The utilization of rewards to modify classroom behavior is properly documented and established in literature. One of the principal advocates of the behavioristic school of thought is B. F. Skinner. His view on behaviorism has been applied with enormous success among the mentally, handicapped, hearing impaired children, and substance abusers. B.F. Skinner’s View on Behaviorism Moreover, Skinner is the lone prominent figure in the history of behaviorism to present a socio-political world observation founded on his dedication to behaviorism. Skinner built a theory in addition to narrative picture in Walden Two (1948) of what an ideal human society would be like if planned consistent with behaviorist principles. Skinner’s social belief reveals both his loathing of free will, to dualism, to homunculi, including his reasons for asserting that a person’s history of environmental interactions manages his or her behavior.
One noteworthy characteristic of human behavior, which Skinner deliberately discards, is that individuals resourcefully and artistically create their own environments. The world is as it is, partly, since we create it that way. Skinner argues that it is in the nature of an investigational examination of human behavior that it must strip away the functions formerly assigned to autonomous man and convey them individually to the controlling environment.
Radical Behaviorism as Developed by B.F. Skinner Radical behaviorism, which was developed by B. F. Skinner, is considered to be a philosophy that brings about the experimental analysis of behavior move toward to psychology. The phrase ‘radical behaviorism’ refers to a specific subset of behaviorism. Furthermore, Skinner was a prominent instrument in defining radical behaviorism, which is also considered a viewpoint codifying the foundation of his school of research (dubbed the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, otherwise known as EAB.) While EAB varies from other approaches to behavioral research on various theoretical and methodological points, radical behaviorism differs from methodological behaviorism most especially in accepting introspection and treatment of feelings as existing and scientifically treatable.
This is performed by means of distinguishing them as something non-dualistic, and here Skinner espouses a divide-and-conquer method, with a number of instances being acknowledged with bodily conditions or behavior, and others obtaining a more comprehensive ‘analysis’ in terms of behavior. Nevertheless, radical behaviorism stops short of acknowledging feelings as reasons of behavior. Among other instances of difference were a refusal of the reflex as a model of every behavior and a justification of a science of behavior corresponding to but independent of physiology.
This fundamentally philosophical point obtained strength from the triumph of Skinner’s initial experimental work with pigeons and rats, summed up in his books Schedules of Reinforcement (1957, with C. B. Ferster) and The Behavior of Organisms (1938) and others. Of specific importance was his idea of the operant response, of which the canonical illustration was the rat’s lever-press. In addition to what was discussed earlier in operant conditioning, contrary to the idea of a reflex or physiological response, an operant is considered to be a class of structurally distinct yet functionally equivalent responses.
For instance, despite the fact that a rat may possibly press a lever with its right paw or its left paw or its tail, all of these reactions and responses function on the world in a similar manner and have a common result. Operants are frequently considered as species of responses, where the individuals vary yet the class goes together in its function–shared outcomes with operants and reproductive accomplishment with species.
Skinner’s experimental work expounded on previous research regarding trial-and-error learning by researchers like Guthrie and Thorndike and with both conceptual reformulations – Thorndike’s idea of a stimulus-response ‘connection’ or ‘association’ or was abandoned – and methodological ones – the utilization of the ‘free operant’, alleged since the animal was now allowed to react at its own rate instead of in a series of trials identified by the experimenter procedures. With this way, Skinner performed considerable experimental work regarding the effects of various rates and schedules of reinforcement on the rates of operant responses carried out by pigeons and rats.
Skinner obtained notable success in terms of training animals to carry out unforeseen responses, and to give out huge numbers of responses, and to display several experimental regularities at wholly behavioral level. This provided certain credibility to his conceptual examination. It is mainly his conceptual examination that made his work much more thorough compared to his peers, a line of reasoning which can be noticed unmistakably in his seminal work Are Theories of Learning Necessary? in which Skinner criticizes what he considered to be theoretical weaknesses at that time common in the study of psychology.
Radical Behaviorism has at all times been controversial due to numerous reasons. The supporters of radical behaviorism contend that the theory is generally misrepresented and misunderstood. Antagonists of radical behaviorism frequently feel just as strongly. Nevertheless, B.F. Skinner has observed that classical conditioning didn’t give an explanation for the behavior the majority of us are interested in (just like writing a book or riding a bike). Skinner’s observations, using the concepts of Thorndike (1898), led him to recommend a theory regarding how these and similar behaviors (dubbed as operants) take place.
B.F. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Skinner changed the beliefs of behaviorism to match his own discoveries that included what he dubbed as “operant conditioning.” “Conditioning” is considered to be the scientific word for learning. “Operant” relates to Skinner’s perception that every organism “operates” on his environment – specifically, executes actions that modify the environment around it either for better or for worse. Operant psychology is founded on the concept that an action taken by a person or an animal frequently has consequences that happen as expected in the environment. This is referred to as “operant conditioning”. Moreover, reinforcement is something that makes it more probable that a certain behavior will be recurring. The outcomes of a certain action either reinforce the said behavior or do not reinforce it.
For instance, if a child makes faces at the teacher in class, the laughter of the other students might cause to reinforce his behavior. If the teacher reprimands the child by means of making him/her write, “I will not make faces” one hundred times on the board, that particular child might keep away from such antics in the future. Therefore, the child instigates the behavior, and features or factors in the child’s environment either reward or reprimands his/her behavior.