Psychology Essay: Using the Principles of Operant Conditioning to Alter Problem Behaviors in Humans

Using the Principles of Operant Conditioning to Alter Problem Behaviors in Humans
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Problem behaviors refer to continuous habits that hinder social relations, communications, and learning children, harming the children, peers, families, and other people (Jessor, 2016). The children may inhibit violence and other unhealthy habits. An example of problem behavior is drug addiction. Such behaviors are dangerous in the community and ought to be minimized through positive or negative ways. A child may not undergo the full development of these problem behaviors that are not eliminated. Principles of operant conditioning refer to learning methods that are reinforced through rewards and punishments (Blackman, 2017). An individual makes an association between a specific behavior and its consequence through operant conditioning. This essay describes how we can use operant conditioning to alter problem behaviors in humans.
Frederic Skinner proposed operant conditioning (Murphy & Lupfer, 2014). He believed that human nature responds to stimuli introduced in life to behave in specific ways. The consequences of action make us uncomfortable or add some advantages to us. Operant conditioning plays a psychological game on people who have a specific behavior to make them leave it, adopt a specific path, or become addicted to a particular way of life. Problem behaviors pose a significant threat to human lives and need to be changed to maintain a positive and healthy society. Operant conditioning aims at ensuring that a habit is repeated because an action results in a pleasant consequence.
Operant conditioning introduces three responses that can follow behavior. They include neutral operant, reinforcers, and punishment. Neutral operant refers to responses from the environment that do not affect people repeating a habit. Reinforcers refer to environmental responses that increase the probability of a repeated habit and can either be positive or negative. On the other hand, punishers are different from reinforcements because they decrease the probability of a repeated habit. These methods determine the suitable applications to change a problem behavior in humans.
Drug addiction is among several problem behaviors that need to be changed to maintain a positive society, and operant conditioning principles help us do that. The best two principles of operant conditioning to apply in our case are reinforcement and punishment.
Reinforcement
Reinforcements can either be positive or negative, but the ultimate goal is the same. It refers to conditioning people to maintain or discourage a particular habit (Blackman, 2017). The Reinforcement can be continuous, over a fixed time, varied intervals, or fixed ratio reinforcement.
Positive Reinforcement
Positive conditioning makes us maintain a good habit owing to its pleasant consequences. In society, a problem behavior like drug addiction has affected several youths, and using positive reinforcement helps them change the problem behavior (Silverman et al., 2019). The drug addicts can be promised good things if they stop using the drugs using operant conditioning principles. This can be easy by breaking down the drug usage cycle, with every cycle ...