What Are Skinner's Reinforcement?

Mama and Ruth are African American women who both play an important role in A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry. They didn’t have much because they were black, and the society was racist. They were around many times and just like mama, Ruth has been a part of the main conflict. Ruth is important because she always has a problem and constantly makes smart remarks towards a certain character. She’s also pregnant and decides to get an abortion without asking he husband how he feels.

Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner was born on March 20, 1904. Skinner lived 86 years passing away on August 18, 1990. He was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania to William and Grace Skinner. His father was a lawyer, while his mother stayed home to care for Skinner and his younger brother. Skinner being 18 lost his 16-year-old brother of a cerebral hemorrhage. At a young age, Skinner showed an interest in building different gadgets and contraptions.

Operant conditioning expert, Skinner (1938), studied the function of negative reinforcement in rats. Figure 1 shows the process of negative reinforcement, which resulted in the rats learning to go directly to the lever when the electric current occurred in order to ‘escape’ the electric current.

Behaviorism is by far one of the most interesting fields of psychology in my opinion. B.F. Skinner’s view on behaviorism was that a person’s actions are controlled by rewards and punishments. Relating this to a real life situation, a great example of this would be a parent and a child.

John B. Watson left academic psychology in the early 20th century creating the place for other behaviorists (McLeod, 2015). These behaviorists started influencing the world of psychology by coming up with forms of learning in addition to classical conditioning. One of the most important behaviorists of that time was Burrhus Fredric Skinner commonly referred to as B. F. Skinner. Contrastingly to Watson’s views, Skinner's aspects seemed less extreme. One of the most important opinions of Skinner was the believing in the existence of mind. Even with the existence of mind, there is still need to learn the observable human behavior in addition to internal mental events.

Examples of Operant conditioning can be found in all areas of life such as children who complete homework and earn a reward from their parents or teacher or employees who complete projects and receive promotions or raises in pay. Cherry (2007) states that the promise of the rewards results in an increase in a specific behavior or alternatively the decrease in a specific and undesired behavior. Operant conditioning involves a voluntary response being followed by a reinforcing stimulus and a reinforcer is stated to be any stimulus that increases the behavior's frequency. In order to be a reinforce stimuli the stimuli is required to follow the response immediately and must be understood as being contingent upon the response.

BF Skinner places heavy emphasis on the use of multiple reinforcements to control the responses of individuals in certain situations. He notes that the responses of individuals to particular stimuli are contingent upon positive or negative reinforcements. This concept is known as operant conditioning. This ideology poses several limitations. Radical behaviorism does not take into account internal processes. To be more concise, Skinner does not view a person’s mental processes (i.e. thoughts and feelings as contributing factors of behavior). By not evaluating a person’s mental state, thoughts, or feelings, this theory assumes the idea that everyone will have the same response to the same situation as long as the same form of reinforcement is

Have you ever thought about what will happen when a child makes a mistake and gets punished for it? Next time when he tries again to do the same thing he will do less and less. This is a theory that B.F. Skinner based his operations on, called operant conditioning. B.F. Skinner was a leading “behaviorist,” who rejected introspection and studied how consequences shape behavior. Introspection is the self-observation of one’s conscious. Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna Depot, Pennsylvania. He grew up in an active household, his mother being a tough and bright housewife and his father a hard-working lawyer. As a child, B.F. Skinner was active, outgoing, and intelligent, he loved school. After B.F. Skinner successfully graduated from high school, he enrolled at Hamilton College in New York. Later on, he decided to go back to school this time at Harvard University to study psychology.

In this paper I am going to tell you about who I feel has made not only a huge impact on the field of psychology in today’s society, but also made an impact on my own personal life. This person has not only played a vital role in understanding discipline in raising children, but also affects something I am most interested in-animals. I will start off this paper by telling you about this person’s work in the field of psychology and what his beliefs are and then at the end proceed to tell you how influential this person’s work is on my life as well as yours. B. F. Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. B. F. Skinner is second only to Sigmund Freud among being one of the most distinguishable

In this theory, Vygotsky suggests the idea of scaffolding from external influences, including parents and teachers. To scaffold is “to use language and social interaction to guide children’s thinking” (Trawick-Smith, 2010, p.53). The key to do this properly, is to know how much or how little guidance to give the children.

There have been many famous individuals who have contributed to education. BF Skinner, William Glasser, John Dewey, and Lev Vygotski are four notorious men in the history and impact of education. Bf Skinner (1904) was a behaviorist who his most widely known for his theory of operant conditioning and the Skinner box. His created this theory to study human behavior. Operant conditioning includes positive and negative reinforcement as well as positive and negative punishment. Positive reinforcement is giving a person a reward when the child behaves well. The opposite of positive reinforcement is negative reinforcement which is the removal of a something negative to increases the likelihood of positive behavior. Negative punishment is the removal of something positive to eliminate bad behavior. Positive punishment is when something negative is added to a situation to decrease bad behavior. B.F. Skinner had a significant influence on education. He believed that behavior can only be changed through learning. His discoveries through operant conditioning can be used in education in classrooms today. When a child’s behavior starts to change, that is a signal to the teacher that the child has learned from previous experiences. For example when a child raises his or her hand to be called on in class, they wait patiently because the student knows from previous experiences that talking when the student is not supposed to is bad behavior. The student then waits patiently to avoid being

Vygotsky believed that social interaction is the catalyst for student learning. Students learn from each other and the adults in their lives. The first learning that takes place is person to person and individually when the person internalizes the information in an attempt to understand something more completely. The first type of social interaction involves social speech in which adults give instructions. Another type of speech is private speech in which children process information and try to apply what they have heard through their experiences with similar situations in an effort to demonstrate self-control. Finally, internal speech is the silent conversation one has within one’s self. This speech leads to higher order thinking.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory. Lev Vygotsky believed that children learn thru cultural and social interactions. He encourages that families, peers, and teachers must give “cooperative learning” to children thru social engagements since this process helps them to learn about languages, beliefs and customs effectively (Scott & Palincsar, 2013). Moreover, Vygotsky coined the term private speech, also called self-talk. Self-talk refers to the time wherein the child tends to “think out loud”. Engaging in this phenomenon

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (Kretchmar, 2015) – proposes that people learn by observing the behavior of others. Bandura asserts that this process has four parts – attention, retention, motor reproduction and motivation. Environmental and cognitive factors can influence the process as well. This theory has many practical applications for understanding behavior in the classroom, and in society more generally. However, despite its far-reaching impact, social learning theory is not without its critics.

Lev Vygotsky is one of the earliest proponents of a constructivist learning theory. Although he only lived through the early 1930s, his work was largely unknown in the West until the 1960s (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2012). His significant contributions to constructivist learning theory include three important distinctions. First, he purports in Mind and Society: the development of higher mental process (1978) that “social interaction between people plays the first fundamental role in the process of cognitive development” (explained in the Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2012). This means we first learn by watching others and discussing new information with others, only then do we attempt to use our own cognitive systems for storing that new knowledge individually. “Vygotsky focused on the connections between