Burrhus Frederic Skinner, commonly known as B. F. Skinner, was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
Operant conditioning is a learning process through which the strength of a behavior is modified by reinforcement or punishment. It is also a procedure that is used to bring about such learning.
Radical behaviorism was pioneered by B. F. Skinner and is his "philosophy of the science of behavior." It refers to the philosophy behind behavior analysis, and is to be distinguished from methodological behaviorism—which has an intense emphasis on observable behaviors—by its inclusion of thinking, feeling, and other private events in the analysis of human and animal psychology. The research in behavior analysis is called the experimental analysis of behavior and the application of this field is called applied behavior analysis (ABA), which was originally termed "behavior modification."
Richard Julius Herrnstein was an American psychologist and sociologist. He was an active researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of the Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior.
The experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) is school of thought in psychology founded on B. F. Skinner's philosophy of radical behaviorism and defines the basic principles used in applied behavior analysis (ABA). A central principle was the inductive, data-driven examination of functional relations, as opposed to the kinds of hypothetico-deductive learning theory that had grown up in the comparative psychology of the 1920–1950 period. Skinner's approach was characterized by empirical observation of measurable behavior which could be predicted and controlled. It owed its early success to the effectiveness of Skinner's procedures of operant conditioning, both in the laboratory and in behavior therapy.
Verbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he inspects human behavior, describing what is traditionally called linguistics. The book Verbal Behavior is almost entirely theoretical, involving little experimental research in the work itself. It was an outgrowth of a series of lectures first presented at the University of Minnesota in the early 1940s and developed further in his summer lectures at Columbia and William James lectures at Harvard in the decade before the book's publication. A growing body of research and applications based on Verbal Behavior has occurred since its original publication, particularly in the past decade.
The law of effect is a psychological principle advanced by Edward Thorndike in 1898 on the matter of behavioral conditioning which states that "responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation."
Shaping is a conditioning paradigm used primarily in the experimental analysis of behavior. The method used is differential reinforcement of successive approximations. It was introduced by B. F. Skinner with pigeons and extended to dogs, dolphins, humans and other species. In shaping, the form of an existing response is gradually changed across successive trials towards a desired target behavior by reinforcing exact segments of behavior. Skinner's explanation of shaping was this:
We first give the bird food when it turns slightly in the direction of the spot from any part of the cage. This increases the frequency of such behavior. We then withhold reinforcement until a slight movement is made toward the spot. This again alters the general distribution of behavior without producing a new unit. We continue by reinforcing positions successively closer to the spot, then by reinforcing only when the head is moved slightly forward, and finally only when the beak actually makes contact with the spot. ... The original probability of the response in its final form is very low; in some cases it may even be zero. In this way we can build complicated operants which would never appear in the repertoire of the organism otherwise. By reinforcing a series of successive approximations, we bring a rare response to a very high probability in a short time. ... The total act of turning toward the spot from any point in the box, walking toward it, raising the head, and striking the spot may seem to be a functionally coherent unit of behavior; but it is constructed by a continual process of differential reinforcement from undifferentiated behavior, just as the sculptor shapes his figure from a lump of clay.
In operant conditioning, the matching law is a quantitative relationship that holds between the relative rates of response and the relative rates of reinforcement in concurrent schedules of reinforcement. For example, if two response alternatives A and B are offered to an organism, the ratio of response rates to A and B equals the ratio of reinforcements yielded by each response. This law applies fairly well when non-human subjects are exposed to concurrent variable interval schedules ; its applicability in other situations is less clear, depending on the assumptions made and the details of the experimental situation. The generality of applicability of the matching law is subject of current debate.
In psychology, a social trap is a situation in which a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains, which in the long run leads to a loss for the group as a whole. Examples of social traps include overfishing, energy "brownout" and "blackout" power outages during periods of extreme temperatures, the overgrazing of cattle on the Sahelian Desert, and the destruction of the rainforest by logging interests and agriculture.
In operant conditioning, punishment is any change in a human or animal's surroundings that occurs after a given behavior or response which reduces the likelihood of that behavior occurring again in the future. As with reinforcement, it is the behavior, not the animal, that is punished. Whether a change is or is not punishing is determined by its effect on the rate that the behavior occurs, not by any "hostile" or aversive features of the change. For example, a painful stimulus which would act as a punisher for most people may actually reinforce some behaviors of masochistic individuals.
Behavioral momentum is a theory in quantitative analysis of behavior and is a behavioral metaphor based on physical momentum. It describes the general relation between resistance to change and the rate of reinforcement obtained in a given situation.
Melioration theory is a theory in psychology used an algorithm that predicts the matching law. Melioration theory is used as an explanation for why an organism makes choices based on the rewards or reinforcers it receives. The principle of melioration states that animals will invest increasing amounts of time and/or effort into whichever alternative is better. To meliorate essentially means to "make better".
Quantitative analysis of behavior is the application of mathematical models, conceptualized from a robust corpus of environment-behavior-consequence interactions in the experimental analysis of behavior, with the aim to describe and/or predict relations between a dependent variable and all possible levels of an independent variable. The parameters in the models hopefully have theoretical meaning beyond being used to fit models to data. The field was founded by Richard Herrnstein (1961) when he introduced the matching law to quantify the behavior of organisms working on concurrent schedules of reinforcement. The field has integrated models from economics, zoology, philosophy, and other branches of psychology, especially mathematical psychology of which it is a branch. The field is represented by the Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior. Quantitative analysis of behavior addresses the following topics among others: behavioral economics, behavioral momentum, connectionist systems or neural networks, integration, hyperbolic discounting including the delay reduction hypothesis, foraging, hunting, errorless learning, creativity, learning, and the Rescorla-Wagner model, matching law, melioration, scalar expectancy, signal detection, neural hysteresis, and reinforcement control.
In behaviorism, rate of response is a ratio between two measurements with different units. Rate of responding is the number of responses per minute, or some other time unit. It is usually written as R. Its first major exponent was B.F. Skinner (1939). It is used in the Matching Law.
In behavioral psychology, stimulus control is a phenomenon that occurs when an organism behaves in one way in the presence of a given stimulus and another way in its absence. Any stimulus that modifies behavior in this manner is referred to as a discriminative stimulus. Stimulus control of behavior occurs when the performance of a particular behavior is controlled by the presence or absence of a discriminative stimulus. For example, the presence of a stop sign at a traffic intersection increases the probability that "braking" behavior will occur.
Charles Bohris Ferster (1922–1981) was an American behavioral psychologist. A pioneer in the field of applied behavior analysis, he developed errorless learning and was a colleague of B.F. Skinner's at Harvard University, co-authoring the book Schedules of Reinforcement (1957).
The behavioral analysis of child development originates from John B. Watson's behaviorism. Watson studied child development, looking specifically at development through conditioning. He helped bring a natural science perspective to child psychology by introducing objective research methods based on observable and measurable behavior. B.F. Skinner then further extended this model to cover operant conditioning and verbal behavior. Skinner was then able to focus these research methods on feelings and how those emotions can be shaped by a subject’s interaction with the environment. Sidney Bijou (1955) was the first to use this methodological approach extensively with children.
