Reinforcements and Punishments

Often times students get confused on the concepts of reinforcements and punishment, as well as the term positive and negative as it relates to punishment.  Hopefully, I can help clarify it for you.

A REINFORCER is anything that INCREASES a desired behavior.  A PUNISHMENT is anything that DECREASES a desired behavior.

POSITIVE means you are adding something to a situation.  NEGATIVE means you are taking something away.  (Don't think of these in terms of good or bad, think of them in mathematical terms as in adding to, or subtracting from.)

When identifying operant conditioning, go through the following steps:
1. Is this trying to increase (reinforce) or decrease (punish) a behavior?
2. Is this adding something (positive) to the situation or taking something away (negative)?

Examples:
Let's say I wanted to increase my exercising frequency for the week.  Here are a few ways I might reinforce that:
Positive reinforcer (adding something that increases my frequency of working out) - buying new running shoes or workout gear.
Negative reinforcer (taking something unpleasant away that increases my frequency of working out) - if I work out 4 times a week, then I don't have to do a specific chore I dislike doing.

If I am trying to reduce my laziness, then I would use punishment in hopes of decreasing that behavior (being lazy).
Positive punishment (adding something that will decrease my laziness) - if I don't work out then I will have to add money to a friends Paypal account.
Negative punishment (taking something away that will decrease my laziness) - if I don't work out, then I don't get to watch my favorite tv show for the week.

Now, let's pretend I want to decrease the amount of junk food I consume.  Here are some ways I might do that using operant conditioning:
Positive punishment:  Every time I eat fast food, I have to do an extra mile of exercise.
Negative punishment: If I eat fast food, I have to give up my make up the next day.

These punishments and rewards happen to be related to task at hand, but keep in mind that reinforcers/punishments don't always have to be directly related.  Anything that increases a behavior is a reward... This is why they say sometimes when we give attention to poor behavior, we are actually rewarding the behavior we are trying to stop (in this case, the reinforcer is our attention).

Be mindful not to confuse rewards and punishment with outcomes.  The outcome of eating less fast food might be weight loss, but the punishment to get to the outcome is a deliberate act (such as giving up my make up the next day).