Skinner_Essay

Skinner Essay | Skinner’s research and contributions to psychology | James McChrisiton | B.F. Skinner is famous for his research on operant conditioning and negative reinforcement. He developed a device called the "cumulative recorder," which showed rates of responding as a sloped line. Skinners research on Psychology has been done in a way that Skinner took a rat in a box and set food on the outside of a box and made it some the rat had to figure out how to get food by making it to where the rat would step on a plate and when he did it fed the rat. This made it so the rat was learning that by chance every time he hit the plate it would drop a food pellet down to him. This is what we call Operant conditioning which means according to chapter 5: The type of learning in which behaviors are emitted (in the presence of specific stimuli) to earn rewards or avoid punishments. These are also known as Reinforcement, where an animal such as the rat in skinners box would be shown the same thing over and over again until it was taught that if you do this then this will happen. I hate to say this but I have seen the same thing on one of my children’s cartoon programs, where a girl had to do an experiment to see if an animal can be trained not to do something by getting a shock each time it touched a certain object. This worked in the program and the object was a cupcake, the girl hooked a small shock to the cupcake and when her bother touched it he got a small shock. He did learn that touching the cupcake would shock him after a few times of getting the shock, and the girl after it was all over offered him a cupcake and he freaked out about it remembering what happened during the experiment. I think this is a good example of a Punishment during an experiment which in chapter 5 it states: Stimuli that follows a behavior and decreases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. Superstitious behavior according to arises when the delivery of a reinforcer or punisher occurs close together in time (temporal contiguity) with an independent behavior. Therefore, the behavior is accidentally reinforced or punished, increasing the likelihood of that behavior occurring again. For example, you walk under a ladder and a minute later you trip and fall. It is easy to attribute your accident to "bad luck" and the irrelevant ladder. The reason an association is easy to form is because your cultural belief that walking under a ladder will bring bad luck is positively reinforced by your fall that occurred soon after walking under the ladder. References: Reading on Chapter 5 http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_skinner.htm