Schedules of Reinforcement
Schedules of reinforcement are structured timelines used in psychology to promote or discourage certain behaviors through rewards or punishments, a process known as operant conditioning. This approach relies on the premise that behaviors can be modified based on the consequences that follow them. Schedules of reinforcement can vary significantly; they can be continuous, where a behavior is reinforced every time it occurs, or partial, where reinforcement happens intermittently. Partial reinforcement, particularly through fixed-ratio and variable-ratio schedules, tends to be more effective in sustaining behaviors over time. For example, fixed-ratio schedules reward a specific number of responses, such as employees receiving bonuses for meeting sales targets, while variable-ratio schedules, like those found in gambling, reward behaviors after an unpredictable number of actions. Additionally, fixed-interval and variable-interval schedules focus on the timing of rewards, encouraging behavior by providing reinforcement at set or average time intervals, such as biweekly paychecks. Understanding these schedules is crucial in various contexts, from behavioral therapy to education and workplace environments, as they help shape voluntary behaviors based on anticipated outcomes.
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Schedules of Reinforcement
In psychology, schedules of reinforcement are timelines used to encourage or discourage certain behaviors by applying stimuli such as rewards or punishments. Schedules of reinforcement are used in a psychological process called operant conditioning, in which an organism voluntarily changes its actions due to the administration of rewards and punishments for those actions. The schedules for delivering these reinforcements can be altered in several ways to modify the organism's behavior, more or less specifically.
For instance, fixed-ratio reinforcement schedules require organisms to respond to stimuli in the desired way a certain number of times before being rewarded. This type of schedule often produces high rates of positive responses, as the organisms come to understand they will be rewarded only after repeating a desired task a specified amount of times. Schedules of reinforcement are important in psychology because they encourage subjects to alter their behavior of their own free will based on the expected consequences of that behavior.
Background
Schedules of reinforcement are vital to conditioning organisms' behavior. Conditioning is a kind of learning process that involves altering a subject's involuntary or voluntary responses to certain stimuli. Psychology identifies two major types of conditioning: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Both types can change organisms' behavior, but they differ in important ways.
Classical conditioning, famously explored by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in the early twentieth century, seeks to modify automatic responses in an organism's body. Classical conditioning does not change a subject's conscious behavior but rather the subject's physiological or emotional responses to specific stimuli. Pavlov experimented with classical conditioning using dogs. After enough times hearing a bell directly before smelling food and beginning to salivate, the dogs salivated only upon hearing the bell. The dogs had been classically conditioned to salivate at the sound of the bell.
Meanwhile, operant conditioning alters an organism's conscious behavior based on learned associations of the behavior with either positive or negative consequences that follow it. Operant conditioning can occur naturally as well as in deliberate psychological experimentation. For instance, many animals can learn in the natural world that touching hot objects leads to pain. The pain is a type of punishment for engaging in harmful behavior. After enough repetitions, an animal will learn to refrain from touching objects associated with pain.
A simple experimental example of operant conditioning involves giving a child candy when they use the words "please" and "thank you." The candy is a reward for the child's polite behavior. Ideally, after some time, the child will be polite to everyone all the time due to the association of being polite with producing positive results in the world. In experimental operant conditioning, the schedules of reinforcement, which are the intervals at which a subject is rewarded or punished for certain behaviors, are important. This is because different schedules result in different behaviors.
Overview
One of the main reasons why schedules of reinforcement are essential to operant conditioning is that occurrences of the learned behavior will generally decrease if the reinforcing rewards or punishments are removed. Cats will no longer scratch at a door if someone stops regularly opening it for them, and people will eventually stop greeting others who do not respond to the greetings. The decline and end of behavior learned through operant conditioning is known as extinction.
To prevent extinction from occurring, experimenters need schedules of reinforcement. Two types of reinforcement schedules exist: continuous and partial. Continuous reinforcement involves reinforcing or discouraging a behavior every time the subject engages in that behavior. Rats in a cage will teach themselves the best way to press a lever if doing so results in them receiving a food pellet after every press. However, modern psychology has found that continuous reinforcement often leads ultimately to decreased behavioral response rates and possibly extinction in subjects. This is because, in natural life, behaviors are rarely rewarded or punished every time without fail. If an animal is rewarded every time it exhibits the specified behavior, the animal will react strongly to the first instance of it not being rewarded and is unlikely to continue exhibiting the behavior.
Partial reinforcement schedules have proven to be more effective in not only teaching a new behavior but also ensuring the behavior is sustained. Numerous types of partial reinforcement schedules can be used to increase the chances of a behavior becoming permanent. One type is a fixed-ratio schedule. This rewards people after a set number of behavior repetitions. Fixed-ratio schedules of operant conditioning can be seen in workplaces in which employees work on commissions, or are paid based on meeting specified sales quotas. Employees who meet their monthly quotas are rewarded with healthy paychecks. Therefore, the employees learn to work aggressively so they can be paid well.
Another type of partial reinforcement schedule is a variable-ratio schedule. This is similar to a fixed-ratio schedule, but rewards are distributed after a somewhat random number of responses that vary around an average. Despite the presence of this average, the length of time between rewards may still be either short or long, but it recurs frequently enough to continue eliciting certain behaviors from a subject. Slot machines operate on variable-ratio schedules. The schedules are responsible for causing the machines to pay out just often enough to ensure gamblers keep playing.
Other partial reinforcement schedules are based on time intervals. A fixed-interval schedule, for instance, rewards behavior after a set amount of time. Behavior performed before the determined minimum length of time is not rewarded. Many employees around the world are rewarded on fixed-interval schedules in the form of biweekly paychecks. These employees might work every day for two weeks but are not paid before the two-week interval ends. The promise of biweekly rewards ensures the employees continue working.
Finally, variable-interval schedules reward behavior either before or after an average length of time. The specified behavior might be rewarded after three minutes or seven minutes, but enough repetitions of the rewarding may make the average reward time about five minutes. Self-employed individuals might be rewarded with customer payments on variable-interval schedules based on the individuals' work output. A yearly payment schedule might vary greatly in the short term but still average a set amount in the long term.
Partial reinforcement schedules such as the variable-ratio and fixed-interval schedules have shown to be the most effective at eliciting desired behaviors in operant conditioning. Test subjects eventually learn they will not be rewarded every time they engage in a certain behavior, and so they strive to continue the behavior independently until the reward is actually delivered. New behaviors are internalized through this process.
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