The experiments of Skinner and other behavioral researchers did much more than teach us how to form habits in a rat. They studied the precise conditions that stimulate effective and lasting learning. In his experiments Skinner used shaping, a procedure by which certain reinforcers, for example, food, guide an animal’s behavior toward the desired behavior.
Imagine you want to condition a hungry rat to press a bar. After observing how the animal behaves before training you make modifications based on existing behaviors. You can give the rat food every time it approaches the bar. Once the rat approaches regularly, you will try to get it closer before rewarding it, eventually receiving the treat if it comes too close. With this method of successive approximations, you reward responses that increasingly come closer to the desired behavior and ignore other responses. This way of rewarding desired behavior helps researchers and animal trainers achieve the gradual shaping of complex behaviors.
In everyday life we continually reward and shape the behavior of others.
By training nonverbal creatures to discriminate stimuli, a psychologist can also determine what they perceive.
Parents can use rewards to teach good table manners, rewarding ways of eating that are increasingly similar to that of the adult.
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In everyday life we continually reward and shape the behavior of others, Skinner argued, but often we don’t do it on purpose. Sometimes we even unconsciously reward behaviors that bother us (like when a parent scolds his child for shouting for something and not being able to wait, but gives him his attention and grants his request when the child shouts).
Source: Myers, D. (2006), Psychology 7th edition, Editorial Médica Panamericana: Madrid
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