Operant Conditioning and the Skinner Box

Operant-conditioning is a procedure by which a change in the consequences of a response will affect the rate at which the response occurs, according to Skinner. Skinner’s operant-conditioning apparatus is also known as the Skinner box. When a food-deprived rat is placed in the box, its behavior at first is spontaneous and random. The rat is active, sniffing, poking, and exploring its environment. These behaviors are emitted, not elicited; in other words, the rat is not responding to any specific stimulus in its environment.

At some time during this activity, the rat will depress a lever or bar located on one wall of the Skinner box, causing a food pellet to drop into a trough. The rat’s behavior (pressing the lever) has operated on the environment and, as a result, has changed it. How? The environment now includes a food pellet. The food is a reinforcer for the behavior of depressing the bar. The rat begins to press the bar more often. What happens? It receives more food—more reinforcement—and so presses the bar even more frequently. The rat’s behavior is now under the control of the reinforcers. Its actions in the box are less random and spontaneous because it is spending most of its time pressing the bar, and eating.

If we put the rat back in the box the next day, we can predict its behavior and we can control its bar-pressing actions by presenting or withholding the reinforcers or by presenting them at a different rate. Withholding the food extinguishes operant behavior in the same way that it extinguishes respondent behavior. If the unreinforced behavior no longer works, in that it no longer brings a reward, after a while it will stop. Thus, the person who controls the reinforcers controls the research participants’ behavior.

Skinner believed that most human and animal behavior is learned through operant conditioning. For example, an infant initially displays random, spontaneous behaviors, only some of which are reinforced (rewarded with food or hugs or toys, for example) by parents, siblings, or caregivers. As the infant grows, the positively reinforced behaviors, those of which the parents approve, will persist, whereas those of which the parents disapprove will be extinguished or discontinued. The concept is the same with the rat in the Skinner box. To Skinner, personality is a pattern or collection of operant behaviors.