Nov 03
Question: Identify and evaluate one contribution of the learning perspective to the scientific study of behavior
One contribution of the learning perspective to the scientific study of behavior is Skinner and its mouse in the Skinner box. Skinner box is a cage or room for a mouse, where at one place has a lever sticking out, which whenever a mouse pushes the lever, food is supplied to the mouse. As this experiments repeat, mice learn to know that by pushing lever, they gain food. This contributes to through law of effect (mouse learns to know that by pressing lever they get food) and generalization of learning perspective. The experiment's beneficial points are that they are objective, easy to take control, and cause and effect is clear. Since the experiment is carried out in lab, temperatures, sounds, and other factors that could cause affect can be controlled. However, this situation in the Skinner box is rather artificial, and unnatural in the usual environment of mice. Therefore the learning of mice seen in the box cannot be said that the organisms’ learning occurs as it did in the box. Another conflict of this experiment is that Skinner does not observe the internal events as cause of behavior. The experiment works when its testing animals, but when it comes to human, complex animal with feelings and other internal events, the result wouldn’t be as simple. This means the experiment does not explain the process of learning of human beings, but using human for experiment has ethical problems. Skinner’s says that any situation has effect to behavior, and that behavior leads to consequences, and depending on how the consequence outcomes to be, reinforcement or punishment, the behavior of organism varies later ward. This Skinner’s theory and whole experiment explains the behavior is learned through various trials of actions and the organisms choose to continue the behavior depending on what they get as results.