Although rejected by many orientations within the field of psychology, behavioral techniques, particularly shaping, are widely used as therapeutic tools for the treatment of various disorders, especially those affecting verbal behavior. For example, behavior shaping has been used to treat selective, or elective, mutism, a condition manifested by an otherwise normal child's refusal to speak in school. Therapists have also relied on behavior shaping in treating cases of severe autism in children.
While autistic children respond to such stimulus objects as toys and musical instruments, it is difficult to elicit speech from them. However, researchers have noted that behavior shaping is more effective when speech attempts are reinforced than when speech production is expected. When unsuccessful efforts to produce speech are rewarded, the child feels inspired to make a greater effort, which may lead to actual speech. While recognizing the effectiveness of behavior shaping in the laboratory and in therapy, experts, particularly psychologists who do not subscribe to behaviorism , have questioned the long-term validity of induced behavior change.
Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Operant conditioning, sometimes referred to as instrumental conditioning , is a method of learning that employs rewards and punishments for behavior. Through operant conditioning, an association is made between a behavior and a consequence whether negative or positive for that behavior.
For example, when lab rats press a lever when a green light is on, they receive a food pellet as a reward. When they press the lever when a red light is on, they receive a mild electric shock. As a result, they learn to press the lever when the green light is on and avoid the red light.
But operant conditioning is not just something that takes place in experimental settings while training lab animals. It also plays a powerful role in everyday learning.
Reinforcement and punishment take place in natural settings all the time, as well as in more structured settings such as classrooms or therapy sessions. Operant conditioning was first described by behaviorist B.
Skinner , which is why you may occasionally hear it referred to as Skinnerian conditioning. As a behaviorist, Skinner believed that it was not really necessary to look at internal thoughts and motivations in order to explain behavior.
Instead, he suggested, we should look only at the external, observable causes of human behavior. Through the first part of the 20th century, behaviorism became a major force within psychology. The ideas of John B. Watson dominated this school of thought early on. Watson focused on the principles of classical conditioning , once famously suggesting that he could take any person regardless of their background and train them to be anything he chose. Early behaviorists focused their interests on associative learning.
Skinner was more interested in how the consequences of people's actions influenced their behavior. Skinner used the term operant to refer to any "active behavior that operates upon the environment to generate consequences.
His theory was heavily influenced by the work of psychologist Edward Thorndike , who had proposed what he called the law of effect. Operant conditioning relies on a fairly simple premise: Actions that are followed by reinforcement will be strengthened and more likely to occur again in the future.
If you tell a funny story in class and everybody laughs, you will probably be more likely to tell that story again in the future. If you raise your hand to ask a question and your teacher praises your polite behavior, you will be more likely to raise your hand the next time you have a question or comment. Because the behavior was followed by reinforcement, or a desirable outcome, the preceding action is strengthened.
Conversely, actions that result in punishment or undesirable consequences will be weakened and less likely to occur again in the future. If you tell the same story again in another class but nobody laughs this time, you will be less likely to repeat the story again in the future. If you shout out an answer in class and your teacher scolds you, then you might be less likely to interrupt the class again.
Skinner distinguished between two different types of behaviors. While classical conditioning could account for respondent behaviors, Skinner realized that it could not account for a great deal of learning. Instead, Skinner suggested that operant conditioning held far greater importance. Over successive trials, actions that were helpful in escaping the box and receiving the food reward were replicated and repeated at a higher rate.
According to this law, behaviors are modified by their consequences, and this basic stimulus-response relationship can be learned by the operant person or animal. Once the association between behavior and consequences is established, the response is reinforced, and the association holds the sole responsibility for the occurrence of that behavior.
Thorndike posited that learning was merely a change in behavior as a result of a consequence, and that if an action brought a reward, it was stamped into the mind and available for recall later. From a young age, we learn which actions are beneficial and which are detrimental through a trial and error process.
For example, a young child is playing with her friend on the playground and playfully pushes her friend off the swingset. Her friend falls to the ground and begins to cry, and then refuses to play with her for the rest of the day.
The law of effect has been expanded to various forms of behavior modification. Because the law of effect is a key component of behaviorism, it does not include any reference to unobservable or internal states; instead, it relies solely on what can be observed in human behavior. While this theory does not account for the entirety of human behavior, it has been applied to nearly every sector of human life, but particularly in education and psychology.
Skinner was a behavioral psychologist who expanded the field by defining and elaborating on operant conditioning. Research regarding this principle of learning was first conducted by Edward L. Thorndike in the late s, then brought to popularity by B. Skinner in the mids. Much of this research informs current practices in human behavior and interaction. Skinner theorized that if a behavior is followed by reinforcement, that behavior is more likely to be repeated, but if it is followed by some sort of aversive stimuli or punishment, it is less likely to be repeated.
He also believed that this learned association could end, or become extinct, if the reinforcement or punishment was removed. Skinner : Skinner was responsible for defining the segment of behaviorism known as operant conditioning—a process by which an organism learns from its physical environment.
In his first work with rats, Skinner would place the rats in a Skinner box with a lever attached to a feeding tube. Whenever a rat pressed the lever, food would be released. After the experience of multiple trials, the rats learned the association between the lever and food and began to spend more of their time in the box procuring food than performing any other action.
It was through this early work that Skinner started to understand the effects of behavioral contingencies on actions. He discovered that the rate of response—as well as changes in response features—depended on what occurred after the behavior was performed, not before.
Skinner named these actions operant behaviors because they operated on the environment to produce an outcome. The process by which one could arrange the contingencies of reinforcement responsible for producing a certain behavior then came to be called operant conditioning. In this way, he discerned that the pigeon had fabricated a causal relationship between its actions and the presentation of reward.
In his operant conditioning experiments, Skinner often used an approach called shaping. Instead of rewarding only the target, or desired, behavior, the process of shaping involves the reinforcement of successive approximations of the target behavior. Behavioral approximations are behaviors that, over time, grow increasingly closer to the actual desired response. Skinner believed that all behavior is predetermined by past and present events in the objective world. He did not include room in his research for ideas such as free will or individual choice; instead, he posited that all behavior could be explained using learned, physical aspects of the world, including life history and evolution.
His work remains extremely influential in the fields of psychology, behaviorism, and education. Shaping is a method of operant conditioning by which successive approximations of a target behavior are reinforced. In his operant-conditioning experiments, Skinner often used an approach called shaping. The method requires that the subject perform behaviors that at first merely resemble the target behavior; through reinforcement, these behaviors are gradually changed, or shaped , to encourage the performance of the target behavior itself.
Shaping is useful because it is often unlikely that an organism will display anything but the simplest of behaviors spontaneously.
It is a very useful tool for training animals, such as dogs, to perform difficult tasks. Dog show : Dog training often uses the shaping method of operant conditioning. In shaping, behaviors are broken down into many small, achievable steps.
To test this method, B. Skinner performed shaping experiments on rats, which he placed in an apparatus known as a Skinner box that monitored their behaviors. The target behavior for the rat was to press a lever that would release food. Initially, rewards are given for even crude approximations of the target behavior—in other words, even taking a step in the right direction.
Then, the trainer rewards a behavior that is one step closer, or one successive approximation nearer, to the target behavior. For example, Skinner would reward the rat for taking a step toward the lever, for standing on its hind legs, and for touching the lever—all of which were successive approximations toward the target behavior of pressing the lever. As the subject moves through each behavior trial, rewards for old, less approximate behaviors are discontinued in order to encourage progress toward the desired behavior.
For example, once the rat had touched the lever, Skinner might stop rewarding it for simply taking a step toward the lever. In this way, shaping uses operant-conditioning principles to train a subject by rewarding proper behavior and discouraging improper behavior. This process has been replicated with other animals—including humans—and is now common practice in many training and teaching methods. It is commonly used to train dogs to follow verbal commands or become house-broken: while puppies can rarely perform the target behavior automatically, they can be shaped toward this behavior by successively rewarding behaviors that come close.
Shaping is also a useful technique in human learning. For example, if a father wants his daughter to learn to clean her room, he can use shaping to help her master steps toward the goal.
First, she cleans up one toy and is rewarded. Second, she cleans up five toys; then chooses whether to pick up ten toys or put her books and clothes away; then cleans up everything except two toys.
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