Instrumental Conditioning Research Paper

An amazing trait that humans have is their learning capacity. There are many ways to learn. For example, some organisms learn by trial and error, and learn from their mistakes. Experimental psychology conducts experiments to understand and predict behavior. There are three types of learning, observational learning, classical conditioning, and instrumental conditioning. Observational learning is when someone learns by imitating or copying from other people. If a group of children watch a video about a child bullying another child without consequences, it is likely that the children watching will imitate and start bullying. Classical conditioning is when organisms learn by testing and fixing mistakes. If a food tastes bad, they would ignore it if it ever shows up in the future, because they remember how bad it tasted. Instrumental conditioning is when an organism performs a response so that there can be an outcome. For example, Bart would disturb is class to irritate Mrs. Krabappel. In this method of learning, the outcome can either increase or decrease the response, so the organism will learn whether or not to do this again. There are four response-outcome relationships, positive reinforcement, positive punishment, negative reinforcement, and negative punishment. In positive reinforcement, the …show more content…
Psychology studies how organisms behave and learning plays a huge role in that. For example, if a child wants attention, it will test out many ways to attract attention, and figure out which is the most effective. He or she is basically learning, and by learning, their behavior will change. They will cry more often or even scream. Homer, on the other hand, rarely learns from is mistakes. There are times when Homer should express classical conditioning, but he does not because of the way he acts and behaves. He once almost died from eating a poisonous fish, but a few episodes later, his appetite does not