Operant Conditioning
B.F. Skinner (1938) developed operant conditioning in order to examine what effect consequences had on behavior.
B.F. Skinner (1938) developed operant conditioning in order to examine what effect consequences had on behavior. Operant Conditioning examines the stimulus, the response to the stimulus (a behavior) and the behavior’s consequence.
In 1938 B.F. Skinner published his Behavior of Organisms and in so doing established himself as one of the leading behaviorists in the United States. Skinner called Pavlovian Conditioning Respondent conditioning since it was concerned with respondent behavior -- that is, behavior that is elicited by a preceding stimulus. Skinner's Operant Conditioning attempts to account for most of human learning and behavior. Operant behavior is behavior in which the individual "operates" on the environment and then consequences follow.
According to Skinner, the positive events or stimuli increase the probability of a recurrence of the behavior that preceded it. If your behavior is followed by a positive consequence, you are more likely to repeat the act in the future; if it is followed by a negative consequence, you are less likely to repeat it. This observation underlies the mechanism of Operant Conditioning Kosslyn and Rosenberg, 2003).