behavior

Examples of behavior in the following topics:

• Employee Role in Preventing and Addressing Unethical Behavior

• Classical Conditioning in Behavioral Therapy

• Operant Conditioning in Behavioral Therapy

• Behavioral Therapies

• Consumer Behavior and Advertising

• Introduction to Animal Behavior

  • Behavior is the change in activity of an organism in response to a stimulus.
  • Behavioral biology is the study of the biological and evolutionary bases for such changes.
  • One goal of behavioral biology is to distinguish the innate behaviors, which have a strong genetic component and are largely independent of environmental influences, from the learned behaviors, which result from environmental conditioning.
  • Innate behavior, or instinct, is important because there is no risk of an incorrect behavior being learned.
  • These behaviors are “hard wired” into the system.

• Shaping

  • Instead of rewarding only the target, or desired, behavior, the process of shaping involves the reinforcement of successive approximations of the target behavior.
  • The method requires that the subject perform behaviors that at first merely resemble the target behavior; through reinforcement, these behaviors are gradually changed, or shaped, to encourage the performance of the target behavior itself.
  • Then, the trainer rewards a behavior that is one step closer, or one successive approximation nearer, to the target behavior.
  • As the subject moves through each behavior trial, rewards for old, less approximate behaviors are discontinued in order to encourage progress toward the desired behavior.
  • In this way, shaping uses operant-conditioning principles to train a subject by rewarding proper behavior and discouraging improper behavior.

• Instructional Scenarios

  • Here are some scenarios that portray educational applications of behaviorism: Scenarios for Using Behaviorism (http://epltt.coe.uga.edu/index.php?
  • title=Scenarios_for_Using_Behaviorism)

• Classroom Importance

  • They change behaviors to satisfy the desires they have learned to value.
  • They generally avoid behaviors they associate with unpleasantness and develop habitual behaviors from those that are repeated often (Parkay & Hass, 2000).
  • The entire rationale of behavior modification is that most behavior is learned.
  • If behaviors can be learned, then they can also be unlearned or relearned.
  • Consistently ignoring an undesirable behavior will go far toward eliminating it.

• Introduction

  • Collective behavior, a third form of action, takes place when norms are absent or unclear, or when they contradict each other.
  • Scholars have devoted far less attention to collective behavior than they have to either conformity or deviance.
  • These diverse actions fall within the area sociologists call collective behavior.
  • 1) collective behavior involves limited and short-lived social interaction while groups tend to remain together longer
  • While there is a degree of debate over what should be included under the label of "collective behavior" among sociologists today, often included are additional behaviors like: rumors, riots, trends, and fads.