Revised on 1/4/14
Malott's 2nd question on p. 6 (middle of 1st column) asks what reinforces the behavior of giving attention to Eric as he throws a tantrum. Watching something - Eric throwing a tantrum, a beautiful sunset, a good-looking person - is a behavior. And all behaviors require explanation.
Malott says that sometimes the sight of the thing we're looking at reinforces the behavior of looking at it. This is an example of a stimulus functioning as a reinforcer (remember the 4 kinds of reinforcers discussed on p. 3). The sight of something, the smell of something, the taste of something - these are all stimuli, & in the right circumstances, any of them might function as a reinforcer for a behavior that they immediately follow.
Anyway, Eric is throwing a tantrum & you watch him as he howls & flails about. Your watching is a behavior. Why do you do it? Because it's reinforced by the sight of the thing you're looking at.
Monday, August 23, 2010
When the sight of the thing reinforces looking at it
Reinforcer is as reinforcer does
Revised on 1/4/14
Malott points out several places in Ch. 1 that whether or not something functions as a reinforcer in a particular instance depends on whether the frequency of the behavior it immediately follows increases when circumstances are similar in the future. That's kind of a tangled sentence, so you should re-read it as many times as you need to in order to understand what I just said.
One of the places he makes this point is on p. 8 (the "Reinforcer Assessment" section). We can't simply make the blanket statement that candy is a reinforcer, because for some people, if you give them candy immediately following a target behavior, the future frequency of that behavior doesn't increase. And even if candy often works as a reinforcer for someone, there may be times when it doesn't. So the only way to know for sure if something functions as a reinforcer for a given organism performing a given behavior in a given type of situation is to see if the frequency of that behavior increases when that organism is in a similar situation in the future.
Despite all this, it's certainly true that some things almost always function as reinforcers for most normal people in most normal situations. A good example is money. So as long as we realize the limitations of what we're saying, it's OK to refer to those things as reinforcers. Can you think of some examples?
I teach courses in the principles and applications of Behavior Analysis, the science and technology of behavior, which is different from other approaches in psychology in that it takes behavior as a subject matter in its own right, rather than as a tool for studying something else, such as the mind. The main purpose of this blog is to be a supplementary means of communication with students who are taking my courses.