Question

Why is instinctive drift a theoretical problem for traditional behaviorists

Answer 1

Why is instinctive drift a theoretical problem for traditional behaviorists

It is hard to explain instinctive drift by only using traditional principles of behaviourism. Instinctive drift is explained as a phenomenon in which the innate behaviors of a person or the natural behaviors of a person would be able to ride over the trained or artificial behaviors. This means, that even though a person has been trained through operant conditioning, he would revert to the original form, the behavior before operant training. This is because his typical behaviors would intrude over the taught behaviors.

There have been no concrete experiments to prove the deterioration in taught behaviors. Unlike conditioning, where a change in behaviour could be visually observed, the reduction in Conditioned behaviour could not be observed that concretely. When Breland tried to attempt this experiment, he had to stop midway, though the theory had been formulated. The species typical behaviors began to be explored after Breland’s theory, but concrete proofs could not be given.

For traditional behaviorists, this was a complete contradiction of reinforcement theory, and this had just been observed, but the experiment could not be repeated. An experiment is only accepted if it is reproducible. The lack of reproducibility made this observation a theoretical problem.