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HISTORY, CHANGE, AND BACKLASH

Formal learning theories, heavily influenced by research in Russia and the United States, were a product of the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries. Behavioral scientists were ecstatic! In the stimulus-response connection, they felt that they had found the equivalent of "the atom" in physics or chemistry or "the cell" in the life sciences, that is, they envisioned the "S-R" connection as the basic building block of all organic behavior. Learning theories, or "behaviorism" became the dominant thrust from the early twentieth century to the early 1960s. They still form a prominent paradigm in social psychology today and have changed public attitudes in many ways.

Whereas in the past, human behavior was largely seen as "instinctual" or biologically based in some way, with this paradigmatic shift, our behavior was now seen as learned. This was a tremendous change: after all, if behavior is learned, previous theories of race or ethnic based behavior, grounded in biology or "instinct", simply made no sense. As mentioned in Guide Five, the last bastion to fall was the idea that sex differences were caused by biology. Social scientists could no longer view national differences as ingrained by our genes but due, instead, to cultural influences.

All organisms are considered subject to stimulus and response connections. And all behavior is subject to "shaping." From the progression of babbling baby to speaking child, to teaching tricks to your dog, to Unabomber victim James McConnell, who shaped the behavior of planeria (a primative cellular structure), all living matter learns.

The practical and political implications meant that national and cultural viewpoints could change, and individuals would change with them. "The sky was the limit" for women or ethnic groups previously seen as immutably hampered by their gender or color. With the view of lifetime socialization sponsored by a learning theory perspective, even an old dog could learn new tricks. And, of course, the whole concept of "adult education" took on entirely new meanings.

In virtually all countries exposed to these perspectives, socialization (at home and elsewhere) and education became the keys to change. In the early twentieth century United States, for example, public schools in New York taught adult immigrants the English language and "American ways" in night school. U.S. government agencies sponsored pamphlets and training programs for "modern childrearing." At least two generations of American children were raised "by the clock," conditioned to be obedient to schedules created by behavioral specialists. The profession of social work became a government-sponsored industry. By the late 1960s, Head Start was created to give children from lower income families a boost to make them culturally ready for elementary school. By that time anyway, the children of upper and middle class families were attending nursery school, many of them being drilled in foreign languages and reading. New fields: adult education and instructional design, became industries, as government and industry began to realize the education never stopped. Extension of the behaviorist model to gender meant that girls were now given opportunities in sports that previously had been nonexistent.

Learning theory models were consistent with and boosted the emerging fields of anthropology and sociology, who saw individual behavior as determined by "social forces." It was not difficult to translate cultural mandates and interactional scripts into chains of learned stimuli-response connections.

Did these dramatic changes engender "backlash" or reaction? Sure they did. Developmental theorists pointed out that children had to be at particular stages of maturation in order to perform the activities (such as toilet training) that behaviorists were trying to instill at "too early" an age. By the 1980s, biological determinism and Social Darwinism were re-emerging in new guises, buoyed by breakthroughs in genetics, even though many sociobiology assertions (e.g., "an altruism gene") never received verification and the end goal appeared the same: to make stratified social divisions appear "functional," natural, inevitable, and immutable. These streams of thought continue with us, sometimes financially bolstered by those who would aid agenda scholarship. The book, The Bell Curve, for example, which asserts biological differences in "intelligence" and "motivation" between Blacks and Whites, was largely funded by grants to the authors (one a specialist in pigeon learning, the other a polical scientist, neither a specialist in genetics or IQ) through The Bradley Foundation, an extremely conservative foundation in Wisconsin.

At the same time, cognitive specialists questioned the passive perspective these reinforcement theories imposed on human behavior. People could learn and react, all right, but what happened to originality, initiative, leadership, or the importance of values? About the best behaviorists could muster were vague allusions to randomly emerging behavior, which, if reinforced, became the springboard for original responses.
 

There are certain similarities among virtually all learning theories:

Stimulus and response should both be observable.

Stimulus and response are more likely to be linked if they are contiguous or associated in some way. Association can be temporal (happening close together in time), geographical (linked to the same place) but also linked by symbolism or meaning.

Stimulus and response become linked through processes of reinforcement. Rewarded behavior is more likely to be repeated under the same or similar stimulus conditions to those which contained the reward. (The effects of punishment are conceptually more controversial and are described later.)

Virtually all learning theories consider the role of habit, frequency, or practice. Stimulus-responses connections that occur more often are seen as higher in the habit or response hierarchy. Thus, a well-practiced response is more likely to be evoked and performed in a similar stimulus situation. The veterans of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had a practiced repertoire or script when the building again came under attack. Others had had rehearsals or fire drills held by their companies, a life-saving effort because stairwells were not always easily spotted on all floors.

Learning theories also incorporate motivation and drive. These are sometimes ascertained through deprivation (e.g., not feeding your dog her breakfast) and other times by goals with a high positive valance.

Both stimuli and responses generalize, i.e., there are a range of similar stimuli which evoke roughly equivalent responses and there are roughly similar responses (a smile, a giggle, a guffaw) that can occur to the same stimulus. So, for example, if you have a bad experience with a red-headed teacher, you might invoke stereotypes about red heads and apply them to all people with red hair.

Individuals also discriminate, i.e., they treat stimuli that are different enough as distinct.
 

Over the twentieth century, learning theories also became:

More complex, often leading to several stimulus-response chains, or adding additional variables such as generalization gradients.

More social, in particular, acknowledging that organisms could learn through watching others.

More cognitive, adding cognitive mediators and information organizers that were not immediately observable.

They distinguished more between learning and performance. Contiguity and habit are often more associated with learning while drive and reward are more associated with performance. That is, learning can occur through frequent, contiguous presentations, while performance may require an incentive. In classic learning theories, incentives are seen to be external.
 

Classical conditioning is associated with Ivan Pavlov, who worked with dogs in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. His terminology is still current today.

Pavlov would deprive dogs of food for about a day, then present the dog with meat powder. Upon smelling the meat powder, the dog would begin to salivate. Pavlov measured saliva output in drops.

He termed the meat powder the unconditional stimulus and the saliva as the unconditional response. Pavlov treated unconditional stimuli and responses as a given, an already established stimulus-response connection, possibly due to reflex or to unmeasured earlier conditioning.

Pavlov then presented a tone or a light (the conditional stimulus) prior to presenting the meat powder. After a few trials, the dog would salivated when the tone was sounded or the light was turned on. Then Pavlov left off the meat powder, but the dog would still salivate in response to the light or tone. Note that the conditional stimulus had to be presented prior to the unconditional stimulus. Pavlov termed this response to the tone or light the conditional response--it was typically not exactly the same as the unconditional response (for example, less saliva) but was similar in form.  Thus, previously neutral stimuli become associated with other stimuli or with rewards and punishment.

Notice here that the unconditional stimulus was fused, or confounded, with the reward or reinforcement. Disentangling these two (the stimulus versus reward) was a refinement of later learning theories.

Pavlov could not permanently remove the meat powder, or eventually he would sound the tone or activate the light and nothing happened at all. The conditional stimulus-response connection was now broken. Pavlov termed this process extinction. The unconditional stimulus now had to be replaced in the sequence to reinstill the conditional response. Learning about extinction stimulated Pavlov's interest in different kinds of reinforcement schedules:

Reinforcement could be given on a fixed periodic basis (say, every five minutes).

Reinforcement could be given at fixed intervals (say, every fifth time the organism made the response).

Reinforcement could also be irregular or variable.

Regular reinforcement is often used at the beginning of a learning task to "stamp in" the response.

After that, an irregular reinforcement schedule typically is the most resistant to extinction. Later research suggests that consistent use of a regular (periodic or interval) schedule sensitizes the organism to changes in the reinforcement schedule so that it notices immediately when the reinforcement is missing. It is harder to detect changes when a variable schedule is used because reinforcement is unpredictable.

Pavlov's work also gave rise to the concepts of generalization and discrimination (or differentiation).

HIs work had enormous influence in the United States due to adaptations by psychologist John Watson. Watson felt that humans started with a few reflexes, such as a startle reflex or a fear of falling. All else was conditioned in. In his research with "Little Albert," Watson showed how a toddler, originally interested in a fuzzy, furry white rat became afraid of it after Watson repeatedly clashed symbols behind Little Albert's head when the animal was presented. Little Albert quickly generalized to any white furry animal and (so legend has it) eventually anything white or furry.

Thus, mental illness (or, at least phobias) was seen as explained by conditioned responses and generalization to an initial incident.

Watson extended his applications to the socialization process (those rigid schedules for feeding--and even for picking up and holding an infant) and to education. His belief was that anyone could become anything--any occupation--with the proper background and training. His ideas (particularly on schedules) influenced child-rearing until Dr. Spock and other, more development perspectives gained credence following World War Two.

The picture of people under these perspectives was passive; people were "bundles of reflexes" and conditioned responses.

There was, however, a relatively unnoticed fly in the ointment: Pavlov noted that if someone new entered the testing room dogs would show an alerting response. All their other responses stopped as the dog oriented to the new stimulus in the environment.
 

The late B.F. Skinner had a more active picture of humanity (and, at least, other animals and birds). Skinner saw organisms as active, as constantly emiting responses in a random manner. Some of these responses were rewarded. The ones that were would remain (using Thorndike's "law of effect") in the organism's behavioral repertoire.

Skinner saw learning as incremental. The organism started with a random response which bore some, often very slight resemblance to the end response the experimenter (or authority) desired to instill. For example, simply to get a dog to come near a hoop may be an initial triumph if you are trying to teach your dog to jump through a hoop.

At first the initial response would be strongly rewarded, almost regardless of what it was. As the organism continued to emit responses (now, the dog is sniffing the hoop), only those responses that came closer to the final desired response would be rewarded. Step by step, the organism is successively rewarded for responses that come closer and closer to the goal behavior. Rewarding these successive approximations is called shaping. Skinner saw shaping at work in all forms of human behavior, including language. Eventually, the dog sniffs the hoop, then sticks its head through the hoop, walks through the hoop, then jumps as the hoop is lifted off the ground.

Skinner trained pigeons for the military during World War Two. He also developed the "Skinner Box", a cube with a bar for a rat to press, and a tube that dispensed food pellets, and even a "total environment," a kind of Skinner Box for an infant, with climate control (no diapers, just a paper sheet on rollers; no clothes either) and visual stimulation. His novel, Walden Two (still fun reading after all these years), portrayed an ideal society based on operant conditioning principles. For example, young children would learn to resist temptation by wearing a lollipop dipped in powdered sugar on a string around their necks. Hungry children came to the table and donned their lollipop, which would show tongue tracks in the powdered sugar. The length of time the child had to wait before licking the lollipop was gradually lengthened from a few minutes to as long as an hour.

Never smoked, don't care, find "the personal stuff" boring? OK, skip ahead HERE to phobias.
 
 

AND SHE WENT FROM THREE PACKS OF CIGARETTES A DAY TO NONE! (but it took eight years)

I remembered Skinner's lollipop training when I made the seventh, and it turned out, my final, attempt to quit smoking. I was as addicted to cigarettes as it gets (including waking to have one in the middle of the night) and got the nicotine "high" or "buzz" that many smokers mention. By the mid-1980s following a string of stressful events, I was up to smoking three packs of cigarettes a day (that's 60 daily cigarettes for those who never smoked), a quantity that shocked even me.

In previous attempts to quit "cold turkey," I could not even last 24 hours. At one point I was ludicrously smoking and chewing nicotine gum simultaneously. Obviously, none of this did my sense of self-efficacy about carrying out plans much good. And, in one of life's little ironies, it turns out that I am allergic to tobacco.

On the seventh try, I remembered the one time I had temporarily quit for five days, during an attack of measles (that's right, the two week measles) during my last year of graduate school. I was so sick and the Health Service infirmary forbade smoking. At my next bad cold in 1986, I cut my consumption in half, to 1.5 packs per day. This was not without repercussions: I gained 25 pounds of fluid in two weeks (I didn't eat more either); my hands shook; and I woke constantly with nightmares for a month. When my doctor told me I just should have quit cold turkey, I reminded him that this was the equivalent of a pack-and-a-half a day smoker quitting cold turkey.

Following that, I invoked the "lollipop method," gradually extending the time between cigarettes. At the beginning, this was incredibly difficult. I set timers for the alloted minutes, I took up embroidery (and within a year generated 13 pairs of embroidered pillowcases which virtually everyone I knew received for gifts), I did isometric exercises when the craving hit (which was plenty). I counted out my alloted cigarettes per day. I rewarded myself with a book or other goody when I achieved intermediate goals.

I began to condition my cigarette use to time. Previously I had lit a cigarette in response to any minor stress (being stuck in traffic, for example) or to meals (one before, one after) and after a class. Clearly I had conditioned myself to smoke in response to various events. By conditioning to time, I broke part of the psychological hold that kept me smoking. For example, whenever possible, I would stop whatever I was doing to have a cigarette every 30 minutes on the half hour. If that was not possible (I was in class or on an airplane, for example), I had to wait until the next free half hour (cigarettes in my system could not be banked; an opportunity lost was not made up.)

People who came to my office who heard the timer ticking and saw the cigarettes neatly laid out in labelled rows couldn't stop laughing (although many of them are still smoking.)

And everytime I got sick, I cut back as much as I could. There were many times I hit a plateau, but I never increased my consumption.

By August 4, 1994, I was down to one cigarette every five days. To show you just how hooked I was, I refused to use the "Q word" and was contemplating "cutting back" to one cigarette per week. Although I didn't know it then, that was the day of my last cigarette. I flew to Los Angeles for a conference and contacted a terrible case of Salmonella food poisoning while there. By the time my temperature dropped to normal, that was it. No more cigarettes. For months afterwords, if I smelled tobacco, or even saw a cigarette billboard advertisement, I literally went weak at the knees as a physical craving hit me from head to toe.

So that's how I finally quit smoking, and I feel I owe it all to operant conditioning.

Maybe you have something you want to change, diet, exercise, or something else habitual. Give it a try!
 

More developmental psychologists tended to see phobias as resulting from inner conflicts and psychological defenses. They believe in substitution, that is, if one phobia is "cured," another will replace it until the inner conflict is addressed and resolved. As you might guess, it can take months or even years to unearth unconscious psychological conflicts and resolve them.

Behaviorists believe that phobias are noxious habitual responses to a set of stimuli. The first anxiety reaction may be accidental and the setting merely a coincidence (e.g., an attack of dizziness at a shopping center perhaps in response to sniffing tobacco, a fragrance, or something else that might be an allergen for some people). Through generalization, the person now begins to have the same reactions under somewhat similar circumstances, such as in a grocery store or pharmacy. Very rapidly, the individual may now produce phobic responses in any type of shopping in a large enclosed area. The preliminary response of most people is then to avoid circumstances that set off phobic reactions. Unfortunately, generalization often means that phobic reactions continue to occur, only in new settings, which, in a chain reaction, are then avoided. The individual's world becomes smaller and smaller.

Desensitization training, a variant of operant conditioning, is much faster and more effective than traditional "talk therapy." Further, new phobias do not seem to arise. In desensitization, the individual starts learning relaxation responses in a non-threatening environment. The person learns to contract and release muscles from head to toe. At the end of this series, the body is very relaxed. The muscle exercises are often coupled with visualizing a relaxing scene, which is usually person-specific (favorites are being near the ocean and listening to the surf, or sitting in a quiet forest; others use aural stimuli, such as a favorite piece of music.)

Then, shaping begins. The person is exposed to the least threatening version of the phobia (for example, if you have a feline phobia, you might be shown drawings of kittens). Relaxing techniques are practiced until the individual becomes comfortable with the situation. Then, the next level of the phobic situation is invoked (for example, photographs of adult cats). Step by step, the person learns to make relaxation responses in the presence of a phobic situation (for example, you might have a cat in a carrier placed across the room, which is then moved closer; eventually you might pet the cat.)

Operant conditioning has often been used to explain internalization, or how the individual comes to accept society's values and regulations. For example, Vygotsky's discovery of private speech, in which children talk to themselves aloud before learning to silently think to themselves, is one possible mechanism. By speaking to themselves, children reinforce these values and rules, and they become part of the self.

Operant conditioning has several drawbacks:

It badly predicts the acquisition of more complex behaviors, such as language, compared with learning individual words.

It is slow and cumbersome. As Albert Bandura put it, God forbid you should learn to drive a car this way!

As an undergraduate psychology major, my friends and I trained rats in Skinner boxes. Poor rats! It took them so long to connect pressing the bar with its click noise to receiving a food pellet. In fact, it took forever for them to even depress the bar, so we speeded up the process. We crumbled the pellets and sprinkled them on the bar. That brought the rat right over to the bar. In nibbling the pellet, the rat would press on the bar, it would click, and a pellet shot down the tube of the Skinner box. Using this procedure, lab rats quickly learned to press the bar to receive food pellets.

And operant conditioning STILL doesn't explain the generation of original complex responses.
 

This type of learning goes by several names. It is also often called:

Social Learning (I don't use that term here because the Michener and DeLameter book uses a different definition of Social Learning, which derives from a symbolic interactionism perspective)

Imitation

Observational Learning (because this is what happens)

Vicarious Learning (because what happens to the model has a vicarious effect on the observer)

"No-trial" Learning because the behavior can be learned from one observation without practice.

Going back to John Dollard and Neal Miller's work in the late 1930s, the assumption is that people (and often animals) imitate or "model" responses. Why does imitation occur? That is never really explained; it is just something we do.  Perhaps it has a biological base; perhaps it is a response to stimulation...The original organism emitting a response is called "the model."

Not all responses or all models are imitated. Physically agressive responses, at least for young boys, are often imitated. Physically arousing behavior in general is more often imitated.

Models who are warm and friendly are imitated more often. So are higher status or more powerful models.

What happens to the model is critical. Behavior is far more often imitated if the behavior is rewarded. It is less often imitated if the behavior is punished. Thus, this research demonstrates the influence of vicarious reinforcement.

What happens to the observer is perhaps even more critical. In Bandura's early work, he showed that sex differences between young girls and boys who imitated a filmed aggressive model virtually disappeared if the children were directly rewarded for imitation. Boys were much more likely than girls to imitate an aggressive model if neither the child nor the model received no reward or no punishment. Thus, one thing these results demonstrate is that behavior can be learned but not performed if the observer or the model is not rewarded.

Modeling was not only a more social and more cognitive form of learning, it added several advantages to previous theories:

It illustrates that behavior can be learned, but not performed, unless circumstances are auspicious.

It shows that complex behavior can be rapidly acquired, sometimes within the context of a single observation.

Behavior can be acquired in "large chunks" or sequences, rather than laboriously step by step. Interactional sequences (scripts) can be modeled too.

Consequences to the model are very important.

Both direct and vicarious reward can be effective. So can direct and vicarious punishment.

Behaving in role-appropriate ways (gender, age, occupational) may be intrinsically rewarding. Some role theorists speculate that people deliberately and selectively seek out and perform role-related behaviors. For example, studies of nursery school age children show they want to act "like a girl or boy should."

Modeling results from over literally thousands of studies have changed how we view filmed physical aggression. Prior to these studies, a prominent view was the catharsis or "hydralic model." The basic idea was that physical aggression was one response to stress, which built up like steam in a closed boiler. Watching filmed violence supposedly had a "cathartic effect" by allowing a stressed individual to "blow off steam" by watching someone else do the punching. Now, we realize that a steady diet of filmed violence has negative effects and can aggrevate, not alleviate, aggressive responses. Even the American Medical Association has labelled watching violent TV a medical risk for children.

One chilling finding is that aggression increases after watching filmed violence, even if people have not been frustrated or are not under stress. In fact, Leonard Berkowitz' research suggests that all that is needed are aggressive cues. Half the students entered a laboratory room where a gun was placed in a jumble of papers, books, a tennis racket, and assorted academic junk on a table. The gun was removed for the other random half of the students. The gun was never mentioned by the experimenter. Nevertheless, students shocked an experimental confederate more often and more severely when the gun was present on the table than when it was absent.

Unfortunately, the way most violent villains are punished in films is through violence delivered by the heroes. The heroes are then usually rewarded for bringing the villains to justice.

People who watch a lot of TV (which shows several murders per hour) overestimate the incidence of violent crimes in their area and are more likely to report being afraid to go out at night. (This occurs despite controls for actual crime rates in the person's area and their own experiences being victimized by crime.)

In experiments, boys don't need to see a model rewarded to imitate filmed aggression. As long as the model isn't punished, boys will imitate the behavior. Typically, girls need to be directly rewarded to imitate filmed aggression. Of course, both boys and girls watch long hours of TV (the worst are cartoons) in which they see boys far more likely to initiate aggression and be rewarded for it than girls are.

Many children's movies and TV shows repeatedly show children as far smarter than adults, who are often portrayed as stupid and oblivious. The bumbling behavior and ignorance is ascribed to most adults in authority over children: parents, teachers, principals, and camp counselors. Children are the heroes who solve the problems that adults cannot. Walt Disney features are often the worst offenders. In fact, in the Disney movie 101 Dalmations, not only are the dogs smarter than adult humans, the puppies are the smartest of all. And then teachers and parents, who  tout Disney movies as so terrific because they don't have sex or violence, wonder why kids disrespect authority...

In one TV series, The Power Rangers, which was once wildly popular, selling millions annually in doll figures, posters, books, and so on, the Power Rangers are "mutant" high school students who "metamorph" into strange alien creatures who fight inter-galactic battles. It is clear that the producers have taken at least some behavioral science strictures to heart because the Rangers are a mix of male and female, White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. Unfortunately, all the Power Rangers are also physically gorgeous, so fit that some are gymnasts. Their enemies are fat, badly groomed, poorly dressed, and have pimples. What do you think is being learned and modeled here?

More recently, attention has turned to the modeling of prosocial behavior. Individuals often "follow the lead" of those who act in an altruistic manner as well.
 

It may seem straightforward to you: behavior that is rewarded is repeated under similar circumstances while behavior that is punished is extinguished. That's how the early behaviorists thought too, but we now know the reality is more complex than that.

WHAT ABOUT PUNISHMENT?

Skinner felt punishment was counter-productive for several reasons:

punishment itself may become a reward in itself, as when children receive attention for misbehavior

punishment doesn't get rid of environmental temptations

punishment is highly situation-specific so you might get Johnny to stay in his seat in math but his behavior doesn't improve anywhere else

the punisher becomes an aversive stimulus (as in the dads who are seen as more distant and less close than moms)

punishment requires surveillance turning the situation into one of forced compliance. Hence, it is externally rather than internally controlled. As I noted earlier, a compliance situation for a group or an organization is very costly in terms of resources and personnel.

Skinner suggested simply ignoring unwanted behavior.

As we already know, however, this doesn't always work (remember those boys who imitated filmed aggression if nothing happened to the model?) Or what if your toddler runs into the street? It's tough to reason with a two year old and "time out" may not be dramatic enough for your kid to understand and change his or her behavior.

In his experiments with dogs, Solomon found that severe punishment can be effective. In fact, he was unable to extinguish escape behavior in dogs who were conditioned to escape a severe shock. Well, you don't want to be abusive in any regard, but research indicates that punishment can be effective. The watchwords are:

swift

sure and

[relatively] severe

directly tie the punishment to the transgression

Swift, because your kid and your dog aren't going to remember why you put them in a corner hours after the event, sure so they don't learn you simply threaten, and severe enough to be remembered.

You can see why the old "wait until your father gets home" tactic doesn't work well, besides the fact that it makes Dad aversive. Punishment, if it occurs at all, happens long after the transgression and Dad may say, "I don't think he needs to be spanked about that" (so the child isn't punished at all on that occasion). When fathers do engage in physical punishment, they often inflict more serious harm than mothers, and the entire event becomes blown out of proportion.

In surveys of the adult general public, over 96 percent of American parents say they spank their kids. This mostly means small kids (10 or under) and a quick potch to the rear end. Right or wrong, most parents use at least some corporal punishment. Middle class American parents tend to punish "bad intentions" and use less physical punishment than working class parents do.

On an adult level, punishment has been studied in the form of "fear appeals." The initial studies, done in the 1950s, tended to find that strong fear appeals were ineffective. Although people paid attention, the messages were usually so threatening that individuals failed to comprehend the messages and left the situation when possible. However, more recent research indicates that fear appears can be extremely effective if you suggest specific remedies to alleviate the fearful situation. Brush your teeth and see your dentist, and gorey teeth will not happen to you. Wash your hands and you will get sick less often.

REWARD: A CASE STUDY IN CONCEPTUAL AMBIGUITY

In most cases, research supports the idea that reward directly influences repeating the behavior. And often, the greater the reward, the greater the commitment to the new behavior.

But we have to be careful. Rewards can be idiosyncratic, and specific to a particular individual. Sometimes praise actually does work better than a raise (although it's nice to get both.)

In particular, we should examine issues in behavior that is intrinsically, or internally, motivated as opposed to that which is external or extrinsic. We perform internally motivated behavior because we find the behavior itself is satisfying.

There is research that indicates that expected large rewards for initially internally motivated behavior that occur regardless of performance can be counterproductive. Oversufficient justification describes such instances when reward can lower internal motivation and subsequent performance. When reward is proportional to performance or unexpected (that surprise bonus) oversufficient justification effects do not typically appear.

The oversufficient justification literature dovetails with two other independent streams of research: (1) cognitive dissonance effects, in which less attitude change can occur with larger rewards and (2) equity effects (which we'll examine later, in which proportionate rewards are typically the most satisfying (too low rewards make people angry and too high rewards can make us guilty.) The key in all three appears to be cognitive consistency or proportionality.

Thus, even reward isn't as simple as it appears.
 

Parents and siblings influence an infant who is helpless, dependent, and has few significant others. No wonder, the effects of training may depend on developmental level and parents have such a strong influence on young children.

As we grow, we attend school and form peer groups. While parent and teacher interactions are important, they are hierarchical relationships; voluntary peers have equal status. Thus, by adolescence peer groups often challenge parents in importance. Nevertheless, surveys of college freshmen for over 30 years indicate that parents remain the most important influence in a teen's life.

Most societies have social age grading and normative life stages, i.e., we are age-segregated and have specific goals and challenges that are defined as age-appropriate. Age can interact with socially defined sex roles to define expected life events. Social and historical factors influence how gender and age are perceived. For example, "old old age" is a twentieth century phenomenon and currently most married mothers of infants hold jobs. Current thinking on socialization, you recall, is that it is a lifetime phenomenon. Remember adult education and instructional design? Many people pack several careers--and even successive families--into one lifetime. Some people take early retirement to train for a totally new career, a process facilitated by labor benefits won in industrialized countries during the twentieth century.

Although both symbolic interactionists with the concept of the self, and various learning theorists seem more poised to explain adult socialization, we need more research on maturational processes in adult development. To name just a few:

Experiences during early adulthood, such as marriage, having children, or divorce contribute to adult development

A lot of socialization occurs formally and informally on the job

Many experiences present opportunities for informal learning. For example, studies of individuals active in their religious congregations indicate that they learn skills that are later put to use in civic and political engagement

Many physical changes in middle and late adulthood undoubtedly influence the self-concept. From losing one's hair to acquring stretch marks, to hormonal changes, how we feel and our sense of efficacy is probably affected too.

ON "HABIT HIERARCHIES"

Many psychologists suggest that the overwhelming proportion of our daily behavior is habitual, following established routines and scripts of everyday life. As the attacks on the World Trade Tower show, responses at the top of our habit hierarchies may even save our lives. That's why there are recommendations to practice safety evacuation procedures at home or at work in the case of natural or manmade disasters.

Does it have to stay that way? We gain insight from studies of "self-regulated learners" who set goals and subgoals, and proceed to meet them systematically, re-evaluating and revising along the way. Self-regulated learners apparently echo that classic Asian proverb: "A journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step." Why not take a look at your dreams? Or create new ones? They don't have to be dramatic changes; perhaps you want to stop smoking or exercise more. Or train for a new job. Put your mind to it and you can "beat the habit hierarchy" at its own game.
 
 

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Susan Carol Losh October 12 2002