This course will highlight the most interesting experiments within the field of psychology, discussing the implications of those studies for our understanding of the human mind and human behavior. We will explore the brain and some of the cognitive abilities it supports like memory, learning, attention, perception and consciousness. We will examine human development - both in terms of growing up and growing old - and will discuss the manner in which the behavior of others affect our own thoughts and behavior. Finally we will discuss various forms of mental illness and the treatments that are used to help those who suffer from them. The fact of the matter is that humans routinely do amazing things without appreciating how interesting they are. However, we are also routinely influenced by people and events without always being aware of those influences. By the end of this course you will have gained a much better understanding and appreciation of who you are and how you work. And I can guarantee you that you'll learn things that you'll be telling your friends and family about, things that will fundamentally change the way you think of yourself and others. How can you resist that?!
Lecture 4 - Learning by Consequence (17:32 min)
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来自 University of Toronto 的课程
Introduction to Psychology
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从本节课中
Learning
This section is all about learning and behaviourism. When you're done the videos you'll be able to name and describe the topic of learning and behaviour in contexts such as flirting and gambling!
与讲师见面
Steve JoordensProfessor
Department of Psychology
Alright so back to behaviorism but I want to introduce a new wrinkle, a new
paradigm really that came into play that really expanded the reach of behaviorism
and really showed people how applicable it was to every day life.
So let's go there. All right, week four, lecture four called
learning by consequence. Because as you'll see this new kind of
behaviorism something called operant conditioning has everything to do about
the consequences of behavior and how they ultimately evolve behaviors.
shape how you choose to behave in a given situation.
Operant condition was really pioneered by B.F.
Skinner. Skinner's known for all sorts of things.
He created a bunch of cool little apparatus, that things like Skinner box
as we now call it or the operant conditioning chamber.
but he was really the driving force behind this new approach of, of operant
conditioning. One thing I want you to note is this
isn't that long ago anymore. We're talking, you know mid 1900s when
Skinner was really reigning supreme, sort of 50s through the 70s not long ago at
all. What skinner emphasized was what he
called the three term contingency. Let me take you a little bit slowly
through this, it'll make sense in just a couple minutes but the basic idea is
this. We find ourselves in some situation and
we choose to behave a certain way and then things happen as a result.
And ultimatley the notion was that our mind, not consciously but our mind kind
of put things together and figured out relationships between what we're going to
call discriminative stimulus, a response and the result, the consequence, which
we're going to call the reinforcing stimulus.
So let me just jump right to an example to, to make this concrete.
and it's an example related to the first dog I had, Max.
So we brought Max into our home. And at that point Max knew nothing about
us, knew nothing about our home. and so as she became, it's Maxine by the
way, as she became more comfortable with the home, she would experiment with
things, she would try things. And so, let's say we brought her into our
living room and she would jump up on the sofa.
Now sometimes when she jumped up on the sofa, she got kicked off the sofa and
yelled at and told, no, no, don't do that.
Other times she'd jump up on the sofa and she'd get to just lay there and be
comfortable. And so the notion is very early on she's
trying to figure out. Why am I sometimes being punished and why
am I sometimes not being punished? So she's kind of paying attention to the
scene. Again, none of this need be conscious.
I'm not suggesting she's doing any deep thought processes.
But that her brain is making these connections.
And at some point her brain might realize that there's a critical stimulus that's
determining what happens. And in my household that critical
stimulus was my father because my father was the one who set the rules on the
dog's behavior. I didn't do that, I just took the dogs
for a walk and picked up the dog crap laying around the lawn.
He set the rules and so the way things were actually working is that if dad was
present when Max hopped on the sofa, sorry.
That's the bottom one. If Dad was present when Max hopped on the
sofa, then she got kicked off and punished.
But if he wasn't present and she hopped on the sofa, she got comfort and warmth.
So the kind of reinforcement, the kind of consequence associated with this
behavior, dependent on dad's presence or absence.
So in this example, dad is the discriminative stimulus.
And what we mean by discriminative is the presence or absence of dad's signals what
the reward is likely to be. The reward or punishment.
Okay. So Skinner thought this was a model of
how all of our behaviors evolve. That we go into new situations, that we
behave randomly. Sometimes good things happen, sometimes
bad things happen. Over time and over experience we kind of
learn what's predicting a good thing and what's predicting a bad thing.
And ultimately it's that that controls our behavior.
We just walk into our situation and depending on the discriminative stimuli
we will behave in a way that tends to give us good outcomes.
So eventually Max, for example, if she walked into the room and Dad was present,
she would not hop on the sofa. Because she does not like this.
She would only hop on the sofa when Dad was not present then she would be
rewarded, okay. Again, not conscious, just a, a
behavioral tendency that she would develop.
Now, so it's all about the consequences to some extent.
And Skinner made a big deal about talking about kind of splitting the potential
consequences into ultimately four kinds. The kind that made a behavior more likely
to reoccur, so he called those reinforcements and the kind that made it
less likely to occur. Punishment.
and each of these can take one of two forms.
to some extent the distinction's not critical although I am going to highlight
the importance of this in the next slide so let me just very quickly give you the
following. If you're in some situation and you
behave a certain way, there's two ways of something good happening.
One way is through the actual addition of something good.
So let's say you see someone you're attracted to and you decide I'm going to
go talk to them. And after you, as you start talking to
them, they smile, they seem happy, you're world just got a little better, something
good was introduced. Well, that's cool.
That reinforced your behavior and you're more likely when you're in that situation
again to repeat that. If you see somebody else you'd like to
talk to, you're more likely to do it now because of this positive experience.
but there's another way you could have a positive experience.
Let, let's say your mom was really frantic.
She had too many things to do and you tell her, "you know what mom, I'll go get
the groceries for you because I can see you're really stressed out, so I'll go
get the groceries. and you do that for her and when you
bring them back, she says, you know, "honey that we such a nice thing for you
to do and it really helped me out". "So as a reward, you do not have to do
the dishes for the rest of the week." Okay, so notice the subtle distinction.
She's not adding something positive to your world.
She's removing something negative, your chores.
But either way, it's a good thing, right? And so any time a behavior is followed by
a good thing then it's more likely to increase.
Similarly any time a behavior is or conversely I should say, anytime a
behavior is followed by a bad thing its less likely to repeat and there's two bad
things. So one is the actual addition of a bad
thing. You go up to your father and say, give me
the car keys. He goes slap, [LAUGH] that's a direct
addition of a negative stimulus. You're not likely to go give your dad
that attitude again, okay? But another way is if you went and said,
give me the car keys. And he said, not only am I going to not
give you the car keys now but you will not get to drive the car again for a
month. Okay.
Again, he didn't slack you, he didn't add a negative stimulus to your rent, he
subtracted a positive one, your access to the car.
Okay? Now, in psychology terms, these first two
are called positive and negative reinforcement like something added or
subtracted that reinforces the likelihood.
These two are called punishment versus response cost.
Kind of a hard lingo to follow. but this distinction is sometime between
punishment and response cost is sometimes seen as really important.
and it's often highlighted in terms of, how best to raise children.
So, in the spirit of trying to give you some useful life advice from this course.
Let's go there. and let me give you an example.
Let's say we have little Micky here and little Micky has developed a bad habit
and let's talk about how the habit even developed in the first place.
You have friends over every now and then and let's say once, just by chance, you
had friends over and little Micky ran out naked.
Yoohoo I'm naked, I'm naked! And what did all your friends do?
They laughed they smiled, they giggled, they thought it was really cute and they
rewarded him basically. And so Mickey liked that and so next time
your friends are over. Woohoo I'm naked!
And this is happening over and over again.
And at some point, you're saying, okay. This isn't funny anymore.
This is, I, I do not want him to be a 15 year old kid.
Woo hoo, look at me, I'm naked. we have to put an end to this.
And so we want to somehow reduce that behavior.
Well, two ways of doing it, in my, sort of, best formula.
depending on his behavior. So, one way is to positively reinforce
the behavior you want. So, let's say you have friends over some
time. And Mickey comes out with clothes on or
at least a diaper and a hat. He comes out this way.
well then you could positively, way to go Micky, nice to come out with clothes on.
Good boy, I'm going to give you a nice healthy grape to reward you.
yeah. That's one thing.
So, now you're rewarding an opposite behavior.
You're rewarding non-nakedness. Okay, which is going to make
non-nakedness more likely and therefore make nakedness less likely.
but what if he comes out naked. Okay, now here's the distinction that a
lot of psychologists would make. Yes you could yell at him, scream at him,
hit him, tell him he's bad but if you do any of those punishment, adding something
negative kinds of punishment. You're kind of eroding the relationship
you have with that child. You're making that child feel less loved
and we all want our children to feel loved.
So they say instead of adding something negative it's much smarter to use the
response cost technique. So you would use it, you know, this, this
would be the best way to use it, to say "you know Mickey, I love you very much
you're my beautiful child but while I love you a lot I do not like this running
around naked behavior at all. and so I'm going to punish that
behavior". I'm not punishing you but I'm punishing
the behavior. "So whenever you show that behavior, you
no longer get to watch your favorite shows".
So, you know, Little Einstein, Sesame Street, whatever it is little Mickey
watches, today you're going to have to watch CNN or something like that.
Something little Mickey does not like. And you say hey as soon as you start
behaving right, you, you get your good TV shows back again.
but if you behave wrong you're going to lose that privilege.
So the subtle distinction being made here, is when you take away something
positive, it's, it's less scarring. physically or psychologically.
You're not really hurting the child by removing something positive.
And in fact, you can remove something positive and still give love at the same
time. You can say I love you.
You're a good boy who's doing this bad thing.
And it's that bad thing that we have to get rid of.
But the good boy is fantastic. So you can simultaneously give love and
yet penalize the behavior. and, and especially if you do that while
positively reinforcing when he's right. So the first time he comes in with
clothes on, you give him a lot of positive reinforcement.
This is considered the best way to shape the child's behavior while keeping the
really good, loving relationship. All right?
Cool. Now I want to end this section with a
really interesting point about Skinner. Skinner ultimately believed that all
there was to behavior was your reward history.
So if he saw me in a certain situation and you asked him what do you think Steve
would do in that situation? He would say well all i have to know to
know that is I have to know about when Steve was in this situation or ones like
this in the past. How did he behave and then what happened
after he behaved in these situations? How often was he rewarded or punished for
given behaviors? You tell me the behavior where he was
mostly rewarded and very seldom punished. That's probably the behavior that he will
emit. He won't think about this.
It's, it's a naturally occurring connection between these discriminative
stimuli, the ones that kind of cue him to what the rewards, contingency will be.
And the behaviors and the consequences that occurred in the past, but if I knew
all that, I could tell you with certainty how we would behave.
And so ultimately, Skinner was saying we don't have any conscious choice over our
behavior. Our behaviors are determined by our
previous reward history. Which is kind of odd because we all feel
like we control our behavior. We feel like we choose how to behave.
But when Skinner was asked about that he said, yeah oh yeah, I agree.
We all feel like that, that conscious experience is there and it's real but
that notion that it's controlling your behavior is wrong.
In fact, he argued, consciousness is an epiphenomenon.
What is an epiphenomenon? Well, here's the best example I've heard.
If you take a motor engine like this one and you turn it on and it starts running,
what naturally happens is a magnetic field develops around the engine as it
runs. So its all around here a magnetic field
develops. If you had something that could measure
magnetic fields you would detect it. Its there.
It exists but it exists as a consequence of this machinery and it doesn't alter
the working of the machinery in any way it just emerges from the machinery.
Skinner thought our conscious experiences were like that.
That our brain was really doing everything and making the decisions and
determining our behavior and our conscious experience was just like that
magnetic field, something that emerges around the machinery.
But doesn't actually play any causal role.
It's not actually doing anything. It's just there.
which is a very provocative idea. You know, a very and, and really humbling
idea if it's true. Because we all feel like we are the
authors of our own lives. you know, Skinner said things like this.
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it, I never made
decisions. Things always came up and made them for
me. That's what life is.
So, to his death, Skinner believed that this was true.
That our notion of conscious control was just an illusion.
that consciousness was just an epiphenomenon and that all of our
behaviors evolved over our lifespan as a function of how we were rewarded, and how
we were punished. Very extreme view.
Skinner was a very extreme character. If you'd like to know a little more about
Skinner, well here's something. So here's a formal video on operant
conditioning you can check out. And Skinner will be featured well in this
one. this is from the, the comedy TV show, The
Big Bang Theory. it's a funny little episode where, where
they're using operant conditioning. so just.
A little humor sometimes helps you learn a bit.
and here's another whole video that's more specifically Skinner speaking about
consciousness. That's epiphenomenon idea.
So, check that out, and hear it from him himself.
operant conditioning itself most definitely works.
In fact it's used in the training of animals all the time.
When you go to Seaworld and things like that and you see animals do amazing
things. Why do they do it?
Well, because we give them a fish afterwards or we do something like that.
So operative conditioning is the basis of most animal training programs.
It's used to shape their behavior. So check that out if you want a little
bit more, information about that. And then finally there's a TedEd talk
that's all about classical and operant conditioning.
kind of brings the two together. So I thought this would be a good place
for you to, to check that out. kind of solidify your knowledge so far.
Alright, now you guys are becoming behaviorists.
Experts on behaviorism. Fantastic.
[LAUGH] A great little journey we're on together.
hopefully I'll see you in the next step of the journey, until then, have a great
life.
