behaviorism

Examples of behaviorism in the following topics:

• Behavior Modification

  • Behavior modification strategies (positive and negative) decrease unwanted behavior and help employees to show suitable workplace behavior.
  • Behavior modification strategies are systematic antecedents and consequences to change the undesired behavior.
  • Two related terms are behavior therapy and applied behavior analysis.
  • Since techniques derived from behavioral psychology tend to be the most effective in altering behavior, most practitioners consider behavior modification along with behavior therapy and applied behavior analysis to be founded in behaviorism.
  • While behavior modification encompasses applied behavior analysis and typically uses interventions based on the same behavioral principles, many behavior modifiers who are not applied behavior analysts tend to use packages of interventions and do not conduct functional assessments before intervening.

• 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.