Modeling Instrumental Conditioning - The Behavioral Regulation Approach

Basically, instrumental conditioning is learning through consequences: Behavior that produces positive results (high “instrumental response”) is reinforced, and that which produces negative effects (low “instrumental response”) is weakened. Instrumental conditioning plays a major role in learning, but the content of such learning might be desired (e.g. correct cause-effect association) or undesired (superstitious behavior/beliefs). We apply the (relatively) recent behavioral regulation approach to develop a generic system dynamic model of a “classroom example” of instrumental conditioning. The model captures essential aspects of the theory and it enhances understanding of how desirable learning may be promoted and undesired outcomes restrained during an instrumental conditioning process. The psychology of contiguity Human beings are extremely sensitive to coincidence, i.e. contiguity in time and space of different events. According to Vyse [1, p. 60] this fact “is both an often overlooked psychological truth and a monumental understatement.” Learning is frequently based on noting that events occur closely together – for example, in time. An example is the ability of children to learn the rules of grammar: By observation and experiment on noting co-occurrences, children acquire schemes capable of generating quite complex behavior. But cues-tocausality such as co-variation to infer, and 'learn' causal relations in the environment, may be erroneous in particular instances and lead to the acquisition of superstitious beliefs, with potential for severe human error – learning of falsehoods, “superstitious learning” [2, p. 229-30]. Contiguity in time and space plays a crucial role both in learning of truths and “learning” of falsehoods. The empirical study of contiguity effects on learning began arguably as early as in the 1890’s with the studies of Pavlov on classical conditioning [3, p. 41ff] and Thorndike on instrumental (or operant) conditioning [3, p. 81ff]. The basic principle of instrumental conditioning is learning through consequences, what Thorndike called the Law of Effect: Behavior that produces positive results is strengthened, and that which produces negative effects is weakened. The work by Pavlov and Thorndike elicited great interest and generated new research by Watson, Skinner, Hull and others. The success of conditioning studies made behaviorism – the tenet that psychology should only be concerned with the objective data of behavior – a dominant view in psychology, including theories of learning, for decades [4, Ch. 2]. Few learning theorists subscribe today to (radical) behaviorism, but most would agree that the influence of behaviorism can still be felt in e.g. instructional design. The richness of aspects in learning has lead to a similar richness of theories of learning: behaviorism; cognitive theories of learning (e.g. meaningful learning, schema theory, situated cognition); developmental theories of learning (Piaget’s genetic epistemology and others); etc. A pragmatic view would acknowledge that such theories are incomplete and should be seen as complementary or supplementary. But some people take radical stances, going far in ignoring or even opposing other “isms”. Our interest in instrumental conditioning originated from studies of erosion of security and safety awareness [5-7]. We have argued that superstitious learning caused by reinforcement of non-compliant behavior coupled with misperception of risk is likely to play an essential role in the erosion of standards of security and safety. In [8] we extend the system dynamic model for erosion of standards of security and safety developed by one of us. A brief presentation of the model and of its implications for information security is given in [9]. However, the models of instrumental conditioning developed for the issues of security (and safety) are by nature restricted. Instrumental conditioning is central for theories of learning, including organizational learning, and for the acquisition of superstitious behavior and beliefs [1, Ch. 3, p. 69ff, Ch. 4, p. 93ff]. This is where this paper comes in, i.e. modeling the dynamics of instrumental conditioning in a general framework, aiming at capturing essential aspects while keeping an open eye for possible new directions for the psychology of instrumental conditioning. We are hopeful that system dynamical models of this important phenomenon might lead to new