In this video I explain the difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Next I explain Thorndike’s work with cats in puzzle boxes which led to his Law of Effect. This approach was greatly expanded by B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning which distinguished primary and secondary reinforcers, as well as positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment.

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B.F. Skinner photo from Wikimedia Commons

Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review.

In the previous videos we’ve been talking about classical conditioning and you might have noticed that in classical conditioning the organism that’s being conditioned is fairly passive. So Pavlov’s dogs are just standing there, bells are ringing and food is being placed in front of them and then they have a response; salivating.

Or little Albert is sitting there and a rat is being put in front of him and loud noise is occurring behind him and then he responds by crying or showing distress. But it’s also the case that animals act first they start off a cascade of events, they don’t wait for things to happen in order to learn.

They perform behaviors, those behaviors have consequences, and then those consequences influence subsequent behavior. So this brings us to the idea of operation conditioning. In operant conditioning the focus is on the animal operating on the environment. The animal does something first and then this has consequences and those consequences can lead to learning. They can influence subsequent behavior.

So one of the first researchers in this area was Edward Thorndike. Here’s a picture of Thorndike here. Thorndike worked with cats in these devices he called “puzzle boxes”.

So what’s a puzzle box? What Thorndike did was he put cats, here’s something vaguely resembling a cat, here’s our cat, he looks impossibly skinny, but that’s appropriate because these cats were hungry in this experiment. What Thorndike did was he took a cat and he put him inside a puzzle box. So a puzzle box was this specially designed cage here and inside the cage there was a lever.

The lever was connected to this spring-loaded front door here so that when the cat stepped on the lever the front door would spring open.

And just outside the cage we have a bowl of food. The cat, as I said, is hungry. So, let’s give the cat eyes here so he can see that food.

So the cat gets put inside the puzzle box and the first time Thorndike put the cat in the box, the cat would randomly happen to step on the lever at some point. He’s moving around the cage, he accidentally steps on the lever, the door springs open, and he gets the food.

But Thorndike found that on subsequent trials if he kept putting the cat in the same puzzle box eventually the cat would learn what the lever was doing. The cat would press the lever more quickly. So Thorndike tracked the time that it took the cat to get out of the box on each trial.

He found, not too surprisingly, that the cats got faster and faster. They essentially learned that the lever opens the door. Eventually you put the cat in the box and he immediately goes and presses the lever so he can get out and get the food. That shows that learning has occurred.

He’s learned what the lever does, the lever leads to getting food. Based on this, Thorndike proposed the Law of Effect. The Law of Effect is quite simple, it just says that behaviors that have positive consequences are more likely to be repeated. So if stepping on a lever gets you food when you’re hungry, then you’re going to be more likely to step on the lever in the future.

The Law of Effect is just that behaviors with positive consequences are more likely to be repeated.

This makes sense. If you do something and something good happens as a result of that, you’re more likely to do that thing in the future. Now another researcher who expanded on four nights ideas and was most associated with operant conditioning is a guy named Burrhus Frederic Skinner.

It shouldn’t be surprising that with a name like Burrhus, he went by B.F. Skinner. Let’s change color here.

I said Skinner expanded on Thorndike’s ideas, here’s a picture of Skinner here.

Skinner is considered one of the most influential psychologists of all time for his work on operant conditioning. Skinner investigated the idea of how behavior influences, or how behavior is changed by the consequences that follow it.

He referred to anything that increases a behavior as reinforcement.

Sorry my handwriting is fairly atrocious.

Reinforcement is anything that increases the likelihood of a behavior. It makes a behavior more likely to occur. So we say it reinforces the behavior, it strengthens it, it makes it more likely. Skinner distinguished between things that he called primary reinforcers: a primary reinforcer is something that is just naturally reinforcing. If you’re a hungry cat then food is a primary reinforcer. It’s just, it’s good.

There’s no question about that, you want it. Food would be a primary reinforcer. Or if you’re cold, warmth would be a primary reinforcer. You’re naturally going to want this, it’s going to be good to have.

On the other hand, there’s things that require some learning in order for you to know that they’re good. So primary reinforcers are just natural. You don’t have to teach a hungry cat anything to want food, it just naturally wants it. But secondary reinforcers have to be learned.

In the case of humans, this would be something like money. Money is a great example of a secondary reinforcer. Why is that? Well, if you’re hungry you don’t eat money, right? But you still find it rewarding, it’s going to reinforce certain behaviors because you know that you can use money to buy food.

You’ve learned that money is associated with other primary reinforcers. You can use the money to pay your heating bill. Now you won’t be cold anymore. So money is a secondary reinforcer. It doesn’t directly get you the things you want, but it’s one step removed from that.

It’s secondary, but it’s still reinforcing because you know you can use it to get those things. Similarly, grades would be a secondary reinforcer. So I can give you a sheet of paper with an A on it, that’s not naturally going to do anything special for you So why are grades reinforcing, why do they encourage you to do certain behaviors? Because they’re associated with other primary reinforcers. So if your parents are buying you ice cream for getting good grades, now you see the reason to get good grades. But you have to learn that association. Or even if they’re just giving you praise, that would be a primary reinforcer.

So the grades are associated with these other reinforcers and that’s why they’re able to influence behavior. Another thing that Skinner differentiated was that reinforcement came in different types.

First we have what he called positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement involves giving you something that’s good. You’re adding something good. So it’s positive.

If I give you an ice cream every time you do your homework then that’s going to increase the likelihood that you’ll do your homework the next day, right? If you do your homework you get an ice cream, do that over and over you’re going to be more likely to complete your homework. So the reinforcement, remember, always increases behavior.

Any time you see the word reinforcement remember we’re talking about increasing a behavior. This applies even if we have what’s called negative reinforcement. So we’re still going to increase the behavior, but in this way we do it by taking away something bad.

So if I keep giving you electric shocks and you say “I’ll do anything to stop these electric shocks” I say “Ok, do your homework”. So you do your homework and I stop the electric shocks. I’m removing something bad and in doing that I’m increasing the behavior. I’m getting you to do your homework more often. Tomorrow I say “Ok, are you going to do your homework?” you say “oh yes, anything to get those electric shocks to stop”. That’s kind of a silly example but a more realistic example would be if you have a headache and you take an aspirin.

So the behavior is taking an aspirin. The result is that it makes your headache go away. If that works then next time you have a headache, what are you going to reach for? You’re going to reach for the aspirin. You’re going to repeat that behavior. You’ve increased the behavior of taking aspirin not because you get anything out of it, what you get is that the headache goes away. You take something away. So that’s why it’s called negative reinforcement. You’re taking away something in order to increase a behavior. Skinner also investigated the role of punishment.

So if a reinforcement always increases behavior then you can say punishment always reduces behavior. So if we’re reducing a behavior then it’s a punishment.

This is a common trap that students fall into. They get mixed up with negative reinforcement and punishment and things. Just remember reinforcement always increases the behavior. Whether it’s positive or negative reinforcement, the end result is the behavior increases. Punishment always reduces the behavior, it always results in less of that behavior.

So what are the two forms of punishment? You’ve probably already guessed they’re positive punishment and negative punishment. In the case of positive punishment we reduce the behavior by giving something bad. So if you press this button and you get an electric shock, what are the odds that you’re going to press the button again?

They’re going to be lower, it’s going to reduce the behavior. You don’t want to press that button if it’s painful. That’s going to reduce the behavior so that’s an example of positive punishment. Pressing the button gives you an electric shock, that’s bad, so don’t press the button. Then we have negative punishment.

Negative punishment refers to taking away something that’s good. So we remove something that you want. Remove something good.

In this case, let’s say you’re speeding when you’re driving. What do you get for that? You get a fine. What’s a fine? A fine is a negative punishment. They take away something good, in this case, money. You like having money, now you have less of it. The lesson you should learn from that is to that behavior, reduce the speeding behavior. So that’s an example of negative punishment.

This is also called, in some texts you may see this called omission training. We reduce a behavior by taking away something desirable. If I take away your food when you do something, so if you put your elbows on the dinner table or something and I take away your food, that’s going to reduce this behavior of putting your elbows on the table, something like that.

Now we can already see one of the problems with punishment, if we return to this speeding example, is that it tells you what not to do but it doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to do. So if you get a ticket for speeding it doesn’t actually tell you how to be a good driver. It just tells you, “don’t speed”. In fact even then it doesn’t tell you that message very clearly. There’s probably some times you speed and you don’t get get. So the real lesson you learn is “OK, you can speed, as long as you don’t get caught”.

So rather than reducing speeding behavior you might reduce other behaviors like “don’t drive on this road where the cops are always pulling people over”. You can still speed, just do it somewhere else. Or maybe it changes your behavior to make sure you look around for cops more often or do whatever you can to avoid getting caught rather than reducing speeding.

So that’s a problem with punishment, it doesn’t give clear instructions about what you’re supposed to do. Whereas reinforcement tells you “that behavior is good, I want more of that. Press that button you get a reward.” Ok, then I know what I’m supposed to do, I’m supposed to press that button.

OK so we’ll go into more detail on reinforcement and punishment in future videos and we’ll look at now different schedules of providing these rewards and punishments can influence behavior. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more.

Thanks for watching!