Skinner's Theory of Behaviorism Flashcards
Skinner’s views on Behaviorism
‘A learned response and its outcomes motivate human behavior. This is called external motivation as it involves things outside one’s personal thoughts and experiences reinforcing it. It is something one may observe.’
Skinner box
The Skinner box has a food tray and a lever, and a starving rat in the box may get food conveyed to the tray after pressing the lever. Skinner reported that when a rat was first placed into the box, the rat wandered around, exploring and sniffing, and would mostly accidently press the bar, after that a food pellet would be delivered to the tray.
After some time, number of bar pressing would dramatically increase and remain high until the rat’s tummy was full. In the field of psychology, the operant conditioning box has played a crucial role to study behavior. B. F. Skinner’s research involving the Skinner Box led to the principle of reinforcement, which states that the likelihood of occurrence of something depends on the consequences of behavior.
Behaviorist central idea in linguistics
Children imitate adults. Their correct utterances are reinforced when they get what they want or are praised.
Counter theory to Skinner’s theory
Berko-Gleason conducted the Wug test, and this implies that linguistic understand is inherent in children
Positive v.s. negative reinforcement
Rewarding v.s. punishing behaviors, emphasizes and supports Skinner’s theory of behaviorism
Bobo Doll Theory
The Bobo Doll Theory by Albert Bandura is the Social or Observational Learning theory is based on the Bobo Doll experiment. It depicts increased aggression in children who observed aggressive models of behavior.
What did the Bobo Doll experiment prove?
The Bobo Doll experiments proved that children can learn through observation and later imitating the same behaviors with a combination of environmental and cognitive processes. Its aim was to discover the extent of environmental influence on aggressive behavior.
