Answered You can hire a professional tutor to get the answer.
Need an research paper on burrhus frederic skinner in apa style. Needs to be 4 pages. Please no plagiarism.
Need an research paper on burrhus frederic skinner in apa style. Needs to be 4 pages. Please no plagiarism. It should be noted that "his work has influenced how information is organized and presented in textbooks for elementary school through college, as well as how many computer tutorial programs are written" (Major Behavioral Psychology Theories n.d.).
B. F. Skinner's main contribution to the field of behavioural psychology is his pioneering work on understanding behaviour as a function of environmental histories of reinforcing consequences. He has capitalized on E. L. Thorndike's theory which posits learning as a function of behaviour and consequences. BF Skinner has been widely regarded for his discovery of operant conditioning or the "use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behaviour" (Operant Conditioning 2007). He believes that the development of our individual personality is largely due to how to respond to the external situations around us. As stated above, this finding has become one of the basic assumptions held in the field of behavioural psychology, that is, a behaviour is created through reinforcement and punishment.
The contributions of Skinner to psychology can be created through his invention of the operant conditioning chamber which he uses to measure the organism's responses and their interaction with the environment. His study focused mainly on how rats are conditioned in order to come up with the desired behaviour.
According to B. F. Skinner, there are four types of operant conditioning namely, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, and extinction. Through positive reinforcement, a particular behaviour is strengthened by the consequence of experiencing a positive condition. In negative reinforcement, a particular behaviour is strengthened by the consequence of stopping or avoiding a negative condition. On the other hand, punishment occurs when a behaviour is followed by an aversive stimulus. Lastly, extinction refers to the weakening of an established behaviour because of the lack of positive or negative reinforcement (Operant Conditioning Basics 2007).
Through these responses of other people around an individual, he is able to establish a unique personality. It becomes notable that Skinner equates personality with behaviour and "behaviour is determined by principles of operant conditioning which focuses on the relationship of behaviour to the environment" (Walsh n.d.). This, of course, is void of the individual's thoughts, emotions, and even freedom of choice. For Skinner, mental processes and structures play no important role in finding the link between behaviour and the external environment. Also, freedom of choice is non-existent. stressing that it is solely the environmental stimuli which determine the behaviour of an individual. Thus, B. F. Skinner strongly asserts that "the consistency observed in the behaviour of individuals is the result of the development of stable response tendencies (Walsh n.d.)." He also recognized that these tendencies may change over time as environmental stimuli changes but they are stable enough to instil consistency in an individual. . .
