ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses variously referred to in the literature of psychology as simple selective learning, trial-and-error learning, effect learning. It provides a scientific account of the types of behavior described as "purposive", but the first step is to recognize that such behavior is influenced by its previous consequences. The chapter studies laboratory animals because rigorously control their environment, past and present, but operant behavior constitutes a large proportion of the everyday activities of humans. Human behavior is much affected by conditioned reinforcement. That is, behavior is changed when the consequence is a stimulus with a function that has been established through the experience of the individual. The chapter also explains instrumental learning, instrumental conditioning, operant learning, and operant conditioning. It prefers to use the term simple operant conditioning for the situation where a reinforcing stimulus is made contingent upon a response that has a nonzero frequency of occurrence prior to the introduction of reinforcement.
