Operant conditioning

Yeah, I really think that there's been a concerted.

Well, I don't think we know it's documented that essentially the beginning of the 20th century to now, everything from an educational perspective has been operant conditioning, meaning we're just told to regurgitate what some other authority tells us.

We're not actually given the tool of how to learn.

We're not taught how to learn.

2010 some well known authors their children with autism required abduction prevention skills that maintained on follow up assessments.

I like this article from 2020, Confessions Selected by Consequences, an Operant Analysis of False Confessions and Interrogation Techniques.

And this alludes to the idea of how interrogation may induce a confession.

And I think it's a pretty important data and a pretty modern look at how law enforcement practices might be influential and how once again how behavior analysis might be a benefit in such a field.

Like, if you're terrified of roller coasters, but you made yourself ride one 10 times a day for two weeks, would your fears fade? For the record, recent exploration has revealed that the boy known as Little Albert sadly died a few years after these experiments, while Watson eventually left academia and got into advertising, where he put all that associative learning to lucrative use.

So that's classical conditioning, but we've also got another kind of associative learning, operant conditioning.

If classical conditioning is all about forming associations between stimuli, operant conditioning involves associating our own behavior with consequences.

The kid who gets a cookie for saying please, or the aquarium seal that gets a sardine for balancing a ball on its nose, they've both been trained with operant conditioning.

The basic premise here is that behaviors increase when followed by reinforcement or reward, but they decrease when followed by punishment.

And the most well-known champion of operant conditioning is American behaviorist B.F. Skinner.

He designed the famous operant chamber, or Skinner box, a confined space containing a lever or button that an animal could touch to get some kind of reward, typically food, along with a device that keeps track of its responses.

Okay, time for a debunking break.

Well, I mean, I know a little bit.

Dog training uses a technique called operant conditioning, developed by psychologist B.F. Skinner, who studied under Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov.

Pavlov, if you're not familiar, studied animal behavior and and discovered that it was possible to teach dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell.

Pavlov realized that dogs would automatically salivate when they were given food, so he set out to associate the sound of a bell with food by ringing it before the dogs were fed.

Ew, choke collars.

You said it, girl!

We can appreciate that language for operant conditioning concepts can get a little confusing, so we've made a graphic here to help you out.

Feel free to pause and take notes.