sesi 7 skinner (excluded)

Skinner: Behavioral Analysis

Overview of Behavioral Analysis

• Emerged from laboratory studies of animals and humans.

• Minimized speculation in favor of empirical data.

• Focused exclusively on observable behavior.

• Avoided hypothetical constructs and ensured behavior is lawfully determined.

• Emphasized that behavior is a product of environmental stimuli.

Biography of Skinner

• Born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania in 1904.

• As a child, constructed gadgets, played music, and wrote novels.

• Attended Hamilton College, earning a BA.

• Earned his PhD in psychology at Harvard in 1931.

• Accepted first job at age 32, teaching at the University of Minnesota.

Biography (cont’d)

• Published "The Behavior of Organisms" in 1938.

• Invented the controversial baby tender.

• Trained pigeons to guide bombs into enemy ships during World War II (demonstrated in 1944).

• Realized his writing ambition with "Walden Two."

• Also taught at Indiana University and Harvard.

• Died in 1990 from Leukemia.

Precursors of Skinner’s Scientific Behaviorism

• E.L. Thorndike: Introduced the Law of Effect.

• John B. Watson:

  • Argued that behavior can be studied objectively.

  • Advocated for the exclusion of consciousness and introspection in scientific studies of behavior.

  • Proposed that psychology's goal is to predict and control behavior via stimulus-response studies.

Scientific Behaviorism

• Philosophy of Science: Allows for the interpretation of behavior, not the explanation of its causes.

• Characteristics of Science:

  • Cumulative

  • Values empirical observation

  • Rejects authority

  • Demands intellectual honesty and suspends judgment.

  • Seeks order and lawful relationships through prediction, control, and description.

Conditioning

• Classical Conditioning:

  • A specific, identifiable stimulus elicits a response from the organism.

  • A neutral (conditioned) stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus until it elicits a previously unconditioned response.

Conditioning (cont’d)

• Operant Conditioning:

  • Shaping: Uses rewards for successive approximations toward a desired behavior.

  • Key conditions:

    • The antecedent (the environment/setting).

    • The behavior itself.

    • The consequence of the behavior.

  • Operant discrimination: Variation in environment and personal history affects behavioral responses.

  • Stimulus generalization: Generalization of responses across similar stimuli.

Conditioning (cont’d)

• Reinforcement:

  • Strengthens the behavior and rewards the person.

  • Two types:

    • Positive Reinforcement: Introduces a rewarding stimulus.

    • Negative Reinforcement: Removes an aversive stimulus to increase behavior.

Conditioning (cont’d)

• Punishment:

  • Presentation of an aversive stimulus to decrease behavior.

  • Comparing Punishment and Reinforcement:

    • Conditioned Reinforcers: Environmental stimuli that gain their reinforcing ability through association with primary reinforcers.

    • Generalized Reinforcers: Reinforcers associated with more than one primary reinforcer.

Conditioning (cont’d)

• Schedules of Reinforcement:

  • Fixed-ratio

  • Variable-ratio

  • Fixed-interval

  • Variable-interval

• Extinction: The weakening of a previously acquired response due to nonreinforcement.

The Human Organism

• Natural Selection and Cultural Evolution.

• Inner States:

  • Self-awareness, drives, emotions, purpose, and intention.

• Complex Behavior:

  • Higher mental processes, creativity, unconscious behavior, dreams, social behavior.

• Control of Human Behavior:

  • Social control and self-control.

The Unhealthy Personality

• Counteracting Strategies:

  • Escape, revolt, passive resistance.

• Inappropriate Behaviors:

  • Excessive vigor, excessive restraint, blocking reality, self-deluding responses, self-punishment.

Psychotherapy

• Viewed as a major obstacle to a scientific study of human behavior.

• Involves therapists reinforcing slight improvements in behavior.

• Active role in treatment with behavior modification techniques that highlight positive consequences of certain behaviors and aversive effects of others.

Related Research

• How Conditioning Affects Personality:

  • Tidey, O’Neil & Higgins (2000): Values of reinforcers can change.

• How Personality Affects Conditioning:

  • Philip Corr (2002): Responses to reinforcers vary by personality.

• Reinforcement and the Brain:

  • Beaver et al. (2009): Behavioral activation correlates with brain activation in response to rewards.

Critique of Skinner

• Skinner’s Theory:

  • Very high on generating research, guiding action, and internal consistency.

  • High on falsifiability but moderate on organizing knowledge.

  • Difficult to rate parsimony.

Concept of Humanity

• Emphasizes determinism over free will.

• Optimism over pessimism.

• Causality over teleology.

• Unconscious over conscious influences.

• Social influence over biological factors.

• Uniqueness over similarity among individuals.

Reflection

• Consider a behavior or habit that needs change.

• Identify effective forms of reinforcement and punishment to change that behavior or habit.