Operant Conditioning Tutorial

Ajouté : 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]If you're wondering why I'm wearing so much green, it's because the little guy tunnel networks get closed for maintenance every once in a while and I have to camouflage with my environment.

[00:00:07]And Vermont is a very, very green state.

[00:00:09]So, this video's going to be kind of an introduction to behavior and the tactics that are used in it. And it's going to be like my old Vim tutorials where it's all gas. It's just like all very valuable information that will immediately be applicable to your life.

[00:00:24]No fluff. I'm even kind of sickened that I took the trouble to make this intro.

[00:00:28]Before I get any further though, I just want to say I've read five [snorts] chapters of B.F. Skinner's About Behaviorism and talked to a couple of behavior experts. I'm not an expert at all myself yet. I'm just really interested in this field cuz it's super complex and feels like it goes infinitely deep like Vim. And so, I'm going to keep going deeper and deeper into it. But yeah, I am not a professional. I'm just citing from stuff I've read. So, I have a video on the vestibule and in general, the vestibule is where behavior content will go. But a lot of people kind of got jump scared by behavior on this channel.

[00:01:00]>> I may feel free, but I'm still being controlled.

[00:01:03]>> Absolutely. Well, we're all controlled all the time.

[00:01:06]>> Got it. Kind of cross post. So, the first thing you should understand is Thorndike's law or the law of effect, which basically states behavior is a function of its consequences. And then slightly downstream from that is behavior that's rewarded will be repeated. And then also behavior that's punished will will not be repeated.

[00:01:23]It'll be done less.

[00:01:25]And that that fundamental principle sounds very simple.

[00:01:29]But when combined with like a a slight lens change in the world, you're going to start to see things pretty differently. So, the next model, antecedent, behavior, consequence. So, antecedent, like something happens before, then there's a behavior, and then there's consequences. Like for instance, I don't know, you hear your mom call for dinner.

[00:01:48]You engage in a certain behavior like going downstairs to eat dinner.

[00:01:53]And then the consequence is like you've eaten dinner. You've been fulfilled. So, that behavior is now been rewarded. When your mom calls for dinner, you're like associating now that you're going to get a nice meal. You're probably not going to go downstairs and get punched in the face, depending on your domestic situation. I don't want to assume anything. Practicing behavior I find is really an exercise in just watching your environment very carefully and watching people very carefully. Uh the the actual like little frameworks I'm going to cover in this video quite simple, but what it takes to bring things into focus in a behavioral lens is kind of strange.

[00:02:26]I would say it's like 40% uh reading and 60% practice.

[00:02:33]Okay, so next up is the consequence menu, the four types of consequences.

[00:02:37]Now this one I find a lot of people get kind of confused and fuzzled with. I did uh for a few days. It's really worth sitting down and kind of memorizing the difference between these four because it's kind of a subtle nuance thing. Not a ton of work though, compared to like learning Vim commands. Uh so you've got two types of reinforcement, two types of punishment. Reinforcement is going to make a behavior occur more often. It's going to make It's a It's a kind of a reward. It's good. Um and punishment is bad. It'll make the behavior occur less often. So we have positive reinforcement. This is like giving a dog a treat or giving someone praise. It's just like good. It's nice. Completely unrelated, but I wanted to just spotlight this comment from HypnoGirl.

[00:03:19]It's really cool to see someone pull out some behavior knowledge. I was hoping by doing this behavior stuff to kind of bait some behavior experts into engaging with me and teaching me more, which is in general a really good strategy. If you're a content creator listening, that's how I got some Vim experts to teach me the really elite Vim tips.

[00:03:37]Um then we have negative reinforcement.

[00:03:39]This is taking away something aversive.

[00:03:42]Uh so for instance, you have a rock in your shoe, you take off your shoe, you feel relieved. Um so you've been reinforced. It's a good thing, um but it's negative reinforcement. You're taking away. Another example is when your seatbelt is like beeping at you to click it in, you do and then it stops and you're like, "Ah, that's okay."

[00:03:59]Negative reinforcement is everywhere, but it's kind of hard to see because we're really not trained for it. Like no one ever tells you about this pattern, but it's very very common way that uh our behavior is driven. So, to give some other examples that are more relevant maybe like we will feel stress or anxiety or fatigue or hunger and all of those feelings, all those negative states being alleviated by an action, whatever that is like playing video games for stress or eating for food or talking to people for loneliness. Like all those things are negative re- reinforced. Um and these negative reinforcers are everywhere. They they underpin everything. They're just sneaky. And then we get to the punishment uh consequences. So, we have negative punishment which is negative meaning takes something away and punishment meaning bad. So, we're going to take away something and this could be time out. Um in the context of a community or a job, it could be like you fire the person. Um or you yeah, you take away their roles or their access to something. And then the last is positive punishment. This is like the most severe. This is like you know, like beating your cow Bessie until she like she didn't produce milk, you know, so you just like thrash her a little bit.

[00:05:19]Now, positive punishment and negative punishment, the punishment in general um it's effective in a certain sense, but it's also causes a bunch of side effects. So, this is why like we don't really want to use punishment unless strictly necessary, unless it's like really a situation which demands it which uh I can think of two punishment examples, right? So, for negative punishment, which is withholding reward, uh if someone is being really annoying to you in your DMs, ignore them. Like don't reinforce that behavior because if someone pesters you constantly and you respond to them, think about that. Like behavior rewarded is behavior repeated. So, they've done something annoying, they got a result from it, they're going to do it again in the future. If they do something annoying and you ignore them, they might start to think, "Okay, why didn't that person respond?" Popular girls do this all the time. And then positive punishment is like if you have a a pedophile or something on your hands, you just out. Punished. And then you've got positive reinforcement, obviously, which is giving something good. But the the good thing you give to someone is really dependent on the person and the situation. So, it depends on what you're trying to do. It depends on what behavior you're trying to encourage, essentially. But say that you like the way that someone is scholarly and academic or the way, for instance, in the server this happens a lot, when someone admits they don't understand something cuz we we get in our programming community a lot of people that like to intellectualize um and like to they like to feel smart. And that might be partially because I've like I've put intelligence on a pedestal a lot in this community.

[00:06:59]Um but when I see someone who's humble and is like, "You know what? I don't get what that sentence means at all." I always positively reinforce that. And there's a whole different like toolkit.

[00:07:09]There's all these different kind of treats I can pull out. I can give a reward in terms of a role. I can give them praise. I can give them attention, social information. I can spotlight them on my channel. I can introduce them to people. Like there's many different kind of rewards. Um and my reward toolkit is going to be different from yours, especially in the context of this community, because people in this community have a certain they they know certain things about me. I have a certain like weight to the rewards I can give, particularly praise, particularly public praise. Um and you applying these tactics in your daily life, and yes, you do you can and do apply these in your daily life. I apply these with everyone.

[00:07:48]In a in a learning theory teaching context, um, negative reinforcement could be someone is struggling to solve a problem or struggling to answer a question. You can provide the answer and they will feel relief. Now, this is a sneaky sneaky tactic and a really good one for uh being a a general more competent conversationalist.

[00:08:09]So, what I will do and I've seen my mentor do this a lot, too, is uh when having kind of a harder conversation with someone, you can ask them kind of leading questions to get them thinking about stuff. And especially if you're asking slightly slightly harder questions, slightly uh maybe maybe slightly more personal questions like if there's something that they did that you didn't really like, you can ask like, "And And what do you think the effects of that were?" And if they they aren't really sure, you can wait like 1 or 2 seconds, let them kind of sit in that uncomfortable silence, and then answer the question for them.

[00:08:40]And you've just negatively reinforced them. You've removed that discomfort and you've provided some reinforcement. Um, this is also a very important tactic when you're having tough conversations with people. If you want to try to um help them out with a particularly difficult behavior or particularly social behaviors are ones that hold people back a lot. Um, what you can do is kind of drop some information slowly, and then they might feel pretty uncomfortable because there are certain realizations to have, which uh are are pretty worldview shattering. And so, what you can do is allow that person to back away, take their time to kind of incorporate that into their worldview.

[00:09:20]And that's also kind of uh negative reinforcement. Like, it can be intense to be on a one-on-one with someone, especially someone offering you like really strong advice. Um, and then let that person, yeah, like back away, and they'll feel relief at that. And you can get really good at combining all these different kinds of rewards. Well, the the two primary rewards, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, in different ways and different amounts, so that conversation with you is very enjoyable for people and they'll keep coming back because behavior rewarded is behavior repeated.

[00:09:57]So, that's pretty cool. You can look at something someone does and if you like it, you can reinforce it and if you don't like it, you shouldn't really punish it exactly per se. I mean, you can in certain scenarios, but but be kind of sparing with that and um yeah, it's better to use negative punishment.

[00:10:13]There's kind of a chart I've seen that's like you use positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, negative punishment, positive punishment. Like that's the last resort. Um Although there are there are times where like a small slap on the wrist isn't isn't bad. There there are uses of it.

[00:10:27]The thing with punishment though is it will cause usually unintended side effects because the person won't learn, "Oh, I shouldn't do this." They're going to learn, "Oh, if I do this around this person, I will get punished. Therefore, I'm not going to do it around this person or I'm going to kind of skirt around it in another way." They they will generate an avoidance behavior sometimes and that's just not it doesn't really work as well as positive reinforcement does. All right, and then next up is the enrichment category. So, I just learned about these recently and I'm a little bit of a noob here still, but bear with me. So, we have social, cognitive, physical, habitat, sensory, and food. And uh these occur all around us. It's a little a little funny to kind of treat yourself like an animal, but um I don't know. The more we know about humans, the more we're kind of just like really really smart animals. And uh yeah, so all around us constantly are stimuli. We're in environments where there are different stimuli happening.

[00:11:23]And uh you can kind of take this ensemble and it'll it'll get fed into all your sensors um on this thing and then you'll feel a certain way towards it. So, for instance, right now you're probably watching the screen or maybe you're doing chores or something and and spending your time more efficiently, which is good for you. I appreciate you doing that cuz I would do that too with this kind of content. But, I'm sad that you're not looking at my fancy graphics.

[00:11:49]I will say that. You have like visual stimuli. You have like me, the outfit I'm wearing, my conspiracy theory strings on the ceiling. You have the sound of my voice. You have probably the smells and whatever aromas, I guess, if you want to be more fancy, hanging about in your environment, in your house, wherever you're watching this. And that kind of amalgamation of things is creating a certain feeling within you. And I would guess that feeling is reinforcing because you've come back again and again. Something about this experience is reinforcing and we could we could take some guesses, right? Looking at the enrichment categories for cognitive, we've got mental stimulation and novel experience. I would imagine this is slightly novel for you and probably largely cognitive.

[00:12:34]That's why you come back to this channel again and again.

[00:12:38]Maybe there is some sensory stuff you like about this as well. Maybe there's just like a certain vibe to you, my videos or my persona that you might find enjoyable for some reason. So, why do we care about the the different enrichment categories? Well, because you can kind of use them to break down what may be reinforcing to people. So, in the context of my community, I can say like well, I can kind of engineer the habitat a little bit. I can make cool, interesting visual motifs. I can add different areas with different social structures and expectations and dynamics. I can add different cognitively stimulating things. We can't really do food yet.

[00:13:19]We're working on that one. We're going to probably mail out some I don't know. We'll we'll we'll we'll we'll work on that. Physical habitat one is super interesting like nests and dens.

[00:13:29]Um The the ability to build with your own materials. This is kind of what the the vestibular social network mirrors, like you have your own little area of the server.

[00:13:40]We also have like perching and climbing structures, which I guess could be the forums.

[00:13:46]There's there's like a lot of different kind of materials in here, like social materials to shape your uh your environment with. And then social social is probably one of the biggest ones, like uh people and other animals around you um in in the context at least of programmers. So, I was talking to you a good programmer friend of mine the other day and um any programmer who's burnt out, this might hit close to home. And anyone in general actually who's trying to learn behavior and is finding it hard. Reading about behaviors and is not an easy book at all. And uh you might you might be trying to read it and start to apply things in it and it's like it's theoretical. There's a lot of history to it. There's a lot of isms you got to understand. You can't just like go out and start changing things in your environment right away. Um and let's let's just think about the experience of reading or programming or doing hard work for a second, right?

[00:14:41]Like let's look at the enrichment categories. You're probably hitting both cognitive categories pretty well. You're maybe hitting some tactile experience. I know for me Vim is quite reinforcing, like tactilely and audi auditorial.

[00:14:55]What's the word for that? Auditorially, I guess.

[00:14:58]Um so, you've got a few of the categories hit, but you're probably missing some of the big ones. The biggest ones being social. And yes, like studying and learning can be a very introverted activity, but I've found like the biggest cheat code in my motivation by far has just been having other humans to give me praise and recognition for my hard work. It just makes the cycle reinforcing. And remember, behavior rewarded is behavior repeated. Um behavior will slightly shatter your view of free will and a bunch of other things like that. Um not I I shatter isn't the right word because I would say reconfigure because you'll look at yourself not like, oh, I'm I'm the guy up in here. I make decisions. I do things. Instead, you're like, this thing I'm in gets affected by the environment. I can change the environment and then the the thing I'm in will respond differently. Um but we have we have pretty low willpower to be honest. We're weak-willed little guys.

[00:15:56]And uh well, I'm a little guy. You might be taller than me. So, this is where the real power of behavior starts to come in. You can look at those enrichment categories and be like, hey, I'm not really hitting some of these in the way that I like and I'm not really enjoying programming or learning anymore. I'm watching YouTube all the time um because YouTube has got maybe a little bit more of a social element.

[00:16:16]You're actually seeing someone which is in a in a very parasocial way, but like it's it's it's a need. It's an enrichment category, right? And And our brain maybe can't tell the difference all the time.

[00:16:27]It's like, well, you're talking to Sylvan, you know, that's kind of social.

[00:16:30]And uh even even though it's like literally just through a screen. It's It's weird how our brain works.

[00:16:36]And I've heard of this from a lot of other YouTubers like Speak Machine um has said posting progress about like his weight loss journey. And for me, just posting progress about my like technical journey is massively rewarding. I keep doing it and doing it and doing it. I would have given up long ago if I wasn't like watched by so many people. And now it's gotten to the point where so many people in real life know that I do this that it's like, oh, I can't really give up.

[00:17:01]And uh it's very important to have like uh social enrichment and very important to enjoy what you're doing. Enjoy that hard work. Um and it becomes almost trivially easy once you hit those enrichment categories. It's you'll realize how much wasted effort you were making like trying to force yourself to do something when it's just like well, you just didn't enjoy the thing. And so, how do you actually do it? For for instance, behavior.

[00:17:29]Anyone that was at my book club like a couple days ago knows that I make the book club like a really really enriching on purpose. So, I'll like constantly go on random tangents. I'll constantly like give people roles and praise strategically. I'll constantly like pull up random little software recommendations and stuff.

[00:17:48]And I'll try to hit as many of those enrichment categories as possible. And when I'm reading the Skinner book, which is pretty hard, I'll kind of go into personal explanations and anecdotes and talking with my friend Eric the other day who I got pretty interested in behavior.

[00:18:03]He was like, well, I don't really have the the mental capacity right now. It's like it's pretty tough to read hard science. You got to sit down and get obsessed with it. It's it's a completely different beast when you're being reinforced to do something. It's like you will your your willpower does not matter. You will do it because you love it.

[00:18:24]You will just keep doing it. Behavior rewarded is behavior repeated. We're we're little biological state machines.

[00:18:31]And then we'll get into DRI and DRA.

[00:18:34]Differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior, differential reinforcement of alternative behavior.

[00:18:39]And then there's a couple others I haven't learned yet, but even those have proved remarkably effective. So, what exactly are they? I mentioned them in another video. So, maybe you watch a lot of YouTube, maybe you play a lot of video games. Nothing super inherently wrong with either of those things. I've partaken heavily in my time. I would min-max those things though. Like I would always be playing Hypixel Bed Wars and like listening to an audiobook at the same time. And uh what you can do instead of like punishing that behavior if you want to do something else like read a hard science textbook is you can make the other things so fun and so reinforcing that by differential reinforcement of an alternative or incompatible behavior, you you will stop doing the thing you don't want to do. So, incompatible is something like it directly prevents you from doing the other thing. So, an example would be like for dogs, like if you give them a chew toy, they can't bite and chew on the chew toy at the same time cuz they only have one mouth, unless you have a really really weird breed of dog. I know they're getting kind of up these days, like just look at pugs.

[00:19:45]And then reinforcement of alternative behavior, I guess isn't totally incompatible, but it's like you you would be unlikely to do it. I mean like I I don't totally know like what the hard line is there. I'm not sure on that one, I'm guessing, but say like going for a run or a bike ride instead of watching YouTube. Like yeah, you could watch YouTube at the same time, but it would be kind of inconvenient, but it would be possible.

[00:20:11]So, then there's schedules of reinforcement. These are pretty important to understand. I'm still quite fuzzy on the details, but here's how I understand it. So, you could have fixed ratio reinforcement where you'll do an action, a behavior will occur, and then after a certain amount of time, you'll get a reward.

[00:20:27]Um and then that's that's fixed interval. And then there's fixed ratio, which I believe is after a certain number of times of doing a certain behavior. So, this could be just like you know, every time you sit down to program, you spend a couple hours. It's there's going to be some variation there, but more or less it's linear. You'll kind of have an idea, okay, I'll get this much understanding, maybe this much progress.

[00:20:56]Whereas you've got variable interval and variable ratio reinforcement, which is where the time or the number of times repeating the behavior is randomized.

[00:21:06]And this one is insidious. It makes things extremely addictive. This is how gambling operates, it's how TikTok operates.

[00:21:15]The when you're you're not really sure when the reward will happen next, you'll kind of compulsively engage in the behavior waiting for that gambling hit.

[00:21:24]That absolutely just tricks our monkey brains. The nice thing about it is you can you can kind of use it yourself. You can kind of weaponize it. And I do this all over my server where like it's there's just random rewards waiting to happen. You could run into mentors, your luck could change completely tomorrow based on your behavior.

[00:21:43]You could like all kinds of stuff could happen. All kinds of praise, all kinds of doors could open to you. And like that makes the server pretty pretty enjoyable.

[00:21:53]And the same thing with my book clubs.

[00:21:54]And the same thing with um Yeah, if you if you want to be just very charming, very fun to be around, very reinforcing to be around for any kind of person, you can kind of use a lot of these tactics. You can combine them together. And if you are variably reinforcing someone with like the things that they like and things you know are enjoyable to them, you become pretty magnetic. All right, stay tuned for top five elite behavior tips.