Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning is learning via consequences with an emphasises on the role of reward and reinforcement in behaviour
• Reinforcement increases likelihood of behaviour
• Positive reinforcement is behaviour made more likely through association with a reward of gaining something pleasurable
• Negative reinforcement is behaviour made more likely through association with the reward of something unpleasant being removed
• Punishment always reduces the likelihood of a behaviour/ potentially extincts a behaviour as now associated its unpleasant consequences
• B.F Skinner (1953) set up a series of experiments devised on the concept of the ‘Skinner Box’: placed a rat inside each box- each with different stimulus- each with lever that releases food (reward) and an electroplated floor (punishment)

  IV: natural consequences rats faced for behaviour in Skinner box

  DV: behaviour exhibited
• Skinner box reinforcement:

  Positive: learned quickly that when the lever is pulled a food pellet is delivered

  The reward/ consequence of pressing the lever repeatedly over and over

  Negative: Rats placed in box with a loud noise/ electric shock

  When lever was pressed the punishment would stop

  Learned to press the lever
• Skinner box punishment:

  Positive:Rats placed in box with a loud noise/ electric shock

  When lever was pressed the punishment would be enacted- learnt to stop pushing the lever

  Also, red light shown shortly before noise/ shock in some conditioned

  Learnt to press the lever when light showed
• Strengths of Skinner Box:

  • replicable
  • tightly controlled
  • objective
  • empirical
  • falsifiable
• Weakness of Skinner Box:

  • problem of extrapolation as rats are not human- how can you generalise findings onto human behaviour
  • overly- simplistic as environmentally reductive as humans more complex
• Strengths of OC:

  • good real- application as the token economy to improve the life of people with schizophrenia : as the behaviour is driven by the positive consequence of the action
  • Weight of evidence
• Limitations of OC:

  • cannot explain why some people may repeat behaviour which are detrimental, eg: self- harm, smoking