Reinforcement — Enhancing Desirable Behavior
The word reinforce means to provide some support to strengthen something. Reinforcement means trying and strengthening the behavior desired by you
In terms of psychological learning, reinforcement means applying a situation that will strengthen the behavior of a person from whom we expect the desired behavior to be showcased. Reinforcement is of two types: Positive and Negative.
Positive Reinforcement: It helps one to nourish and amplify behavior with the use of positive reinforcers. Positive reinforcers are further divided into primary reinforcers and secondary reinforcers. The primary reinforcers help one to fulfill basic biological requirements like food. But it can also be the case that primary reinforcers might not be effective all the time. The behaviors of people around us are most of the time the result of secondary reinforcers such as higher pay, owning status symbol goods (refer my another article ‘What is the demand for the goods you use every day?’, to know about status symbol), achievements such as awards, etc. These types of reinforcers are positive ones and are generalized under conditioned reinforcers.
The behavior delivered by a person is in a way where the secondary reinforcer is associated with the primary reinforcer. Here, to understand this we can cite the example of the Classical Conditioning Theory of Ivan Pavlov, where he uses a ringing bell and meat to grab the dog’s attention. In this case, meat is the primary reinforcer and the ringing of the bell becomes the secondary reinforcer.
Positive reinforcers give varied results in different situations. Simply put, the behavior of organisms varies in different situations even if the reinforcers are the same. For example, a student who loves to drink orangeade might not be interested to have the same on the morning of his exam day. Also, a stimulus that had worked as a positive reinforcer on one organism might not give off the same result or might not work on another person given the same situation.
Negative Reinforcement: In this, something uncomfortable is withdrawn when the desired behavior occurs because of that something uncomfortable. Here, one important point to note is that negative reinforcement is not punishment and it is not the opposite of positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcers discard the negative stimulus and does not reinforce negative behavior. For example, a mother might allow her child to play video games if he agrees to perform well in learning in school. Or another example can be removing strict deadlines if the employee is performing well with his projects.
In one of his experiments of Operant Conditioning, B.F. Skinner placed a rat in a box, he made the box as such that it had some uncomfortable electric current. When the rat moved around in the box it hit the lever which stopped the flow of current. After doing so repeatedly, the rat becomes smart enough to comprehend that pressing the lever will stop the electric current. Here the electric current acts as a negative reinforcer.
In the first part of his experiment, Skinner also talks about positive reinforcement where food drops whenever the rat presses the lever and replaced it with an electric current for explaining negative reinforcement.
Conclusion —
Reinforcement increases the prospects of behavior that people around us desire. The use of various reinforcers motivates people to do the job and provides the result and desired behavior. Both positive and negative reinforcement helps to build the behavior. Positive reinforcement makes use of reinforcers that are pleasant and nourishes the behavior by providing a desirable and favorable situation. On the other hand, negative reinforcement makes use of reinforcers that might not be pleasant and consequences can be undesirable.
