OPERANT CONDITIONING

Operant Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Skinner (2001) has claimed that it is the influence of past and present contingencies of survival and past and present contingencies of reinforcement that influence sexual behavior. By "contingencies of survival" Skinner is referring to the selective action of the environment on the gene pools of the species. In Skinner's view, sexual contact has come to function as a powerful primary reinforcer through the contingencies of survival:

At a time when the human race was periodically decimated by pestilence, famine, and war and steadily attenuated by endemic ills and unsanitary and dangerous environment, it was important that procreative behavior should by maximized. Those for whom sexual reinforcement was most powerful should have most quickly achieved copulation and should have continued to copulate most frequently. The breeders selected by sexual competition must have been not only the most powerful and skillful members of the species but those for whom sexual contact was most reinforcing. In a safer environment the same susceptibility leads to serious overpopulation with its attendant ills.

Skinner (2003) also stated that the ontogeny and phylogeny of sexual behavior are closely tied together:

Those who are preoccupied with sex are exposed to attack (indeed, may be stimulating attack); hence, those who engage in sexual behavior under cover are more likely to breed successfully. Here are phylogenetic contingencies which either make sexual behavior under cover stronger than sexual behavior in the open or reinforce the taking of cover when sexual behavior is strong. Ontogenic contingencies through which organisms seek cover to avoid disturbances during sexual activity are also plausible.

According to Skinner, the contingencies of survival have played a role in shaping global behavioral patterns exhibited by different organisms. However, natural selection is also complemented in the lifetime of the organism through selection of behaviors by consequences. Operant conditionability was an adaptive mutation because organisms responsive to immediate environmental consequences survived temporally unstable shifts in prevailing environmental features. This selection of behavior Skinner termed "operant conditioning" and the behaviors selected through consequences are called "operants."

It is interesting to note that although Skinner focused only on natural selection in the evolution of human sexuality, Darwin (1871) suggested that evolution operated through two selection mechanisms: natural selection and sexual selection. According to Darwin (1871), sexual selection involves male competition for females and female choice among males. Darwin thought that the "law of battle" or male competition for mates accounted for ...