ABSTRACT
According to the Behaviourist ethos, an understanding of people's actions can be gleaned from a consideration of happenings in their surroundings to which they have been exposed. Reinforcement can be engineered through positive or negative means. The vast range of things that we do as we go about our workaday lives gives rise to a multiplicity of differing outcomes, both physical and social. Primary reinforcers can be thought of as stimuli, the positive value and reinforcing potential of which do not rely upon a process of prior learning. Social behaviour presupposes the involvement of other people. Contemplating behavioural options brings us inexorably to the possibility of choice. Reinforcement operates by increasing the future probability of an action that it is made contingent upon. The concept of expectancy is centrally important to the explanation and prediction of behaviour. This chapter covers a lot of ground in considering rewards and rewarding from a number of quite varied points of view.
