Primary and Secondary Reinforcement
Modified: 2024-07-02 1:44 AM CDST
- Primary reinforcers are biological.
- Food, drink, and pleasure are the
principal examples of primary reinforcers.
- But, most human
reinforcers are secondary, or conditioned.
- Examples include money,
grades in schools, and tokens.
- Secondary reinforcers acquire their power via a history of
association with primary reinforcers or other secondary reinforcers.
- For example, if I told you that dollars were no longer going to be
used as money, then dollars would lose their power as a secondary
reinforcer.
- Here's an example of how a secondary reinforcer is established.
- Let's train a dog to sit.
- First we would introduce the discriminative
stimulus, the word "sit."
- We could just say "sit" and when the dog
sits, we would give it some food.
- The food would be the primary
reinforcer.
- Immediately after we gave it the food we would say, "good
dog."
- "Good dog" is our secondary reinforcer of praise.
- We would then
repeat the process many times.
- Gradually, we would give the
food less often, but the dog would continue to sit when we told it
to.
- The words "good dog" gradually became a secondary reinforcer.
- Another example would be in a token economy.
- Many therapeutic
settings use the concept of the token economy.
- Remember, a token is
just an object that symbolizes some other thing.
- For example, poker
chips are tokens for money.
- In New York City, subway tokens used to be
pieces of metal that could be inserted into the turnstiles of the
subway.
- Small debts were often paid off using tokens in New York because
of the token's value of one subway ride.
- However, attempting to pay
off debts elsewhere using NYC subway tokens would not be acceptable.
- In a token economy, people earn tokens for making certain
responses; then those tokens can be cashed in for privileges, food,
or drinks.
- For example, residents of an adolescent halfway house may
earn tokens by making their beds, being on time to meals, not
fighting, and so on.
- Then, being able to go to the movies on the
weekend may require a certain number of tokens.
- Poker chips in a poker game are also tokens.
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