In: Psychology
Situation # 2 A 13-year-old boy likes to steal cookies from a local convenience store.
-Explain how the stealing behavior might have developed in terms of Operant Conditioning. In your answer specify: Operant behavior (Voluntary response), Consequence, Reinforcement (specify Positive or Negative).
Operant behavior
Consequence
Reinforcement (specify Positive or Negative)
- In this situation involving the theft of cookies, explain how the concepts of primary and secondary reinforcers might apply.
- Describe how the stealing behavior might have developed using a Social Cognitive (Observational) Learning model.
- Using the Operant model, how might the stealing behavior be extinguished?
- How might the impact of punishment differ from the extinction you described in Q. 10 (above)? In your answer provide an example of punishment that might be effective in this situation.
- Describe how Latent Learning might explain how the boy knows where to find the cookies in the store.
The 13 year old boy likes to steal cookies from the store because first of all he has developed an urge to eat that product which gives him extreme enjoyment and that too upto a maximum level that he is ready to take chance of the situations which is not at all a postive behaviour.Even he also knows that this thing is not a good thing and one day i might be in a problem but the joyfullness of eating cookies beat the feelings of good and bad things. Concept of classical conditioning applies here that he might be needy and thus the behaviour he has developed is an operant behaviour which is at par with the situations.
Regarding punishment in this case, if we caught the child and hand him over to police etc the problem will get solved temporarily but he will miss the cookies so chances are there that he might do the same thing again. Rather, if we give him the scope of eating cookies daily and givesome sort of counselling , then after a certain period of time he will loose interest on those cookies andproblem will get solved automatically.