Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, man.

Oh, wow. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 29,

operant conditioning, and I'm your host, James Fodor. This is a follow-up to episode 28 on classical conditioning. In this episode,

I'm going to now cover Operant Conditioning, which is a different type of learning, and I'll also

at the end talk a little bit about observational learning, which is an even more recent discovery.

But before we get to that, we'll start with operant conditioning, which is also known as instrumental conditioning.

This is a more recent discovery. It's generally associated with the behaviorist or behavioralist school of psychology, for example, B.F. Skinner in particular,

who did a lot of work on this in the early to mid-20th century.

Operant conditioning is a form of learning, during which an individual modifies its own behavior

due to association of the behavior with some stimulus or some consequence.

So what I want to do first is clearly distinguish the difference

between operant conditioning and classical conditioning, because this can be a source of confusion.

Remember, classical conditioning requires the existence of some kind of innate reflex.

It basically causes an initially neutral stimulus to give rise, to be conditioned so that it gives rise to some

innate reflexive response.

Uprime conditioning has nothing to do with reflexes.

It's about conscious or what might call voluntary behavior, although the behavior of school

wouldn't actually like using those words, but that's how we describe it.

It's not reflex, it's voluntary behavior.

So anything that involves a reflex or an involuntunt reaction is going to be classical conditioning. Anything that

involves some kind of decision is going to be operant conditioning, or for the most part. Another

difference is that operant conditioning basically involves reinforces and punishments. So operant

...