For this assignment, students choose a behavior that they want to change in their personal
lives. During a two-week period, they then alter the circumstances that prompt the behavior and
change the reinforcements that follow the behavior. The behavior students are encouraged to try is living in a way that produces zero garbage (compost, recycling, and reuse are allowed).
Most students enjoy the challenge, and this project consistently has a strong personal impact.
Students are instructed to carry out the following steps:
Step 1: Examine your daily habits and consider their impact.
Step 2: Choose a specific behavior goal.
Step 3: Define the actions that fulfill your goal.
Step 4: Before making any changes, keep track of conditions that relate to your goal. Observe
behavior for two days and write down how often goal and non-goal behaviors occur, and
under what circumstances.
Step 5: Analyze the conditions leading to non-goal behavior and think about how these
conditions could be changed. Also analyze what happens after non-goal behavior, and think
about how non-goal behavior is reinforced.
Step 6: Outline a plan of how you will change circumstances and reinforcement in order to
successfully change your behavior.
Step 7: Tell someone about the project, and make a written public commitment to your goal.
Step 8: For the next two weeks, regularly record your experiences in making the desired
change.
Final Step: Turn in a summary of your experience (around 10 pages). Provide a written
analysis(it can be in the form of a handy booklet, PPT etc that must include your pictures
that reflect the personal changes)
1.3. Explain any one of the following proverbs with reference to the current pandemic that has
affected every single individual in the country. You should be creative with the expression and
can present the same through PPT's, Cartoon strips etc.
a)Necessity is the mother of invention
b)Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today
c)Let bygone be bygone.
Answers
Answer:
classical conditioning the organism learns to associate new stimuli with natural biological responses such as salivation or fear. The organism does not learn something new but rather begins to perform an existing behaviour in the presence of a new signal. Operant conditioning, on the other hand, is learning that occurs based on the consequences of behaviour and can involve the learning of new actions. Operant conditioning occurs when a dog rolls over on command because it has been praised for doing so in the past, when a schoolroom bully threatens his classmates because doing so allows him to get his way, and when a child gets good grades because her parents threaten to punish her if she doesn’t. In operant conditioning the organism learns from the consequences of its own actions.
How Reinforcement and Punishment Influence Behaviour: The Research of Thorndike and Skinner
Psychologist Edward L. Thorndike (1874-1949) was the first scientist to systematically study operant conditioning. In his research Thorndike (1898) observed cats who had been placed in a “puzzle box” from which they tried to escape (“Video Clip: Thorndike’s Puzzle Box”). At first the cats scratched, bit, and swatted haphazardly, without any idea of how to get out. But eventually, and accidentally, they pressed the lever that opened the door and exited to their prize, a scrap of fish. The next time the cat was constrained within the box, it attempted fewer of the ineffective responses before carrying out the successful escape, and after several trials the cat learned to almost immediately make the correct response.
punishment, and he developed terms that explained the processes of operant learning (Table 8.1, “How Positive and Negative to their prize, a scrap of fish. The next time the cat was constrained within the box, it attempted fewer of the ineffective responses before carrying out the successful escape, and after several trials the cat learned to almost immediately make the correct response.
8