Operant Conditioning in Daily Lives

Operant Conditioning in Daily Lives

First time I got in touch with the word ‘ Psychology’ was watching a television show where psychology is used in understanding the mind of offenders to solve a case. I haven’t thought that psychology could be applied in our daily lives as well until I attend the psychology lecture recently.

According to McLeod (2007), operant conditioning is providing reinforcement or punishment after the desired or undesired response to alter the behavior. With the use of reinforcement, parents can easily teach their kids to perform well. For example, I am a lazy guy in the past. Atteracting me to do housework, my mum started to give me some pocket money when I helped her doing housework. In this situation, positive reinforcement is applied. The pocket money is the positive secondary reinforcer pushing me to strengthen my behavior of doing housework. I will repeat the behavior of doing housework more often in order to gain pocket money even my mum sometimes didn’t give me any pocket money. Apart from positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement can also be applied in daily lives as well. Recently, I am being a private english tutor of a primary student, Tom. He performs poorly in the homework given by me. In order to attract him perform better, I set a rule that each time he gets 90% correct or performs well in his homework, he can be exempted from copying the vocabularies once. Then his homework becomes significantly better. In this case, copying the vocabularies is the negative secondary reinforcer. Tom strengthens his behavior of working hard on homework so as to avoid copying the vocabularies which is unpleasant for him.

On the other hand, punishment is another method changing one’s behavior. Law is the best example of the postive punishment. Once someone breaks the law like pilfering and injuring others, they will get jailed and have to impose a fine. They may be scolded by their friends or family members. Those penalties, acting as the positive