When I came in to class today, all the desks were pushed to the back of the room. Very odd. It bugged me, so I moved them back. Probably says something about me. Also, I apparently remind the woman who sits behind me of someone she went to highshool with. That was in Deer Park, though, so not me.
Clark Hull’s theory. Hull was a significant theorists, still cited frequently. Worked before Skinner. Started as a classical conditioning theorist, then developed from there. Drive Reduction Theory is his thing. Drives are innate motivators: hunger, thirst, sleep, etc. Appetitive behaviors. Clark believed that reinforcement reduces the power of the related drive. This runs into problems with behaviors that are hard to directly link to biological urges.
David Premack had Acquired Relative Value Theory, or simply Relative Value Theory. Says that we learn to want things. Things we naturally want are primary reinforcers. Things which allow us to get primary reinforcers are secondary reinforcers. Money is a generalized secondary reinforcer. Generalized secondary reinforcers are powerful. They can start to be valued even higher than the primary reinforcers.
Premack believed that we had a behavior hierarchy. You could rank a person’s behaviors on the basis of what they wanted to do most. A more desirable behavior can be a reinforcer for a lower ranked behavior. Even a not very desirable behavior can reinforce something less desirable. The Premack principle is that one behavior can be used to reinforce another behavior.
Timberlake and Allison are responsible for a theory called Response Deprivation. It stated that if you prevent someone from engaging in a behavior, you can increase their motivation to engage in that behavior. Only covers things that a subject will desire to engage in anyhow, mostly.
Chapter 6 in the text is on Aversive Conditioning. Aversive conditions are things you want to avoid or dislike. Aversive conditions result in escape or avoidance behavior.
Negative reinforcement is when you are reinforced by not having something bad happen. The reward is “bad thing doesn’t happen”. This sort of thing can easily be very persistent. If you expect something bad to happen, and you engage in a behavior, and that bad thing doesn’t happen, you’ve reinforced that behavior. That behavior will be reinforced every time you engage in the behavior and the bad thing doesn’t happen, regardless of whether the behavior actually prevented the bad thing from happening that time.
Negative reinforcement causes behaviors to occur more frequently. Punishment causes behaviors to occur less frequently.
Punishment temporarily suppresses behavior. It does not remove that behavior from the repetoire. It can potentially reduce that behavior for long periods, but it’s still temporary.
Punishment has side-effects. One side-effect is escape. People will try to get away from the punishment, instead of internalizing the behavior lesson. A second potential side-effect is aggression or retaliation. A third potential side-effect is apathy, the reduced tendency to behave in many/all behaviors. Escalation to abuse is possible by the punisher. Imitation or modeling is also possible; by administering that punishment, you show that under certain circumstances that punishment behavior is reasonable, and the subject may then tend to utilize them. A final possible side-effect is facilitation, which means that when the behavior recurs, it will recur more frequently than it did previously.