Jessi Honeycutt

Conditioning while eating out

Operant conditioning is a type of learning where the emitted response is followed
by a consequence, either positive or negative. This learning is very common with
children, as parents will reward or condemn behaviors with either a reinforcer or
punisher. Lunch hour is a good example of this. I went to Article Circle at 1:30 on a
Saturday. Article Circle is a fast food restaurant that is most popular for their ice cream.
The restaurant that I was observing had a small dining area at the front and a play area
in the back. The play area had a number of interactive toys including a basic slide. The
operant conditioning was soon to take place.
The three principles of operant conditioning that I best observed were that of
positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment; and it wasnt always
the children who were doing the learning, sometimes they were in fact conditioning their
parents. Positive Reinforcement is used to increase a desired behavior and the
response is followed by a favorable consequence. Picture a typical American family. A
Mother and Father with 3 children, two younger boys (ages 3-7) and an older girl
(around 10) all Caucasian. At 1: 30 on a Saturday, the family has already been to a
soccer game and perhaps other activities that morning, and is ready for some grub. The
father takes the kids to the play area while the mother orders the food. The kids readily
come to the table when their mother arrives, but are less inclined to stay at the table.
And so the father uses the classical reinforcer, If you eat all your food I will get you an
icecream cone. That of course gets the kids attention and they gobble down the rest of
their food and receive their desirable consequence, ice cream. yum. Another family is
not so easily bought. Negative Reinforcement, increases a behavior, response is
followed by a presentation of an outside stimulus, and Punishment decreases a
behavior. A mother arrives with her two sons, caucasian, ages 12ish and 4ish. At the
end of the lunch hour, all the boys want to do is play in the play area. The mother while
patiently waiting at first, begins to grow frustrated that her children will not grab their
shows and leave. Therefore, she counters with a negative reinforcer, counting
backwards from three. It is unknown what will happen at the end of counting, but this
catches the attention of the older boy. The younger boy is not so lucky, and continues to
play. Thats all fine and dandy, until the mother snatches the boy from the ladder and
hauls him out. The punishment of all this behavior? He gets his kids meal toy taken
away, and is not getting this back!
I learned a lot while observing the Arctic Circle play area. Each principle
supposedly emits a desired response, but that didnt always happen. Sometimes a
reinforcer was met only with the strong will to do exactly the opposite of whatever the
parent was saying. Sometimes the parent would bow out, leaving the child essentially
conditioning the parent to what they desired. Not only did the parents play a role in this,
the siblings had an influence as well (and sometimes they didnt). For example, the first
family, mentioned earlier, had two boys relatively close to the same age. If not for the
example of the older brother, the younger boy would not have responded to the positive
reinforcement. In application, this can show the effect of peer and societal pressure on a
person. Often, we push aside the consequences in order to participate in a certain
activity in order to gain group acceptance. There can also be positive influence, as in
this example, where others help us realize the positive and negative consequences.
There was also the battle between using a reinforcer/punishment and whether it
was used, or should have been employed and wasnt. This was especially true in the
areas where the children seemed to have control over the adults. In more than instant, a
temper tantrum was thrown ( a negative reinforcer) and the parent was forced to hand
over the ice cream to quiet the child. On the other hand, the parent that used
punishment to end the temper tantrum did not seem to make things better and the child
was less likely to listen to them in the future. I learned that there must be a balance
between each, so that there is not an extinction in good behaviors, or a learned bad
behavior.
Naturalistic observation is an excellent way of obtaining data, as the subjects are
unaware and the data is less skewed. While there are many factors that are not
controlled, in a behavioral study it is often best to keep things the way they would be
naturally. Overall, I would say that my observations were consistent with parenting
practices in society. While not every state is the same, and surely every country, on
parenting matters, there is a basic understanding in every society of punishers and
reinforcers in order to obtain desired behavior of the culture. The reason we teach using
this method is to create a better society overall. While parents are not always perfect,
sometimes inappropriately using a reinforcer or punisher, they are simply trying to mold
their children into what they think is best for the child and society. I think that is the most
important lesson that we take from operant conditioning in this situation, that the reason
we teach and learn is to make the world and its people better.