6.3 Operant Conditioning — Why Your Brain Can't Stop Pulling the Lever | Psychology 2e
After this lesson you will be able to…
- Learn the core concept of operant conditioning through a dolphin example.
- Differentiate between operant and classical conditioning.
- Understand BF Skinner's contribution and Thorndike's Law of Effect.
- Learn how Skinner scientifically proved the Law of Effect in a controlled environment.
- Clarify the psychological definitions of positive, negative, reinforcement, and punishment.
- Understand how adding a desirable stimulus increases a behavior.
- Learn how removing an undesirable stimulus increases a desired behavior.
- Understand how adding an undesirable stimulus decreases a behavior, and its drawbacks.
- Learn how removing a pleasant stimulus decreases an undesirable behavior.
- Discover how to teach complex actions by rewarding successive approximations.
- Distinguish between innate biological rewards and learned societal rewards.
- Understand how secondary reinforcers are used in behavior management systems.
- Learn the psychological rules for implementing timeouts as negative punishment.
- Compare continuous and partial reinforcement schedules for teaching and maintaining behaviors.
- Understand how predictable time-based rewards affect behavior.
- Learn how unpredictable time-based rewards lead to steady behavior.
- Explore how rewards based on a set number of responses drive high-speed behavior.
- Understand how unpredictable effort-based rewards, like gambling, create highly addictive behaviors.
- Examine the limitations of Skinner's view that internal thoughts are irrelevant to learning.
- Learn about Tolman's experiment demonstrating learning without immediate reinforcement.
- Ponder the 'chicken or egg' question of whether brain chemistry causes addiction or vice versa.
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(0)This lesson unpacks the science of operant conditioning — how organisms learn by connecting behaviors to their consequences. From Thorndike's Law of E...
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Quiz: Operant Conditioning Principles and Behavior
FundamentalsAnswer each question based only on what was covered in the video lesson on operant conditioning. No outside knowledge is required.
Practice: Operant Conditioning Concepts and Applications
PracticeAnswer each question using what you learned in the video lesson. Show your reasoning where asked, and pay close attention to the precise psychological definitions of positive, negative, reinforcement, and punishment.