One of my student/friends is now part of the elite Vet Start program at Colorado State University. She reported that defining the elements of operant conditioning flummoxed most of her fellow students in her freshman course on basic psychology. The names for the four simple concepts lack intuitive connections for most people since Skinner used "positive" and "negative" in a mathematical sense--added to, subtracted from--not to mean good and bad as most people use the words. Consequently, most of the students in the class failed to identify what happens in the two types of reinforcement and the two types of punishment.
The blog Equinox Horse provides a delightfully clear set of definitions:
Positive reinforcement:
- A pleasant stimulus is added to the animal's environment when a behavior occurs, resulting in an increased chance of the animal repeating the behavior.
Negative reinforcement:
- An unpleasant stimulus is removed from the animal's environment when a behavior occurs, resulting in an increased chance of the animal repeating the behavior.
Positive punishment:
- An unpleasant stimulus is added to the animal's environment when a behavior occurs, resulting in a decreased chance of the animal repeating the behavior.
Negative punishment:
- A pleasant stimulus is removed from the animal's environment when a behavior occurs, resulting in a decreased chance of the animal repeating the behavior.
Perfectly clear. As simple as it is I find food for thought in the definitions.
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