Добавил:
Sekretar
kiopkiopkiop18@yandex.ru
t.me/Prokururor I Вовсе не секретарь, но почту проверяю
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Ординатура / Хирургия / Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана / Книга_27_библиотеки_им_акад_М_И_Перельмана
.pdf
Punishment
In 1948, Skinner wrote Walden Two, a novel about a fictional society in which
socially adaptive behaviors were maintained by various schedules of reinforcement.
The book was a blueprint for the use of “behavioral engineering” to design a happy,
healthy, and productive community. Skinner never hesitated to preach the use of
reinforcement. Yet he just as adamantly opposed the use of punishment, even though
it is a common form of behavior control. Think about it. Caregivers scold their
children, police officers fine motorists for speeding, referees penalize athletes for
committing fouls, and employers fire workers who are lazy. So what’s the problem?
Aren’t these forms of punishment effective?
Research shows that punishment has mixed effects (Axelrod & Apsche, 1983;
Domjan, 2018c; Masui, Nomura, & Ura, 2012). When it’s strong, immediate,
consistent, and inescapable, punishment does suppress unwanted behaviors. Shock
a rat for pressing the response bar and it will quickly stop making the response. Yell,
“No!” at the top of your lungs to a child playing with matches, and it is unlikely to
happen again. Clearly, punishment can be an effective deterrent.
To test punishment, Rebecca Bennett (1998) had 263 college students play the
role of a corporate executive faced with an ethical dilemma. Those who selected an
unethical path in order to maximize profits were then assessed a large or small fine
and told that a competitor who had made the same choice was or was not similarly
fined. Indicating the benefits of punishment, Bennett found that the large fine deterred
subjects from later making another unethical choice. She also found that when the
fine was administered even-handedly, the participants did not become resentful,
angry, or aggressive.
While potentially effective, punishment can have unwanted side effects. There are
four specific problems in this regard. First, a behavior that is met with punishment
may be temporarily inhibited or hidden from the punishing agent—but it is not
necessarily extinguished. The child who lights matches and the teenager who
smokes cigarettes may both continue to do so at school, at a friend’s house, or at
home when the parent is at work. Second, even when punishment does suppress an
unwanted behavior, it does not always replace that behavior with one that is more
adaptive. It’s okay to lock up convicted criminals, but to change their future behavior,
some form of rehabilitation program is necessary. Third, punishment can sometimes
backfire because a stimulus thought to be aversive may, in fact, prove rewarding. The
neglected child who acts up and is scolded by busy caregivers may “enjoy” the
attention and make trouble again in the future. Fourth, punishment can arouse fear,
anger, frustration, and other negative emotions—leading the person to strike back,
retaliate, tune out, or run away.
https://t.me/medicina_free
B. F. Skinner was born in 1904 and received his psychology degree from Harvard
in 1931. He published his first paper in 1930, his last in 1990. He wrote 19 books and
hundreds of journal articles.
On August 10, 1990, Skinner made his final public appearance in Boston at the
American Psychological Association’s convention. He was there to receive an award
for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology. Upon his introduction, Skinner
was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation. Everyone in the audience knew they
were watching a living legend. They also knew he was dying. The talk itself was
vintage Skinner. For 20 minutes, he insisted, as always, that psychology could never
be a science of the mind, only a science of behavior.
On August 17, 1990, one week after his Boston appearance, Skinner completed
his last article, for the American Psychologist. He died the next day.
Nina Leen / Contributor / Getty
A particularly contentious debate concerns the use of corporal punishment by
caregivers who use spanking to discipline their children. Defined as the use of
reasonable physical force, which causes a child pain but not injury, corporal
punishment is more common in some parts of the world than others. Some countries
prohibit corporal punishment by law; yet many American caregivers support it. So,
what are the effects? Elizabeth Gershoff (2002) meta-analyzed 88 studies spanning
62 years and involving 36,309 children whose caregivers varied in their use of
corporal punishment. Overall, she found that children who were spanked were more
likely to stop misbehaving immediately afterward. However, they also had poorer
relationships with their caregivers, were more aggressive and more antisocial, and
were more likely as adults to have psychological problems and abuse their own
spouses and children. In a later study, Gershoff (2013) concluded that “spanking is a
form of violence against children that should no longer be a part of American
childrearing” (p. 133). Others agree with Gershoff’s conclusions. In 2014, Minnesota
Vikings athlete Adrian Peterson was arrested and charged with injury to a child after
using a wooden switch to discipline his son. As a result, the child suffered from cuts
and bruises. Peterson’s case went viral and thus “revived a debate about corporal
https://t.me/medicina_free
p
punishment” (CBS News, 2014). Across the United States, corporal punishment is
legal. Texas, where Peterson’s case took place, allows a guardian to use nondeadly
force for child disciplinary purposes as long as said guardian “reasonably believes the
force is necessary to discipline the child or to safeguard or promote his welfare” (CBS
News, 2014).
Interestingly, more recent studies also show that many caregivers simply do not
equate their physical disciplinary strategies—such as spanking, or slapping of the
hand, arm, or leg—to corporal punishment (Fréchette & Romano, 2017). Although
beliefs about spanking can vary by culture (Lansford et al., 2017), many caregivers
will report being against corporal punishment and yet use corporal punishment
strategies to punish their own children. In many cases, caregivers are apparently
unaware that they are using corporal punishment. Still, critics of studies like these are
quick to note that the correlations do not prove that spanking itself causes the
negative effects, that spanking is too often accompanied by abusive rearing, and that
the results do not speak to the effects of nonphysical forms of punishment (Baumrind,
Larzelere, & Cowan, 2002), such a public shaming, which can likewise be associated
with negative outcomes, including suicide (Panagopoulou-Koutnatzi, 2014).
Properly administered, punishment can be used to suppress unwanted behavior.
Improperly administered, however, it can create more problems than it solves. Thus,
advised Skinner, it is better to use a combination of reinforcement (to bring out
alternative desirable behaviors) and extinction (to extinguish the undesirable
behaviors) in order to shape a new, more adaptive way of life.
https://t.me/medicina_free
Stimulus Control
In operant conditioning, organisms learn to respond in ways that are reinforced.
But there is more to the story. A pigeon trained in a Skinner box learns to peck a key
for food, but it may also learn that the response produces reinforcement only in the
presence of certain cues. Because reinforcements are often available in some
situations but not others, it is adaptive to learn not only what response to make but
when to make it. If pecking a key produces food only when a green disk is lit, a
pigeon may learn to discriminate and to respond on a selective basis. The green light
is a discriminative stimulus that “sets the occasion” for the behavior to be
reinforced (Ross & LoLordo, 1987).
discriminative stimulus. A stimulus that signals the availability of reinforcement.
When people learn to respond in some situations and not others, their behavior is
said to be under stimulus control. In human terms, this is often important for treating
behavioral disorders. Consider the problem of insomnia. Studies show that people
with insomnia too often use the bed for nonsleeping activities such as watching TV,
gaming, listening to music on their phones, reading, and worrying about personal
problems. In other words, the bed has become a discriminative stimulus for so many
activities that it becomes a source of arousal, not relaxation. To counter this problem,
people with insomnia are advised, frequently with successful results, to lie in bed only
for the purpose of sleeping (Bullis & Sauer-Zavala, 2018).
An operant response may spread from one situation to another through the
process of stimulus generalization. As in classical conditioning, the more similar a
new stimulus is to the original discriminative stimulus, the more likely it is to trigger
the response. In one study, pigeons were reinforced for pecking a key that was
illuminated with yellow light. They were then tested with lights of different colors. The
more similar the test lights were to the yellow discriminative stimulus—for example,
green and orange as opposed to red and blue—the more likely the pigeons were to
peck at it (Guttman & Kalish, 1956).
It now appears that even more subtle forms of discrimination are possible. In one
clever study, eight pigeons were reinforced with birdseed to peck a key whenever a
slide was projected into their cage. Half the pigeons were reinforced for the key press
only in the presence of a painting by Monet, the French impressionist. The others
were reinforced only in the presence of a painting by Picasso, the Spanish cubist.
Showing an ability to both generalize and make fine discriminations, the pigeons in
each condition later pecked when shown new paintings by the same artist (stimulus
generalization) but not when shown new paintings by the other artist (discrimination).
Remarkably, the pigeons even went on to generalize from Monet to other French
impressionists, such as Renoir—and from Picasso to other cubists, such as Matisse
(Watanabe, Sakamoto, & Wakita, 1995).
Discrimination and generalization are important aspects of human operant
conditioning. From experience, a child may learn that temper tantrums bring results
from busy caregivers but not from teachers, that studying increases grades in social
studies but not math, that lewd remarks elicit laughter in the locker room but not in
the classroom, and that aggression wins praise on the football field but not in other
settings. As adults, we routinely regulate our behavior according to situational cues.
Self-Control
For many years, psychologists interested in operant behavior have studied the
ways in which our life choices—for example, the economic decisions we make—are
guided by our learned expectations for reinforcement (Mazur, 1998). In fact, the field
of behavioral economics continues to grow and brings together various aspects of
psychology and economics (Brocas & Carrillo, 2003; Earl, 2017).
Some psychologists have theorized that people (and animals too, for that matter)
make behavioral choices according to how reinforcing these choices have been.
Simply put, the more reinforcement we receive for a particular type of response,
relative to others that are possible, the more likely we are to make that response in a
future situation (Herrnstein, 1970). This principle suggests that people tend to behave
in ways that maximize the value of their own return. This makes sense, but are
people always so rational? Don’t we often behave in ways that detract from our own
long-term interests—as when we smoke, gamble, drink too much, eat too much, blow
the paycheck without saving for tomorrow, and engage in other bad habits? To
reconcile the notion that people seek to maximize reinforcements in their lives with
the fact that they often behave in ways that are not personally adaptive, researchers
have studied self-control—the extent to which people pass up small but immediate
https://t.me/medicina_free
rewards in exchange for more valuable future gains (Beames, Schofield, & Denson,
2018; Rachlin, 1995).
By electrically stimulating a pleasure center in the brain for reinforcement,
researchers can shape rats to move in various directions. Perhaps some day, remotecontrolled rodents will be trained to search through piles of rubble for disaster
survivors.
Ian Allen / Contributor / Getty
Research shows that we often do not exhibit self-control, and hence we do not
maximize our own gains, because rewards seem less valuable to us when we have
to wait to get them than when they are immediately available. What’s more, the
longer people have to wait for a given reward, the less valuable it seems (Kirby,
1997). Consider this choice: Would you rather have $5 today or $6 in a week? What
about $50 today or $75 in six months? When presented with these types of choices,
subjects often make the “myopic” (which means near-sighted) decision to select the
smaller but immediate reward. As you might expect, some people are more
impulsive, or more present oriented, than others. For example, Kirby, Petry, and
Bickel (1999) presented a series of monetary choices to groups of participants
addicted to heroin and found that they discounted the value of the delayed-but-larger
sum of money more than college students and others did. Similarly, Suzanne Mitchell
(1999) found that smokers are more likely than nonsmokers to choose a smaller but
more immediate sum of money. These classic findings have been extended beyond
drug use to include how we make decisions about money and what to eat, and even
our use of disposable surgical masks during the COVID-19 pandemic (Amlung, Gray,
& MacKillop, 2016; Cannito et al., 2021).
Practical Applications of Operant Conditioning
From the start, Skinner was interested in the practical, everyday applications of
operant conditioning. In World War II, he worked for the U.S. government on a topsecret project in which he shaped pigeons to guide missiles toward enemy ships.
Based on this work, the U.S. Navy trained dolphins and sea lions to locate explosive
https://t.me/medicina_free
mines in the Persian Gulf and to perform other dangerous underwater missions
(Morrison, 1988). Similarly, the Coast Guard used pigeons to search for people lost at
sea. The birds were strapped under the belly of a rescue helicopter and trained to
spot floating orange objects (orange is the international color of life jackets). In
response to this stimulus, the birds were conditioned to peck a key that buzzes the
pilot (Simmons, 1981). In a provocative form of operant conditioning, researchers
fitted five rats with electrodes and battery-powered backpacks and delivered
reinforcement in the form of mild electrical stimulation to a pleasure center in the
brain. In this way, they shaped the rats to climb up, and move forward, left, and right.
Some day, they speculated, we’ll be able to navigate remote-controlled rodents
through piles of rubble to search for and rescue disaster survivors (Talwar et al.,
2002).
Skinner’s daughter in the air crib he invented. Contrary to popular misconceptions,
he did not put her in a Skinner box to shape her behavior.
Sam Falk / Science Source
Skinner was eager to use operant conditioning in other ways as well, but his
efforts were sometimes misunderstood. In 1945, he constructed an “air crib” for his
infant daughter, Deborah. This crib, which he called a “baby tender,” was a
temperature-controlled enclosed space equipped with an air filter, sound-absorbing
walls, a stretched canvas floor, a safety glass window with a curtain, and a roll of
diapers. The goal was to place the infant in an environment that was comfortable,
safe, and stimulating. Skinner tried to market his new invention and wrote about it for
Ladies’ Home Journal in an article he titled “Baby Care Can Be Modernized.”
Unfortunately, the Journal editor changed the title to “Baby in a Box”—which led the
public to think that he was experimenting on his daughter the way he did with rats
and pigeons. Rumors later spread about his daughter’s mental health. For years,
many people believed that she had suffered a nervous breakdown and committed
suicide. In fact, she remained very much alive and was actually quite close to her
father (Bjork, 1997).
Over the years, Skinner advised caregivers to raise children with the use of
reinforcement rather than punishment. He also invented a “teaching machine” that
would enable students to learn at their own individualized pace by solving a graded
series of problems and receiving immediate feedback on their answers. Today,
computer-assisted instruction in schools is based on this early work (Benjamin,
1988). In fact, personal computers are being used just as Skinner had envisioned to
train students to type, play the piano, or practice their academic skills. Inspired by
Skinner, other behaviorists have applied the principles of operant conditioning to get
people to use safety belts, recycle wastes, conserve energy, or simply help
themselves (Lattal & Perone, 1998; Sigafoos et al., 2014).
The use of operant conditioning is now commonplace in the health clinic, the
workplace, the classroom, and other settings. For clinical purposes, it laid an
important foundation for the techniques of behavior modification, in which
reinforcement is used to change maladaptive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (refer
to Chapter 14). It also forms the basis for biofeedback—an operant procedure in
which electronic instruments are used to provide people with continuous information,
https://t.me/medicina_free
on the body and an instrument that amplifies the signals, people can monitor—and
then learn to regulate—their own heart rate, blood pressure, and muscular tension.
Biofeedback can thus be used in the treatment of migraine headaches, sports
injuries, chronic back pain, and other health problems (Blumenstein & Hung, 2016).
Operant conditioning has also been used extensively in the workplace. For
example, many companies toil over the best ways to motivate employees. In a study
conducted with 1,469 employees, Norberg (2017) compared employee motivation
across a variety of reward strategies using cash, points, and gift card rewards. In this
survey study, employees who received points and gift cards were more likely than
those who received cash to talk to others about their rewards and to use their
rewards (that is, the rewards were more rewarding). Interestingly, you may think that
cash would be rewarding, but many participants who received cash paid bills with the
money. While the flexibility of receiving cash can be rewarding, paying bills is not
necessarily something people like to do. As Norberg observed, “one might even
suggest that paying bills reduces negative emotions but does not necessarily
increase positive emotions.... [I]ndividuals who receive cash are far less likely to treat
themselves” (p. 384). The very nature of understanding rewards to motivate
employees highlights the value of operant conditioning in workplace settings.
Finally, operant conditioning is used regularly in the classroom. Skinner’s teaching
machine was one application, but there are others as well. For example, many
teachers establish large-scale reinforcement programs in which children earn gold
stars, ribbons, or “tokens” for engaging in desired behaviors—tokens that can be
exchanged for toys, extra recess time, and other privileges. Skinner (1988) himself
described how a sixth-grade teacher gave her students a card every time they
handed in an assignment. The students put their cards into a jar and, at the end of
the week, one card was drawn randomly, with the winner receiving a prize, like a
portable radio. The result was a dramatic improvement in the number of assignments
completed. Another use of operant techniques is the “flipped classroom.” In this
approach, the teacher serves as a moderator, organizing material for students to
complete and review ahead of class, and thus can use class time to identify student
progress and provide students with immediate feedback. Students are thus trained to
teach themselves and each other (Lin & Hwang, 2018).
Developments in Operant Conditioning
Believing that a science of behavior must restrict its focus to observable stimulusresponse relationships, Pavlov did not account for aspects of the organism that
influenced classical conditioning. In the realm of operant behavior, Skinner took the
same narrow view, leaving others to study the impact of inborn biological
predispositions and cognitive processes.
Biological Constraints
Behaviorists used to think that animals and humans alike could be trained to emit
any response that they were physically capable of making. However, it is now clear
that there are biological limits to what an animal can learn. In 1947, Keller and Marian
Breland, former students of Skinner, founded Animal Behavior Enterprises in Hot
Springs, Arkansas. The Brelands were in the business of training animals to do tricks
in county fairs, zoos, circuses, movies, and TV commercials. Indeed, they trained
thousands of animals belonging to 38 different species—including bears, whales,
chickens, pigs, goats, and reindeer.
Despite their professional successes, the Brelands had to concede that biological
predispositions often interfered with the shaping of a new behavior. At one point, for
example, they tried to train a raccoon to pick up a wooden coin and deposit it into a
piggy bank. But instead, the raccoon would clutch the coin or rub two coins together,
dip them into the container, pull them out, and rub them again—rather than make the
deposit that was reinforced with food. The Brelands also sought to train a pig in the
same routine, but after a while the pig would drop the coin, push it with its snout, toss
it in the air, and drop it again. What was the problem? In an article entitled “The
Misbehavior of Organisms,” Breland and Breland (1961) concluded that animals
revert to species-specific behavior patterns, a powerful tendency they called
instinctive drift. In the wild, raccoons manipulate food objects and dunk, or “wash,”
them, and pigs “root” for food in the ground—foraging instincts that inhibit the learning
of new operant responses.
https://t.me/medicina_free
Biological predispositions can lead to many fun behaviors, such as when a dog
catches a frisbee using its predisposition to fetch, particularly for hunting breeds.
iStock.com/Capuski
Biological predispositions may also constrain an animal’s ability to learn how to
escape from danger. For example, rats are easily conditioned to freeze, run from one
place to another, or attack another rat—if these responses are reinforced by the
termination of a painful electric shock. Yet they are slow to learn to escape by
pressing a lever, a response they easily learn to make for food and water. According
to Robert Bolles (1970), an animal’s innate defensive reactions compete with the
learning of a new escape response. All this serves to remind us that behavior is
guided not just by personal experience but also by an organism’s evolutionary past.
Like classical conditioning, in which some associations are learned more easily than
others, operant learning is limited by an organism’s own adaptive ways (Chance,
2013; Skora et al., 2021).
Cognitive Perspectives
Up to the day he died, Skinner (1990) steadfastly refused to speculate about
internal mental processes. Although this radical position still has its share of
proponents (Poling, Schlinger, Starin, & Blakely, 1990), most psychologists now
believe that it is important to understand internal cognitive processes—not only in
humans but in animals as well (Bekoff, Allen, & Burghardt, 2002; Vonk, 2016).
Latent Learning.
The first prominent theorist to adopt a cognitive position was Edward Tolman.
According to Tolman (1948), animals in their natural habitat learn more than just a
series of stimulus-and-response connections. They also acquire a cognitive map,
which is a mental spatial model of the layout—and they do so regardless of whether
their explorations are reinforced. Thus, when Tolman trained rats to run a maze but
then changed the starting place or blocked the most direct routes, the animals
behaved as if they were using a street map of their surroundings: They rerouted
themselves to take the best available detours (illustrated in Figure 5.10).
https://t.me/medicina_free
Description
Figure 5.10 Rats in a Maze: Evidence for a Cognitive Map Adapted from Tolman,
E.C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55, 189-208.
To examine whether spatial learning required that the rats be reinforced for their
exploratory behavior, Tolman and Honzik (1930) conducted a classic experiment.
Once a day for two weeks, they put three groups of rats into a complex maze and
measured their speed in reaching the goal box. One group was rewarded with food
and improved considerably over time. A second group was not rewarded and did not
improve much over time. From an operant standpoint, neither of these results is
surprising. The third group, however, was the key to this experiment. In this group,
the rats were not rewarded during the first 10 days, but they received food beginning
on the 11th. The result: They showed immediate and dramatic improvement. On the
11th day, before realizing that there was food in the goal box, they were just as slow
as the no-reward group. But on the 12th day, after one reinforcement, they were just
as fast as the group that had been rewarded all along (illustrated in Figure 5.11).
https://t.me/medicina_free
Description
Figure 5.11 Latent Learning Adapted from Tolman, E. C., & Honzik, C. H. (1930).
Introduction and removal of reward, and maze performance in rats. University of
California Publications in Psychology, 4, 257–275.
This result was significant because it demonstrated what Tolman called latent
learning, learning that lies dormant and is not exhibited in overt performance until
there is an incentive to do so. By making this distinction between “learning” and
“performance,” Tolman was able to demonstrate that animals learn from experience—
with or without reinforcement. More recent research provides additional support for
this phenomenon and is now being applied to or adapted for e-learning systems
(Capuano, Gaeta, Ritrovato, & Salerno, 2014).
latent learning. Learning that occurs but is not exhibited in performance until
there is an incentive to do so.
Locus of Control.
Strict behaviorists claim that people are controlled by objective reinforcement
contingencies. In contrast, a cognitive perspective holds that behavior is influenced
more by our subjective interpretations of reinforcement. To illustrate the point,
consider two incidents. The first was a demonstration by Skinner (1948), in which he
dropped food pellets into a pigeon’s cage on a random basis, leading the animal to
repeat whatever it happened to be doing at the time. Soon this “superstitious” pigeon
was busy turning, hopping on one leg, bowing, scraping, and raising its head. This
pigeon—like most humans, says Skinner—was under the illusion that it had control,
even though it did not. The second incident concerns a young psychotherapy patient
named Karl S. who was depressed because he felt incompetent to find a job, friends,
or a woman. E. Jerry Phares (1976), Karl’s therapist, tried to raise his expectancy for
success through a series of small achievements—applying for a job, striking up a
conversation with a woman, and so on. Karl succeeded in these efforts but remained
passive and pessimistic. The problem? He did not see the link between his actions
and successful outcomes. In contrast to the superstitious pigeon, Karl had control but
didn’t realize it. So he didn’t try.
https://t.me/medicina_free
Соседние файлы в папке Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана