Skinner and Staats: Behaviorism Theories

Skinner and Staats: The Challenge of Behaviorism

Chapter Overview

Radical Behaviorism: Skinner
  • Behavior as the Data for Scientific Study
  • The Evolutionary Context of Operant Behavior
  • The Rate of Responding
  • Learning Principles
  • Reinforcement: Increasing the Rate of Responding
  • Punishment and Extinction: Decreasing the Rate of Responding
  • Additional Behavioral Techniques
  • Schedules of Reinforcement
  • Applications of Behavioral Techniques
  • Therapy
  • Education
  • Radical Behaviorism and Personality Theory: Some Concerns
Psychological Behaviorism: Staats
  • Reinforcement
  • Basic Behavioral Repertoires
  • The Emotional-Motivational Repertoire
  • The Language-Cognitive Repertoire
  • The Sensory-Motor Repertoire
  • Situations
  • Psychological Adjustment
  • The Nature-Nurture Question from the Perspective of Psychological Behaviorism
Personality Assessment from a Behavioral Perspective
  • The Act-Frequency Approach to Personality Measurement
  • Contributions of Behaviorism to Personality Theory and Measurement

John Broadus Watson Quote

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. (1930)"

Preview of Skinner’s and Staats’s Theory

  • Personality is defined in terms of behavior.
  • Behavior is determined by external factors in the environment- reinforcement and discriminative stimuli
  • It is possible to influence people for the better by changing the environment
  • Change can occur throughout a person's life
  • Behaviorism studies the individual person.

Radical Behaviorism: Skinner

B. F. Skinner
  • Burrhus Frederic Skinner born in 1904 in Pennsylvania
  • Inventor and writer as a youngster
  • Doctorate in Psychology from Harvard (1931)
  • Professorships at Minnesota, Indiana, and Harvard
  • Died at age 86, in 1990 of Leukemia

Behavior as the Data for Scientific Study

  • Skinner’s behavioral approach focuses on predicting and controlling overt, observable behavior.
  • Causes of behavior are external to the individual, in contrast to personality theory which has traditionally looked for causes within people: traits, needs, inner motives.
  • Traits are simply summary descriptions of behaviors.
  • External variables are convenient for science.
  • Radical behaviorism excludes drives or cognitions
  • Inner thoughts and feelings are simply ‘collateral products’ of the environmental factors causing overt behavior.
  • Skinner rules out thoughts, intentions, and other inner states because they cannot be observed and people are not accurate in self-reports. He emphasizes the importance of control over behavior.

Behavior as the Data for Scientific Study

  • The Evolutionary Context of Operant Behavior
  • The Rate of Responding
The Evolutionary Context of Operant Behavior
  • Adaptive behavior is selected within the environment of the individual.
  • Behavior is determined by environmental outcomes contingent on the behavior.
Operant Conditioning
  • Mode of learning in which the frequency of responding is influenced by the consequences that are contingent upon a response.
    • Examples:
      • Bar-pressing in rats, reinforced by food
      • Smiling in a child, reinforced by parental approval
The Rate of Responding
  • Skinner box
    • Controls the environment, observes, and records responses.
  • Operant response
  • Learning is measured by changes (increases or decreases) in the rate of responding.

Learning Principles

  • Operant behavior involves mutual responsiveness of the person and the environment. The person’s behavior leads to a contingent change in the environment; in turn, the person’s behavior changes.
    • Reinforcement: Increasing the Rate of Responding
    • Punishment and Extinction: Decreasing the Rate of Responding
    • Additional Behavioral Techniques
Reinforcement: Increasing the Rate of Responding
  • Positive reinforcer: An outcome stimulus that is presented contingent on a response and that has the effect of increasing the rate of responding.
  • Base rate: The rate of responding before any reinforcement.
  • Primary reinforcer.
  • Secondary reinforcer.
  • Negative reinforcer: Any stimulus the withdrawal of which strengthens behavior.
Positive Reinforcement, Negative Reinforcement and Punishment
  • Positive reinforcement: strengthen response by providing desirable rewards. Ex: Token economy
  • Negative reinforcement: Strengthen response by removing aversive stimuli. Ex: Prisoners-early release for good behavior
  • Punishment: Use aversive stimulus following response to decrease likelihood of behavior in the future
Punishment and Extinction: Decreasing the Rate of Responding
  • Punishment: A stimulus contingent upon a response and that has the effect of decreasing the rate of responding.
  • Extinction: Reduction in the rate of responding when reinforcement ends.
Additional Behavioral Techniques
  • Shaping: Reinforcement of successive approximations of desired behavior.
  • Chaining: One response produces or alters some of the variables that control another response (complex behaviors such as tying shoes).
  • Discrimination learning: Learning to respond differentially, depending on environmental stimuli.
  • Generalization: Responding to stimuli that are similar to, but not identical to, the stimuli present during training.
Schedules of Reinforcement
  • Schedule of reinforcement: the specific contingency between a response and a reinforcement.
    • Continuous Reinforcement: Every response is reinforced.
    • Partial Reinforcement: Some responses are reinforced.
      • Fixed ratio schedule (FR)
      • Variable ratio schedule (VR)
      • Fixed interval schedule (FI)
      • Variable interval schedule (VI)

Applications of Behavioral Techniques

  • Therapy
    • Behavior modification
    • Functional analysis
    • Token economies
  • Education
    • Teaching machines (programmed instruction)

Radical Behaviorism and Personality Theory: Some Concerns

  • What about the relationship among people?
  • Walden Two novel (Utopian community, planned reinforcers coaxed people voluntarily to behave as good citizens).
  • Unique human capacities (including language).
  • Freedom and dignity
  • People are not free…

Criticisms of Skinner

  • Behavior is more than stimulus-response (Bandura- mediating thoughts)
  • Behavior is not totally determined by externals
  • Overly simplistic explanation for human behavior

Contributions of Skinner

  • Emphasis on measuring observable behaviors, instead of unobservable constructs (unconscious)
  • Role of reinforcement in shaping behavior
  • Practical usage of theory
  • Considerable research support

Psychological Behaviorism: Staats

  • It includes traditional personality concerns (emotion, language, testing) as well as behavior.
  • Human personality is built up through learning.
  • Learning has unifying characteristics, not biology.
Reinforcement
  • Time-out: A procedure or environment in which no reinforcements are given in an effort to extinguish unwanted behavior.
    • Example: Removal of a disruptive child from a school class, to improve behavior.
    • Token- reinforcer.
Reinforcement based on emotion (emotion as reinforcement)
  • Contrast with Skinner's radical empiricism
Basic Behavioral Repertoires
  • Starts with born and continues.
    • The Emotional-Motivational Repertoire
    • The Language-Cognitive Repertoire
    • The Sensory-Motor Repertoire
  • Personality as a Basic Behavioral Repertoire (early learning is important!!!)
The Emotional-Motivational Repertoire
  • Individual’s emotional learning, via simple or higher-order classical conditioning, produces the emotional-motivational repertoire.
  • Parental love, food, positive/negative emotions..
  • We learn more quickly when our earlier learning, our basic behavioral repertoire, has prepared us for the new demands.
The Language-Cognitive Repertoire
  • Language has important emotional functions.
  • Language is primarily cognitive.
  • Images.
  • Visual cards.
The Sensory-Motor Repertoire
  • These skills vary from one person to another.
  • Imitation.
  • Excessive practice.
  • Children’s early motor development is more influenced by learning, and less by innate predispositions.
Situations
  • A-R-D theory (three-function learning theory)
    • A: affects and attitudes. Situations can arouse affects & attitudes.
    • R: reinforcements. They can provide reinforcements.
    • D: direct behavior. They can direct behavior.
Psychological Adjustment
  • Depends on learning (basic behavioral repertoire)
    • Emotions (phobias, depression, anxiety)
    • Social skills (sensory-motor)
    • Positive self-concept
    • Defense mechanisms (repression)
    • Standards for behavior (perfectionism)
The Nature - Nurture Question from the Perspective of Psychological Behaviorism
  • Intensive learning.
  • Learning builds on nature.
  • Biology can influence a person
    • Before learning
    • During learning
    • After learning

Personality Assessment from a Behavioral Perspective

  • In contrast to radical behaviorism, which finds personality tests to be useless, psychological behaviorism considers many personality tests to offer useful information about behavioral repertoires.
  • Behavior as ‘personality in action’. (Donald Fiske)
The Act-Frequency Approach to Personality Measurement
  • Measuring personality traits by assessing the frequency of prototypical behaviors
    • Affiliation needs assessed by frequency of choosing to work with friends
    • Dominance assessed by frequency of interrupting others

Chapter Review

Radical Behaviorism: Skinner
  • Behavior as the Data for Scientific Study
  • Learning Principles
  • Schedules of Reinforcement
  • Applications of Behavioral Techniques
  • Radical Behaviorism & Personality Theory: Some Concerns
Psychological Behaviorism: Staats
  • Reinforcement
  • Basic Behavioral Repertoires
  • Situations
  • Psychological Adjustment
  • The Nature-Nurture Question from the Perspective of Psychological Behaviorism
Personality Assessment from a Behavioral Perspective
  • The Act-Frequency Approach to Personality Measurement
  • Contributions of Behaviorism to Personality Theory & Measurement