REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

Reward and Punishment

Reward and Punishment

The Study of Learning

Learning has been a topic of great interest since early in the history of modern psychology. In order to gain a better understanding of the process of social learning, we begin by briefly reviewing two more traditional approaches to the examine of learning.

Classical Conditioning

One type of learning studied by early researchers such as Ivan Pavlov, and later John B. Watson, is classical conditioning. Classical conditioning occurs when an organism develops an automatic reflexive response to a neutral event that has no prior meaning. Pavlov demonstrated that he could condition dogs to salivate (a reflex) to the sound of a metronome (a neutral event), even if they did not subsequently receive food. Classical conditioning explains why some of us flinch involuntarily in anticipation of a loud noise, such as a balloon popping, and why our mouths begin to water when we simply think about tart candy or biting down on a lemon slice.

Operant Conditioning

Another type of learning studied by early researchers such as Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner is operant or instrumental conditioning. Skinner (1953), among others, demonstrated that an organism could acquire a new behavior using reinforcement, or unlearn an old behavior using punishment. In the case of operant conditioning, researchers believe the behaviors are voluntary because the organism chooses to do them in anticipation of a reward, or chooses not to do them to avoid punishment.

In this context both rewards and punishments are consequences of behaviors. For example, parents can toilet-train children by providing a reward (e.g., praise, brightly colored stickers) each time they successfully use the potty chair. The reward, or consequence, increases the likelihood that a child will choose to use the potty chair in the future.

Miller and Dollard

Miller and Dollard (1941) contended that humans can learn through imitation and described three forms of imitation. The first form of imitation, same behavior, occurs when two people independently engage in the same behavior in response to the same stimulus. Miller and Dollard used the example of two people riding the same bus to the same destination. One person did not necessarily learn to ride the bus to the desired destination by imitating the behavior of the other person. Instead, they may have separately read the bus schedule and selected the same bus and route.

Matched-dependent behavior occurs in situations where there is a more experienced model and a less experienced observer. The experience of the model may be related to age, education, or skill level. Miller and Dollard (1941) posited that learning matched-dependent behavior occurs when a less experienced observer imitates the behavior of a more experienced model in order to obtain a similar consequence.

Miller and Dollard (1941) tested their model of social learning in a series of experiments using both children and animals, and concluded that learning through matched-dependent behavior is a special form of operant conditioning. Observers use the behavior of the model as a discriminative stimulus to determine when they also should do the ...