Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.
In behavioral psychology, reinforcement refers to consequences that increases the likelihood of an organism's future behavior, typically in the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus. For example, a rat can be trained to push a lever to receive food whenever a light is turned on. In this example, the light is the antecedent stimulus, the lever pushing is the operant behavior, and the food is the reinforcer. Likewise, a student that receives attention and praise when answering a teacher's question will be more likely to answer future questions in class. The teacher's question is the antecedent, the student's response is the behavior, and the praise and attention are the reinforcements.
Disciplinarians believe that self control is of the utmost importance and enforce a set of rules that aim to develop such behaviour. Such enforcement is often based on punishment.
Good cop, bad cop, also informally called the Mutt and Jeff technique, is a psychological tactic used in interrogation and negotiation, in which a team of two people take opposing approaches to the subject. One interrogator adopts a hostile or accusatory demeanor, emphasizing threats of punishment, while the other adopts a more sympathetic demeanor, emphasizing reward, in order to convince the subject to cooperate. It is an instance of the Reid technique.
In general, incentives are anything that persuade a person to alter their behavior in the desired manner. It is emphasized that incentives matter by the basic law of economists and the laws of behavior, which state that higher incentives amount to greater levels of effort and therefore higher levels of performance.
Social exchange theory is a sociological and psychological theory that studies the social behavior in the interaction of two parties that implement a cost-benefit analysis to determine risks and benefits. The theory also involves economic relationships—the cost-benefit analysis occurs when each party has goods that the other parties value. Social exchange theory suggests that these calculations occur in romantic relationships, friendships, professional relationships, and ephemeral relationships as simple as exchanging words with a customer at the cash register. Social exchange theory says that if the costs of the relationship are higher than the rewards, such as if a lot of effort or money were put into a relationship and not reciprocated, then the relationship may be terminated or abandoned.
Temporal difference (TD) learning refers to a class of model-free reinforcement learning methods which learn by bootstrapping from the current estimate of the value function. These methods sample from the environment, like Monte Carlo methods, and perform updates based on current estimates, like dynamic programming methods.
Personnel economics has been defined as "the application of economic and mathematical approaches and econometric and statistical methods to traditional questions in human resources management". It is an area of applied micro labor economics, but there are a few key distinctions. One distinction, not always clearcut, is that studies in personnel economics deal with the personnel management within firms, and thus internal labor markets, while those in labor economics deal with labor markets as such, whether external or internal. In addition, personnel economics deals with issues related to both managerial-supervisory and non-supervisory workers.
Animal training is the act of teaching animals specific responses to specific conditions or stimuli. Training may be for purposes such as companionship, detection, protection, and entertainment. The type of training an animal receives will vary depending on the training method used, and the purpose for training the animal. For example, a seeing eye dog will be trained to achieve a different goal than a wild animal in a circus.
The public goods game is a standard of experimental economics. In the basic game, subjects secretly choose how many of their private tokens to put into a public pot. The tokens in this pot are multiplied by a factor and this "public good" payoff is evenly divided among players. Each subject also keeps the tokens they do not contribute.
A comparison of apples and oranges occurs when two items or groups of items are compared that cannot be practically compared, typically because of inherent or fundamental differences between the objects.
Behavior management, similar to behavior modification, is a less-intensive form of behavior therapy. Unlike behavior modification, which focuses on changing behavior, behavior management focuses on maintaining positive habits and behaviors and reducing negative ones. Behavior management skills are especially useful for teachers and educators, healthcare workers, and those working in supported living communities. This form of management aims to help professionals oversee and guide behavior management in individuals and groups toward fulfilling, productive, and socially acceptable behaviors. Behavior management can be accomplished through modeling, rewards, or punishment.
In semantics, donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactic role in the sentence poses challenges to linguists. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century is the third book in a trilogy written by the futurist Alvin Toffler, following Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980). The hardcover first edition was published October 1, 1990.
Sidney William Bijou was an American developmental psychologist who developed an approach of treating childhood disorders using behavioral therapy, in which positive actions were rewarded and negative behaviors were largely ignored, rather than punished.
Carrotmob is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. It uses buycotts to reward a business's commitment to making socially responsible changes to the business. Carrotmob also refers to a global movement of community organizers who use the Carrotmob tactic of consumer activism as a way to help change businesses in their communities. In a Carrotmob buycott, businesses compete to be the most socially responsible business, and then a network of consumers spends money to support the winner.
Evelyn Aubrey Montague was an English athlete and journalist. He ran in the 1924 Paris Olympics, placing sixth in the steeplechase race. Montague is portrayed in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, where he is portrayed by Nicholas Farrell. Contrary to the film, he attended Oxford, not Cambridge, and went by the name Evelyn (EEV-lin) rather than Aubrey.
Insufficient justification is an effect studied in the discipline of social psychology. It states that people are more likely to engage in a behavior that contradicts the beliefs they hold personally when offered a smaller reward compared to a larger reward. The smaller reward minimizes the cognitive dissonance generated by acting in contradiction to one's beliefs because it feels easier to justify. The theory of insufficient justification formally states that when extrinsic motivation is low, people are motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance by generating an intrinsic motivation to explain their behavior, and similarly more likely to decline a desired activity when presented with a mild threat versus a more serious threat. Insufficient justification occurs when the threat or reward is actually sufficient to get the person to engage in or to avoid a behavior, but the threat or reward is insufficient to allow the person to conclude that the situation caused the behavior.
Compellence is a form of coercion that attempts to get an actor to change its behavior through threats to use force or the actual use of limited force. Compellence can be more clearly described as "a political-diplomatic strategy that aims to influence an adversary's will or incentive structure. It is a strategy that combines threats of force, and, if necessary, the limited and selective use of force in discrete and controlled increments, in a bargaining strategy that includes positive inducements. The aim is to induce an adversary to comply with one's demands, or to negotiate the most favorable compromise possible, while simultaneously managing the crisis to prevent unwanted military escalation."
Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes is a 1993 book by Alfie Kohn that argues against the use of rewards to incentivize behavior.
