Operant Conditioning Procedures PDF

318 Chapter 13 / The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach TABLE 13.1 Operant Conditioning Procedures Procedure Purpose Application Positive reinforcement Increase behavior Give reward following behavior Negative reinforcement Increase behavior Remove aversive stimulus following behavior Ex...

318 Chapter 13 / The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach TABLE 13.1 Operant Conditioning Procedures Procedure Purpose Application Positive reinforcement Increase behavior Give reward following behavior Negative reinforcement Increase behavior Remove aversive stimulus following behavior Extinction Decrease behavior Do not reward behavior Punishment Decrease behavior Give aversive stimulus following behavior or take away positive stimulus increases because it is followed by the presentation of a reward. Hungry rats that receive a pellet of food every time they press a bar will begin to press the bar frequently. Students who receive an A after dedicated studying for a test are likely to study hard for subsequent tests. We can also increase the frequency of a behavior by using negative reinforcement, the removal or lessening of an unpleasant stimulus when the behavior occurs. Rats that can turn off an electric shock by pulling a string will quickly learn to pull the string. People whose headaches go away when they take a few minutes to relax will soon learn to relax. The other side of operant conditioning is the reduction of unwanted behaviors, and operant conditioning provides two methods for decreasing undesired behaviors. The most efficient method is to cease reinforcement and thereby allow the behavior to extinguish. Although this concept is simple enough, people often reinforce problem behaviors without recognizing they are doing so. A teacher may react to a child who acts up in class by criticizing the child in front of the other students. The teacher may not realize that the attention the child gains from other students in the form of laughter and classroom status has turned the intended punishment into a reinforcement. An observant teacher might take disruptive children into an empty hallway for discipline, thereby removing the reinforcer. Alternatively, we can use punishment to eliminate unwanted behaviors. In theory, the frequency of a behavior is reduced when it is followed by an aversive stimulus, such as an electric shock, or the removal of a positive stimulus, such as taking away toys. The effects of punishment can be demonstrated in laboratory animals, and therapists have had some success applying this technique in special cases. But research shows the effectiveness of punishment is limited for several reasons. First, punishment does not teach appropriate behaviors; it can only decrease the frequency of undesired ones. Rather than simply punish a child for hitting another student, it’s better teach the child alternative ways to deal with frustrating situations. Second, to be effective, punishment must be delivered immediately and consistently. A parent needs to punish the problem behavior as soon as possible, not “when your father gets home.” The punishment must also be fairly intense and should be administered after every instance of the undesired behavior. Parents who sometimes let their children use bad language but other times decide to punish such talk will probably have little success in changing their children’s vocabulary. Third, punishment can have negative side effects. Although parents intend to suppress a certain act, a child might Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Basic Principles of Conditioning 319 associate other behaviors with the punishment. A child who is punished for hitting a toy against a window may stop playing with toys altogether. In addition, through classical conditioning, aversive feelings that accompany the punishment may be associated with the person doing the punishing. Children who are spanked by their parents may associate the parent with the pain of the spanking. Another side effect is that undesirable behaviors may be learned through modeling. Children who are spanked may learn that physical aggression is okay as long as you are bigger and stronger. Punishment can also create negative emotions, such as fear and anxiety, strong enough to interfere with learning appropriate responses. Taken together, these factors make punishment one of the least desirable choices for changing problem behaviors. At best, punishment can temporarily suppress an undesirable response long enough for a parent, teacher, or therapist to reinforce a desired behavior. Shaping Suppose you are hired to work with patients in a psychiatric hospital. Your job is to get reluctant patients more involved in some of the activities on the ward. You start with one patient who has never participated in any ward activities. Your goal is to get him into daily art therapy sessions, and positive reinforcement seems the right tool. Every time the patient joins one of the voluntary art sessions, you will reward him with coupons for free items in the hospital store. The patient skips art therapy the first day, so no reward. He skips art therapy the rest of the week. Still no reward. You wait 2 months, and still the patient has not attended one of the sessions. By now, one of the problems with operant conditioning is apparent to you: A behavior can be reinforced only after it is emitted. Does this mean operant conditioning is useless in this situation? Fortunately, the answer is “No.” A behavior therapist working with the reluctant patient might use a technique known as shaping, in which successive approximations of the desired behavior are reinforced. For example, you might reward the withdrawn patient for getting out of bed and sitting among the other patients. Once this behavior is established, you might reinforce him only when he is near or in the art therapy room. From here, rewards might be limited to time spent in the room during the sessions and later to time spent attending to and participating in the sessions. Shaping is particularly useful when teaching complex behaviors. Children will learn to enjoy reading if each step along the way is reinforced. If learning the alphabet, letter sounds, and short words is unpleasant, it will be difficult to get the child to move on to reading sentences and stories. Generalization and Discrimination Operant conditioning would be rather limited if every situation required that we learn a new response. Fortunately, because of generalization, this is not the case. Pigeons trained to peck at large red circles to receive food will also peck at small orange circles, although not as frequently. This process, called stimulus generalization, helps explain why personality characteristics generalize across situations. A child rewarded for acting politely around relatives will probably act politely around new acquaintances. The polite response has been generalized from the stimulus of the relative to the new stimulus, the stranger. When we observe polite behavior consistently across situations, we say this pattern is part of the child’s personality. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 320 Chapter 13 / The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach As long as the generalized response is met with reinforcement, the behavior is likely to continue. But if the pigeon is not rewarded for pecking at orange circles, it will soon learn to discriminate between rewarded and nonrewarded stimuli and will peck only at the red ones. Similarly, the polite child may come into contact with adults who respond to friendly behavior with harshness. Soon the child will learn to discriminate between people who are friendly and people who aren’t. The difference between a good and a great tennis player or between a second-string baseball player and a star may be the ability to make fine discriminations between those actions that lead to a reinforcement (a winning shot or a home run) and those that do not. Social Learning Theory I t is difficult to overstate the impact behaviorism had on psychology and subsequently on the field of personality. Watson and his followers provided a scientific, easily testable account of human behavior that complemented the growing empirical flavor of psychology in American universities. The basic principles of learning were so universal that they could be tested on lower animals. The image many people have of the lab-coated psychologist, pencil in hand, watching rats running through mazes comes from this era. But somewhere in the 1950s or 1960s, the enthusiasm for traditional behaviorism began to wane. Psychologists questioned the assertion that all human learning is the result of classical or operant conditioning. “The prospects for survival would be slim indeed if one could learn only from the consequences of trial and error,” one psychologist wrote. “One does not teach children to swim, adolescents to drive automobiles, and novice medical students to perform surgery by having them discover the requisite behavior from the consequences of their successes and failures” (Bandura, 1986, p. 20). Psychologists also began to question whether behaviorism was too limited in the scope of its subject matter. Why couldn’t “internal” events like thoughts and attitudes be conditioned the same way as overt behaviors? For example, paranoid individuals who believe evil agents are out to get them might have been reinforced in the past for these beliefs. Thus began the transition from traditional behaviorism to a number of approaches known collectively as social learning theory. Among the concepts introduced by social learning theorists is behavior-­environmentbehavior interactions (Staats, 1996). That is, not only does the environment influence our behavior, but also that behavior then determines the kind of environment we find ourselves in, which can then influence behavior, and so on. The way people treat you (environment) is partly the result of how you act (behavior). And, of course, how you act is partly a result of how people treat you. Other social learning theorists point out that people often provide their own reinforcers. It is rewarding to live up to your internal standards or to reach a personal goal even if no one else knows about it. Social learning psychologists also helped to bridge traditional behaviorism and cognitive approaches to personality by incorporating into their theories a number of concepts once deemed unscientific by Watson. Among the most influential of these theorists was Julian Rotter (1954, 1982; Rotter, Chance, & Phares, 1972). Rotter argued that the causes of human behaviors are far more complex than those of lower animals, and he introduced several “unobservable” concepts to account for human behavior and personality. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Social Learning Theory 321 To get an idea of Rotter’s approach, imagine someone has just insulted you at a party. How do you respond? You have several courses of action to choose from. You might attempt to top the remark with something clever and witty. You could calmly say the behavior was out of line and ask for an apology. You could get angry and hurl an equally rude insult at the offender, or you could simply leave the scene. Each of these responses has a different likelihood of occurring, what Rotter referred to as its behavior potential. But what determines the strength of the behavior potential? Rotter identified two crucial variables: expectancies and reinforcement values (Figure 13.2). Expectancies are what we believe will happen if we act a certain way. Before you decide to stay up all night studying for an exam, you probably ask yourself what the likelihood is that the all-nighter will help you do better on the test. Most often, we base our expectancies on how things turned out when we took similar actions in similar situations. If you always do well after studying all night, you will probably have a high expectancy of being rewarded for sacrificing your sleep. Of course, expectancies are not necessarily accurate. You might expect that studying all night for the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) will result in a higher score, even if in reality the effort has little effect. In this case, your expectancy will probably predict your behavior better than the actual contingencies. But what about situations we encounter for the first time where we have no basis for forming an expectation? In these cases, we rely on generalized expectancies—beliefs we hold about how often our actions typically lead to reinforcements and punishments. Rotter (1966) proposed that each of us can be placed along a continuum called locus of control. At one end of this dimension, we find people with an extreme internal ­orientation. These individuals believe that most of the time what happens to them is the result of their own actions or attributes. On the other end, we find people who hold an extreme external orientation. They maintain that much of what happens to them is the result of forces outside their control, including chance. As you will see in the next chapter, where you fall on this dimension has many important implications, including how much you achieve and your health. The second variable in Rotter’s model is reinforcement values: that is, how much we think we will like each of the possible consequences we expect. Returning to the party example, you may have a high expectation that declaring the rude comment out of line will result in an apology. But if you don’t expect the apology will make you feel any better, it’s unlikely you will select that option. Rotter also noted that what we value tends to be relatively consistent. Some people seem to always work hard, placing their job ahead of family and recreation. We might call these people obsessive or driven. Rotter would say this trait reflects the consistently high value the individuals put on achievement. Behavior Potential (BP) = Expectancy (E) + Reinforcement Value (RV) Figure 13.2 Rotter’s Basic Formula for Predicting Behavior Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. University of Connecticut Julian B. Rotter 1916–2014 Julian Rotter first learned about psychology in the Avenue J Library in Brooklyn, where he spent a great deal of his grade school and high school years. One day, after exhausting most of the books in other sections, he wandered over to the philosophy and psychology shelf. Among the first books he encountered were Alfred Adler’s Understanding Human Nature and Sigmund Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. From that point on, he was hooked. However, for a time, his love of psychology took a backseat to the realities of the world. He decided to major in chemistry at Brooklyn College because “there was no profession of psychology that I knew of. And in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, one majored in a subject one could use to make a living” (1982, p. 343). But circumstances soon intervened. One day during his junior year, Rotter discovered that Alfred Adler was teaching at the Long Island School of Medicine. Rotter began attending the lectures, and eventually Adler invited him to attend the monthly meetings of the Society of Individual Psychology held in Adler’s home. Unfortunately, Adler died the next year. Nonetheless, by then Rotter’s enthusiasm for psychology dictated that he go to graduate school. He chose the University of Iowa so that he could study with the famous Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin. He went to the University of Indiana for his PhD because it was one of the few schools at the time to offer a degree in clinical psychology. He wanted an academic position, but few were available when Rotter graduated in 1941. After working in a hospital for a year, he served as a psychologist in the Army and later the Air Force during World War II. Circumstances again altered Rotter’s career path following the war. The need for clinical psychologists was suddenly high, but their numbers were few. Rotter took a position at Ohio State University, finally fulfilling his ambition to be a professional academic psychologist. He stayed there until 1963, when he moved to the University of Connecticut. Social-Cognitive Theory T he evolution from traditional behavioral views of personality to more cognitive approaches is probably best illustrated by the work of Albert Bandura (1977a, 1986, 2001, 2006). Bandura rejects the behaviorist’s depiction of human beings as passive recipients of whatever stimuli life throws their way. Of course, individuals respond to environmental events, and certainly they often learn characteristic behaviors as the result of rewards and punishments. But people possess other capacities that are distinctly human. By reducing the process through which people grow and change to the way a rat learns to press a bar, strict behaviorists overlook some of the most important causes of human behavior. Because these overlooked causes generally involve thinking and symbolic processing of information, Bandura refers to his approach as a social-­ cognitive theory. 322 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Social-Cognitive Theory 323 Reciprocal Determinism Bandura adds a new twist to the question of whether behavior is determined by internal or external forces. He acknowledges that there are both internal and external determinants of behavior, but he argues that behavior is not determined exclusively by either or by a simple combination. Bandura introduces instead the concept reciprocal determinism. That is, external determinants of behavior, such as rewards and punishments, and internal determinants, such as beliefs, thoughts, and expectations, are part of a system of interacting influences that affect not only behavior but the various parts of the system as well. Put more simply, each part of the system—behaviors, external factors, and internal factors—influences each of the other parts. Some examples will help clarify the concept. Like Rotter, Bandura maintains that internal factors, such as our expectancies, affect our behavior. Suppose someone you don’t like asks you to play racquetball. You can just imagine what a dismal afternoon you would have with this person. Thus, your internal expectation will probably cause you to reject the invitation. But what would happen if this person offered to buy you that new, expensive racket you’ve been eyeing if you play with him? Suddenly the external inducement is powerful enough to determine your behavior, and you say, “Let’s play.” Now imagine further that you have one of the most enjoyable sets of racquetball ever. You’re evenly matched with this person, and he even cracks a few jokes to make the afternoon fun. You actually look forward to playing with him again. The behavior in this case has changed your expectations, which will affect future behavior and so on. The reciprocal determinism process is diagrammed in Figure 13.3. You may notice that the arrows point in both directions, indicating that each of the three variables in the model is capable of influencing each of the other variables. This model is very different from traditional behaviorism, which limits explanations of human behavior to a two-factor, one-way model in which external events cause behavior. Whether one part of the reciprocal determinism model influences another part depends on the strength of each. At times, environmental forces are most powerful; at other times, internal forces dominate. The example used in Chapter 7 of both high Behavior External Factors (Rewards, Punishments) Internal Factors (Beliefs, Thoughts, Expectations) Figure 13.3 Bandura’s Reciprocal Determinism Model Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 324 Chapter 13 / The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach and low self-esteem people fleeing a burning building illustrates how environmental factors sometimes override internal individual factors. Though at times we mold our environment to meet our needs, at other times we are faced with environmental factors we cannot control. We often create our own opportunities and defeats, but they can also be created for us. Imagination and Self-Regulation Bandura identifies several features unique to humans that must be considered to fully understand personality. Unlike lower animals, people use symbols and forethought as guides for future action. Instead of working our way through rewards and punishments in a trial-and-error fashion every time we face a new problem, we imagine possible outcomes, calculate probabilities, set goals, and develop strategies. We do all of this in our mind without engaging in random actions and waiting to see which will be rewarded or punished. Of course, past experiences with reinforcements or punishments affect these judgments. But think about the way you prepare for a vacation. Most likely you think about several options of where and when to go, how to get there, whom to go with, what to bring, what to do when you arrive, and so on. By imagining what a vacation will be like at various locations and with various people, you don’t have to literally try out each option to see if the experience will be reinforcing or punishing. Bandura also argues that most behavior is performed in the absence of external reinforcements and punishments. Our daily actions are largely controlled by what he calls self-regulation. Although we often strive to obtain external rewards, we also work toward self-imposed goals with internal rewards. Amateur runners push themselves in races, even though few expect to win. The reward comes from the feelings of accomplishment and self-worth they get from setting a personal record or perhaps for just finishing the race. Of course, self-regulation also includes self-punishment. When we fail to maintain personal standards, we often degrade and feel bad about ourselves. You may have chastised yourself for being rude to a stranger or not sticking to your diet, even when no one else seemed to notice. Because much of our behavior is the result of self-regulation, Bandura challenges the extreme behaviorist assertion that people will perform just about any action if the environmental contingencies are altered appropriately. “Anyone who attempted to change a pacifist into an aggressor or a devout religionist into an atheist,” Bandura wrote, “would quickly come to appreciate the existence of personal sources of behavioral control” (1977a, pp. 128–129). Observational Learning Perhaps social-cognitive theory’s most important contribution to the understanding of human behavior and personality is the concept of vicarious or observational learning. In addition to classical and operant conditioning, we can learn by observing or reading or just hearing about other people’s actions. Many behaviors are too complex to be learned through the slow process of reinforcement and punishment. We don’t teach pilots to fly by putting them in the cockpit and reinforcing correct behaviors and punishing incorrect ones. Bandura maintains that children would never learn to talk Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. NurPhoto/Getty Images Albert Bandura 1925– Albert Bandura was born in Mundare, a small farming community located among the wheat fields of Alberta, Canada. His parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe when they were teenagers. They had no formal schooling themselves, but communicated to their son the high value they placed on education. Bandura attended the only school in the area, a combined elementary and high school with a total of about 20 students and two teachers. Summer jobs included filling in holes in the highways of the Yukon. Bandura stayed in Canada for his undergraduate education, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia in 1949. He had intended to major in a biological science, but he became enamored with psychology after enrolling in an introductory course one term simply because the early-morning class fit his schedule. Bandura chose the University of Iowa for graduate work, in part because of its strong tradition in learning theory. Among the Iowa faculty members who influenced Bandura was the learning theorist Kenneth Spence. The faculty at Iowa also emphasized the need for empirical research. This training left Bandura with the conviction that psychologists should “conceptualize clinical phenomena in ways that would make them amenable to experimental tests” (as cited in Evans, 1976, p. 243). He received his PhD in 1952. After a year of clinical internship in Wichita, Bandura accepted a position at Stanford University in 1953 and has remained there ever since. While at Stanford, he has continued to build bridges between traditional learning theory and cognitive personality theories and between clinical psychology and empirically oriented approaches to understanding personality. Bandura has received numerous professional honors, including election to the presidency of the American ­Psychological Association in 1974. during their preschool years if they had to be reinforced for every correct utterance. Instead, the pilots and the toddlers watch others fly and talk, noting which behaviors work and which don’t. Bandura draws an important distinction between learning and performance. Behaviors learned through observation need not be performed. This idea again clashes with traditional behaviorists, who maintain that we cannot learn something until we have actually engaged in that behavior. But think for a moment of some of the b ­ ehaviors you could perform if you wanted to, even though you never have. For example, although you have probably never picked up a pistol and shot another human being, you’ve observed this behavior in movies often enough for it to be part of your b ­ ehavioral repertoire. You might even know to stand with your feet apart and to hold the weapon at eye level with both hands in front of you, just like the actors portraying police do. Fortunately, most of us will never perform this behavior, but it is one we have probably learned through observation. 325 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.