Download Chapter 15 Learning Behaviorism Historical Perspective

Learning
Chapter 15
How the world creates who you
are: behaviorism and social
learning theory
• 2 stimuli—events, things, or people—repeatedly
experienced together will eventually come to elicit the
same response
– i.e. someone puffs air into your eye at the same time they ring a
bellbell ring makes blink
• Behaviors that are followed by pleasant outcomes tend
to be repeated, and behaviors followed by unpleasant
outcomes tend to be dropped
– i.e. hard work rewardedmay work harder and hard work
unappreciatedwhy bother?
• Learning
– the change of behavior as a function of experience
– 2 types
• Behaviorism
• Social learning theory
• Behaviorists try to show how people’s behavior is a
direct result of their environment—esp. the rewards and
punishments of the environment
Behaviorism
•
The best angle to understand a person is from
the outside
–
“we can only know that which we can see, and we
can see everything we need to know”
•
Your personality is a sum total of everything
you do. Nothing else
• 2 beliefs
1. All knowledge worth having can only come
from direct observation
–
Introspection is invalid b/c nobody else can verify it
2. The causes of behavior can be observed as
directly as behavior itself, b/c these causes
aren’t hidden in the mind, but can be seen in
the individual’s environment
Historical Perspective
• Locke’s tabula rasa
• Classical Conditioning
– Pavlov’s dogs
– Watson’s “Little Albert”
• Stimulus generalization
• Operant (aka
“instrumental”)
Conditioning
– Thorndike’s cats
• Shaping
– Skinner’s Walden II
• Schedules of
reinforcement
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Philosophical roots of behaviorism
1. Empiricism
•
•
•
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All knowledge comes from experience
Experience is the direct product of reality
itself
Rationalism believes the exact opposite that
the structure of the mind determines our
experience of reality
Tabula rasa or “blank slate”
•
•
The newborn’s mind is empty and ready to be
written on by experience (Locke)
Watson’s quote at bottom of p. 443
Philosophical roots of behaviorism
3. Hedonism and utilitarianism
•
•
Empiricism and associationism together
form the core of the behaviorist explanation
of personality
Hedonism
•
•
Philosophical roots of behaviorism
2. Associationism
•
Two things, or two ideas, or a thing and an
idea, become mentally associated into one if
they are repeatedly experienced close
together in time
•
•
i.e. thunder and lightning become associated in
the mind
The thought of one will conjure up the other, and
the way a person reacts to one will tend to
become the way they’ll react to the other
3 kinds of learning
1. Habituation
2. Classical conditioning
3. Operant conditioning
Why people behave at all—motivation
Utilitarianism
•
The best society is the social arrangement that
creates the most happiness for the largest
number of people
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Habituation
•
Diminishing of response due to repetition
•
•
•
i.e. jump every time someone rings a bell
behind you
Simplest way behavior changes as a
result of experience
A response almost as strong as the
original can be maintained, but only if the
stimulus is changed or increased with
every repetition (recovery)
Classical conditioning
• Learned helplessness
– Feeling of unpredictability due to the
experience of random reward or punishment,
independent of what one does that leads to
the belief that nothing ones does really
matters”why bother” syndrome
• S-R conception of personality
• Watson and Pavlov assumed that the essential
activity of life was to learn an array of responses to
specific environment stimuli and the individual’s
personality consists of their learned “S-R”
(stimulus-response) associations
Classical conditioning
• Pavlov’s dogs
– Bell elicited salivation most quickly and reliably if rung right
before feeding rather than simultaneously with feeding
• Associationism suggest that 2 things become combined
in the mind by being experienced together, but Pavlov
found that conditioning is more than simply pairing one
stimulus with another, but teaching the animal that one
stimulus (the bell) is a signal or the other (the food)
• Concepts become associated not just b/c they occur
close together in time and place, but b/c the meaning of
one concept has changed the meaning of another
– i.e. the bell used to be just a sound, but now it means “food is
coming”
Classical (Pavlovian) Conditioning
• Not just salivating dogs…
• Terminology
– US – unconditioned stimulus
• Stimulus that innately produces a response (does not require
learning: e.g. grilling food
– UR – unconditioned response (reflex)
• Behavior that is triggered by the US: e.g. salivation
• NS – neutral stimulus
– Doesn’t produce a response (e.g. light, tone)
• CS – conditioned stimulus
– Pairings of a NS with a US leads to the formation of
an association between the previously neutral
stimulus and the US
– NS becomes a CS and can produce a response on its
own (conditioned response)
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Classical conditioning: Pavlov’s dogs
US (food)
UR (salivation)
pair with
CS (tone)
Classical conditioning
US
UR
Meat
Salivate
US
Meat
CR (salivation)
Classical conditioning: Dog phobia
US (bitten
by dog)
UR (fear)
UR
+
Tone
Salivate
CS
CR
Tone
Salivate
pair with
CS (dog)
CR (fear)
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How to “cure” a dog phobia 1: Extinction
NOT BITTEN
How to “cure” a dog phobia 2:
Systematic desensitization
NO FEAR
Think of dog
FEAR!!!
So…..…
pair with
Relaxation
Response
DOG
NO FEAR
pair with
NO FEAR
DOG
NO FEAR
RN1
How to “cure” unhealthy behaviors, 1:
Aversion therapy for smoking
Smoke
Pleasure
So…..…
Put nauseating
substance on
tongue
NAUSEA
pair with
Smoke
cigarette
NAUSEA
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Slide 17
RN1
Which is US, CS, UR, and CR?
Ronald Noble, 10/3/2003
Operant conditioning
• Experimentation leads to things that work are
repeated and things that don’t are dropped
– i.e. a good cook experimenting
• The Law of Effect: Thorndike
– Put hungry cats into a “puzzle box”
– They could only escape by doing some specific,
simple act, such as pulling on a wire or pressing a bar
– Doing this would result in the box opening and the cat
would jump out to find some food nearby
– The cat would be put back into the box to try again
Techniques of operant conditioning: Skinner
•
Respondent conditioning
–
What is conditioned is a passive response that has no impact
of its own
•
•
–
The animal learns to operate on its world to change it to the
animal’s advantage
•
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A bar to press and a chute for delivering food pellets
Pigeon would be bumping around and eventually pushes the
bar resulting in a food pellet down the chute
The pigeon eats it and continues with what it’s doing
Eventually the pigeon catches on and hits the bar more often
resulting in persistent hitting of the bar
–
–
•
Operant conditioning
The animal learns to operate on its world to change it
to the animal’s advantage
1. Start some behaviors (usually reward or give praise)
2. Maintain some behaviors (usually reward or give
praise)
3. Prevent some behaviors (can still reward for
something incompatible with the undesired behavior)
Operant conditioning: punishment
•
–
•
Reinforcement
–
–
–
Operant conditioning
–
The animal learns to operate on its world to change it
to the animal’s advantage
1. Start some behaviors
2. Maintain some behaviors
3. Prevent some behaviors
•
Punishment
–
Increasing the frequency or probability of a behavior
by presenting or removing a stimulus following that
behavior
Positive reinforcement
–
•
–
i.e. press leverget food
i.e. press levershock ends
Decreasing the frequency or probability of a behavior
by presenting or removing a stimulus following that
behavior
An aversive consequence that follows an act in order
to stop it and prevent its repetition
•
Negative reinforcement
•
i.e. Thorndike’s cats who pushed the lever to open the cage to
escape
Skinner box used to work out the laws of operant
conditioning using rats and pigeons
–
–
Operant conditioning: reinforcement
i.e. Pavlov’s dog salivating
Operant conditioning
•
–
Used by parents, teachers, and bosses
Positive punishment
i.e. climb pole to birdfeeder = shock (squirrels)
Negative punishment
•
i.e. break rules = no cigarettes (prison inmates)
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Operant conditioning summary
• Reinforcement increases frequency of a
behavior
Positive
(something
added)
– Positive reinforcement = by adding something nice
– Negative reinforcement = by taking something nasty
away
• Don’t confuse negative reinforcement with
punishment
• Punishment decreases the frequency of a
behavior
– Positive punishment
– Negative punishment
Two-stage theory of phobias
• Phobias are acquired by classical
conditioning
– Some neutral US is paired with a CS that
produces fear
• Phobias are maintained by operant
conditioning
– Each time the phobic object is removed or
avoided negative reinforcement occurs
– Because the phobic object is always avoided,
the phobic never learns the object is harmless
Negative
(something
removed)
Reinforcement
(behavior increases)
Punishment
(behavior decreases)
Positive
Reinforcement (R+):
Something added
increases behavior
Positive
Punishment (P+):
Something added
decreases behavior
I.e. give star to child when
makes bed; treat dog for
sitting, praise
I.e. get ticket for speeding, boss
requiring redo of incorrectly
done projectdone correctly in
future
Negative
Reinforcement (R-):
Something removed
increases behavior
Negative
Punishment (P-):
Something removed
decreases behavior
I.e. baby stops crying when
mom feeds it, avoiding dog
reduces fear
I.e. child misbehaves and friend
can’t come over or TV taken
away
How to punish
1. Availability of alternatives
•
Alternative response must be available—can’t be punished and
should be rewarded
2. Behavioral and situational specificity
•
Be clear about exactly the behavior you’re punishing and the
circumstances under which it will/won’t be punished
•
Never punish for being “bad,” but for the behavior
3. Timing and consistency
•
To be most effective, needs to be applied immediately after the
behavior you want to prevent and every time it occurs
4. Conditioning secondary punishing stimuli
•
i.e. hissing spraying cat with water for clawing couchjust hissing
•
i.e. verbal warnings—”1, 2, 3…”
5. Avoiding mixed messages
•
Don’t cuddle after punishing—may lead to misbehaving for attention
•
Parents shouldn’t play off of each other with one punishing and the
other providing sympathy
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Dangers of punishment
1. Punishment arouses emotion
•
Unlikely to “learn a lesson” when under emotion
2. It is difficult to be consistent
3. It is difficult to gauge the severity of punishment
•
A slap or rebuke can be humiliating and cause more
psychological distress than realized
4. Punishment teaches about power
•
Those being punished may focus on getting big and
powerful to punish too
5. Punishment motivates concealment
•
Cuts off communication whereas an anticipation of
being rewarded for good work motivates to bring work
to the attention of the boss
Dollard and Miller’s SLT
• Habit hierarchy
– The behavior you are most likely to perform at a given moment is at the
top of your habit hierarchy
– Your least likely behavior is at the bottom
– The effect of rewards, punishments, and learning is to rearrange the
habit hierarchy
– If you are rewarded for a particular behavior, this behavior might
become more likely; if you’re punished for a certain behavior, it might
become less likely
• Motivation and drives
– Drive
• A state of psychological tension that feels good when it’s reduced
– Primary drives
• Food, water, physical comfort, avoidance of physical pain, sexual
gratification, etc.
– Secondary drives
• Love, prestige, money, and power
• Also negative drives such as avoidance of fear and humiliation
– There can be no reinforcement (and no behavior change) w/o some
kind of drive reduction, whether it’s primary or secondary
Social learning theory (SLT)
•
Important omissions of behaviorism
1. Ignores motivation, thought, and cognition
2. Classic behaviorism is based on animals
•
The hope is to be able to generalize general laws of
learning relevant to all species, but not focusing on what’s
unique to humans like problem solving
3. Ignores the social dimension of learning
•
•
Rat in Skinner box is there alone and can’t interact with,
learn from, or influence any other animal
Humans learn by watching others
4. Treats the organism as passive
•
•
They’re put there
Humans choose what environments to enter and these
environments change as a result of what we do in them
Dollard and Miller’s SLT (cont.)
• Frustration and aggression
– Frustration-aggression hypothesis
• The natural, biological reaction of any person to being blocked from a goal,
or frustrated, will be an urge to lash out and injure
• The more important the blocked goal, the greater the frustration, and the
greater the aggressive impulse
• The preferred target will be the source of the frustration or the aggressive
impulse can be displaced elsewhere
• Psychological conflict
– Conflict between desire and fear and how it can change over time
– Approach-avoidance conflict
• 5 key assumptions
1. An increase in drive strength will increase the tendency to approach or avoid a
goal
2. Whenever there are 2 competing responses, the stronger one (one w/ greater
drive strength behind it) will sin out
3. The tendency to approach a positive goal increases the closer one is to the goal
4. The tendency to avoid a negative goal also increases the closer one is to the goal
5. Most important, tendency 4 is stronger than tendency 3
– The tendency to avoid a negative goal becomes stronger, w/ nearness/ than
does the tendency to approach a positive goal
• For a reward to be rewarding and have the power to make the behavior it
rewards more likely, the reward must satisfy a need
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Rotter’s SLT
•
Expectancy value theory (like SFP)
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Expectancy and locus of control
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–
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Behavioral decisions are determined not just by the presence or size of
reinforcements, but also by beliefs about what the results of behavior are likely
to be
Even if a reinforcement is very attractive, you’re not likely to pursue it if your
chances of success seem slim
Even something that isn’t particularly desirable might motivate behavior, if the
chances of getting it are good enough
An individual’s expectancy for a behavior is their belief, or subjective probability,
about how likely they think the behavior is to attain its goal
What are the chances?
The expectancy is your belief about the odds that an action will pay off
This belief could be right or wrong
It doesn’t matter whether something is actually likely to succeed or not; if you
think it will, you’ll try
It doesn’t matter whether something will actually succeed if you only try, if you
think it won’t work, you won’t even try
2 kinds of expectancies
1. Specific
2. General (locus of control)
–
–
Bandura’s SLT
• Less emphasis on stable differences between people as
w/ Rotter, but rather on the social nature of learning and
the way people interact with the situations in their lives
• Efficacy expectations
– Belief that one can accomplish something successfully
• How one interprets reality matters more than reality itself
– Rotter’s expectancy is the perceived conditional probability
that if you do something, you’ll attain your goal
– Bandura’s efficacy is the perceived nonconditional probability
that you can do something in the first place
• Observational learning (vicarious)
– Learning a behavior by seeing someone else do it
– “Bobo doll” studies
• A child who watches an adult hit the doll is likely to later hit the doll
themselves, especially if they see the adult rewarded for the
aggressive behavior
– modeling
Internal locus of control are those w/ high generalized expectancies that think that what
they do can affect what happens to them
External locus of control are those w/ low generalized expectancies that think what
they do won’t make much difference
Bandura’s SLT (cont.)
• Reciprocal determinism and the self
– An analysis of how people can shape their
own environments
1.You aren’t just placed in the environments in
your life like a rat placed in a Skinner box—
many times you choose the environments that
influence you
2.The social situations in your life are changed,
at least a little because you are there
3.A self system develops that has its own
effects on behavior, independent of the
environment
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Bandura’s Triadic Model of
Reciprocal Determinism
Overt
Behavior
Environmental
Influences
Personal Factors
(beliefs, expectations,
self-perceptions)
Contributions to the learning approaches
1. Conducted admirable programs of
research that came close to achieving
the dream of establishing psych as an
objective science among other sciences
2. Recognize how what people do depends
on the environment and the specific
situation that they’re in at the time
3. The development of a technology of
behavior change
Limitations of the learning approaches
1. It’s not clear that the effects of behavioral
therapies for phobias, addictions, and
other problems are always generalizable
and long-lasting
2. They’re too simple and underappreciate
that people think
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