Premack Principle

B. F. Skinner developed the operant conditioning learning framework to explain how organisms work to receive rewards and avoid punishment. Skinner also noted, via the results of animal experiments, that behaviors could be changed in relation to the consequences paired with the behaviors. Specifically, behaviors are responded to in one of two ways: reinforcement or punishment. Unlike punishment, which aims to decrease the frequency of a behavior, reinforcement seeks to increase the desired behavior's frequency. Positive reinforcement occurs when a pleasant stimulus is added following the occurrence of a behavior, such as giving a treat to a dog every time it successfully follows a command to sit. Negative reinforcement occurs when an aversive stimulus is removed following the occurrence of a behavior, such as when pressing a button (behavior) causes loud noises (aversive) to be taken away. Despite the widespread applicability of operant conditioning, there are limitations of the framework. Particularly, operant conditioning does not detail why an organism carries out a low-frequency behavior and does not delineate what reinforcers are.

David Premack acknowledged this limitation and conceptualized a way to explain how to reinforce a low-frequency behavior by using an existing high-frequency behavior. He stated, “Any response A will reinforce any other response B, if and only if the independent rate of A is greater than that of B” (p. 31). Premack termed this notion the Premack Principle (also known as the differential probability principle). He explained that the principle operates based on a reinforcement hierarchy, which is a list of actions that are ordered from the highest to the lowest probability behaviors. To further illustrate the principle it is useful to consider the work of W. J. Johnson. Johnson used the Premack Principle to encourage a young man with depression to practice positive self-talk. He told the young man to trigger a positive thought (low-frequency behavior) from reading a statement on an index card every time he urinated (high-frequency behavior). After the young man continued this exercise for several weeks, he began to think of positive statements without the index cards before urinating. Soon after that, he was engaging in positive self-talk on a regular basis and not solely in the context of the high-frequency behavior. In this example, positive self-talk could not have been learned and reinforced if the experimenter had paired it with behavior that occurred at a lower frequency than the current rate of self-talk.

Premack further described the reinforcement hierarchy by stating that if A, B, and C are any three responses, with A having the highest frequency followed by B and then C, then A will reinforce both B and C, B will reinforce C but not A, and C cannot reinforce either A or B. The Premack Principle also elaborates on contingency (i.e., dependence). Organisms are taught through trial and error that relationships exist between behaviors and the environment. Specifically, certain behaviors produce particular changes in the organism's environment, so that changes in the environment are contingent upon the identified behaviors. In reference to the Johnson example, if urinating is contingent upon thinking of positive thoughts, then positive thoughts will occur. In his own experiment, Premack allowed a group of children access to a pinball machine and candy. He observed which behavior occurred with higher frequency: manipulation of the machine or eating of the candy. Nearly half of the children were more interested in eating candy than manipulating the machine, whereas the remainder of the children displayed the opposite pattern. For the children that preferred playing with the pinball machine, experimenters made it so the children would have to eat the candy to be able to manipulate the pinball machine. Conversely, for [Page 814]the children who preferred eating candy, experimenters told them they had to play the pinball machine if they wanted to eat candy. Results showed that when the high-frequency behavior of the child was contingent upon the low-frequency behavior, the child would engage in the low-frequency behavior. This experiment supported the Premack Principle in that it demonstrated that organisms could be influenced to carry out a behavior if the desired behavior is dependent upon the less-desired behavior.

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