Shaping Behavior: Thorndike and the Power of Reinforcement

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Shaping Behavior: Thorndike and the Power of Reinforcement

Principles of Management · Chapter 11: Motivation in the WorkplaceSection 11.6 · lesson 67 of 11712 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Watch what follows behavior, not what people say they want.

  • State the law of effect and why it matters to managers
  • Distinguish the 4 consequences precisely
  • Compare reinforcement schedules and their persistence
  • Spot unintended reinforcement in a described situation

Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,621 words). Read along, or search it.

Motivation in the Workplace

Shaping Behavior: Thorndike and the Power of Reinforcement

If you want to know what an organization truly rewards, don't read its policies. Watch what follows behavior. That's the core of reinforcement theory, and it starts with Edward Thorndike's law of effect. We'll see why this is a different kind of theory from everything else in this chapter. We'll define four consequences precisely, including the one almost everyone misnames. We'll compare reinforcement schedules, and see which produces the most persistent behavior. We'll set out the three conditions that make a consequence work at all. We'll look at the problems with punishment, and at a trap organizations fall into constantly. We'll weigh an ethical criticism of behavior modification. And we'll end at Harborline Manufacturing, which rewarded the very crises it complained about.

The Law of Effect

Consequences Shape What Happens Next

The psychologist Edward Thorndike drew this principle from early experimental research on learning. He called it the law of effect. Behavior followed by a satisfying consequence is more likely to recur. Behavior followed by an unsatisfying consequence is less likely to recur. Its significance for management is specific. It directs attention to consequences, rather than to internal states. The content and process theories earlier in this chapter ask what a person wants, or what she believes. Reinforcement theory asks a much narrower, more directly observable question. What actually follows a given behavior? And does that consequence make the behavior more likely, or less likely, to happen again?

A Different Kind of Theory

No Assumptions About Wants or Beliefs

That makes reinforcement theory a genuinely different kind of theory from everything else in this chapter. It doesn't require any assumption about what a person wants or believes. It makes no claim about needs, as the content theories do. And it makes no claim about an internal calculation, as expectancy theory does. It requires only observation of what follows behavior. In a specific sense, that makes it more directly actionable. The other theories depend on inferring an internal state that can't be observed. A manager doesn't need to know what an employee wants or believes, to apply reinforcement principles correctly. She needs only to track what she, and the organization, actually do in response to what the employee does. That's a demanding standard in its own way. It puts the manager's own behavior under the microscope.

4 Consequences

Add or Remove, Increase or Decrease

Four consequences are routinely confused in everyday use. That confusion has real practical costs, so each needs a precise definition. Positive reinforcement adds something valued, to increase a behavior. Negative reinforcement removes something aversive, also to increase a behavior. Punishment adds something aversive, to decrease a behavior. And extinction withholds a previously given consequence, to decrease a behavior. Here's the error this framework corrects. People describe punishment as negative reinforcement. They're not the same thing. Positive and negative don't mean good and bad here. They mean adding, and removing. Reinforcement, positive or negative, always increases a behavior. Punishment always aims to decrease one. So a manager who calls a written warning negative reinforcement is using the term incorrectly. That's punishment.

Table 11.6.1

4 Consequences at Work

Table eleven point six point one grounds each consequence in a workplace example. Positive reinforcement: praising an employee immediately after she handles a difficult situation well. That increases the likelihood she handles the next one the same way. It's sometimes vaguely called a reward, without noting what specifically increases. Negative reinforcement: lifting an unwanted close-monitoring requirement, once an employee demonstrates reliable, independent performance. That increases the likelihood reliable performance continues. It's often confused with punishment, because negative is misread as bad. Punishment: a formal reprimand following a serious safety violation, meant to make a repeat less likely. It's routinely mislabeled negative reinforcement. Extinction: simply no longer responding to a disruptive, attention-seeking comment that always used to draw a reaction. The aim is to make the comment less likely to continue. It's often mistaken for simple neglect. But it's a deliberate consequence.

Reinforcement Schedules

When Reinforcement Arrives

Consequences can also be scheduled in different ways. A continuous schedule reinforces a behavior every single time it occurs. Intermittent schedules reinforce it only some of the time. There are four, varying along two dimensions. Does reinforcement depend on time, or on a number of responses? And is the schedule fixed, or variable? A fixed interval schedule reinforces the first correct behavior after a set amount of time. Think of a weekly paycheck. A variable interval schedule does the same after an unpredictable amount of time. An example is an unannounced spot-check that happens to catch good work in progress. A fixed ratio schedule reinforces behavior after a set number of responses, like a bonus paid after every tenth unit sold. And a variable ratio schedule reinforces after an unpredictable number of responses. Think of an occasional, unannounced spot bonus, with no fixed pattern to when it arrives.

Figure 11.6.1

Variable Schedules Persist Longest

Figure eleven point six point one ranks the four schedules by their relative resistance to extinction. In other words, how long does the behavior keep going once reinforcement actually stops? Lowest is the fixed interval schedule, like the weekly paycheck. Then the variable interval schedule, like the surprise spot-check that ends in praise. Then fixed ratio, like the bonus for every ten units sold. And standing clearly tallest is the variable ratio schedule, the unpredictable spot bonus. The general finding is that variable schedules produce behavior most resistant to extinction. The reason is unpredictability. A person can't easily tell whether reinforcement has simply stopped, or is merely due to arrive later than usual. So the behavior keeps going considerably longer after reinforcement ends. Under a fixed schedule, by contrast, a missed reinforcement is noticed almost immediately. The same mechanism explains why behavior reinforced by genuinely unpredictable rewards persists in many other settings.

What Makes a Consequence Work

Timing, Contingency, Magnitude

Three conditions determine whether a consequence reinforces anything at all. The first is timing. The consequence has to follow the behavior closely. Delayed too long, it loses its connection to the specific behavior that produced it, in the learner's own experience. The second is contingency. The consequence has to actually depend on the behavior. One delivered regardless of what the person did teaches nothing about that behavior specifically. The third is magnitude. The consequence has to be large enough to register as meaningful. The point is worth stating plainly. A delayed or non-contingent consequence reinforces nothing, however well-intentioned it was. Take an annual bonus, loosely tied to a whole year of undifferentiated performance. It fails the timing condition for any single behavior within that year. Or take a reward given to an entire team, regardless of individual contribution. It fails the contingency condition for any one team member's specific actions.

The Problems With Punishment

4 Documented Problems

Punishment carries four specific, well-documented problems. First, it suppresses behavior without teaching an alternative. It can stop an unwanted behavior without ever indicating what the person should do instead. Second, it tends to produce avoidance of the punisher, rather than avoidance of the behavior. A person learns to avoid being caught, or to avoid the punishing manager specifically. That's a different lesson from the one intended. Third, its effects are temporary. They frequently fade once the threat is no longer immediately present. Fourth, it damages the relationship between the punisher and the punished. That connects directly to the coercive power covered in Subchapter nine point ten. In that framework, punishment is simply coercive power, exercised directly.

Unintended Reinforcement

Rewarding What You Complain About

Now the most useful idea in this section: the unintended reinforcement problem. Organizations routinely reinforce, without meaning to, exactly the behavior they later complain about. Three examples make the pattern concrete. First, an organization consistently praises and publicly credits whoever resolves a last-minute crisis. Meanwhile, the steady work that prevents crises in the first place gets no comparable recognition. It has reinforced crisis creation, or crisis tolerance, rather than the prevention it says it wants. Second, a manager pays close attention to an employee only when something has gone wrong. She has reinforced problem behavior as the reliable way to get attention, even while sincerely intending it as correction. Third, an organization quietly reroutes a difficult task away from whoever complains loudly enough. It has reinforced complaining, as an effective way to avoid unwanted work. And that's true regardless of what its stated policy claims to reward.

Behavior Modification

A Behavior-Only Focus, and Its Critics

Behavior modification programs apply reinforcement principles systematically across an organization. They deliberately structure consequences to shape a defined set of target behaviors. A genuine ethical criticism applies here. It holds that this approach treats people as subjects to be conditioned. Not as agents, whose reasons, beliefs, and consent matter in their own right. That criticism is worth taking seriously, rather than dismissing. It identifies a real tension. On one side is reinforcement theory's deliberately behavior-only focus. On the other is the fuller picture of a person that the content and process theories assume. That picture takes account of what a person believes, and what she needs.

Case Vignette

Harborline Rewards the Crisis It Complains About

Here's a composite case, constructed for instruction. Harborline Manufacturing's operations leadership regularly voiced frustration about a recurring pattern. Last-minute production crises kept arising, each needing an emergency, all-hands effort before a shipment deadline. At the same time, the employees who stepped in during these crises got exactly the attention this section describes. They received public praise at team meetings, and direct visibility to senior leadership. They earned a reputation as the people who could be counted on when things went wrong. Meanwhile, some staff did steady, unglamorous work, keeping their own areas running so smoothly that no crisis ever developed there. That work went almost entirely unremarked. Leadership's complaints and its actual reinforcement pattern pointed in opposite directions. Who got praised, who got visibility, who got remembered at review time? All of it reinforced crisis response over prevention. In a real sense, the recurring crises were exactly what Harborline's own reward pattern had trained its workforce to produce. Next, Subchapter eleven point seven turns to goal-setting theory, and how the structure of a goal shapes effort.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Shaping Behavior: Thorndike and the Power of Reinforcement

What is Thorndike's law of effect?
Edward Thorndike's law of effect states that behavior followed by a satisfying consequence is more likely to recur, and behavior followed by an unsatisfying consequence is less likely to recur. For managers, it shifts attention from internal states such as needs or beliefs to observable consequences: what actually follows a behavior, and whether that makes the behavior more or less likely.
What is the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment?
Negative reinforcement removes something unpleasant to increase a behavior, while punishment adds something unpleasant to decrease a behavior. Positive and negative mean adding and removing, not good and bad. Lifting close monitoring once an employee performs reliably is negative reinforcement; a formal reprimand after a safety violation is punishment. Extinction, by contrast, withholds a previously given consequence to reduce a behavior.
Which reinforcement schedule produces the most persistent behavior?
The variable ratio schedule, which rewards after an unpredictable number of responses such as an occasional unannounced spot bonus, produces behavior most resistant to extinction. Variable schedules generally persist longer than fixed ones because people cannot tell whether a reward has stopped or is simply late. A fixed interval schedule, like a weekly paycheck, is the least resistant to extinction.
How do organizations accidentally reinforce the wrong behavior?
Organizations often reward exactly what they complain about. Publicly praising whoever rescues a last-minute crisis, while ignoring steady prevention work, reinforces crises. Giving attention only when something goes wrong reinforces problems, and rerouting tasks away from loud complainers reinforces complaining. Consequences must also be timely, contingent on the behavior, and meaningful in size, or they reinforce nothing.

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