reluctant patient might use a technique known as shaping, in which successive
approximations of the desired behavior are reinforced. For example, you
might reward the withdrawn patient for getting out of bed and sitting among
the other patients. Once this behavior is established, you might reinforce him
only when he is near or in the art therapy room. From here, rewards might be
limited to time spent in the room during the sessions and later to time spent
attending to and participating in the sessions. Shaping is particularly useful
when teaching complex behaviors. Children will learn to enjoy reading ifeach step along the way is reinforced. If learning the alphabet, letter sounds,
and short words is difficult and unpleasant, it is unlikely the child will move
on to reading sentences and stories.
Generalization and Discrimination
Operant conditioning would be rather limited if every situation required that
we learn a new response. Fortunately, because of generalization , this is not
the case. Pigeons trained to peck at large red circles to receive food will also
peck at small orange circles, although not as frequently. This process, called
stimulus generalization, helps explain why personality characteristics general-
ize across situations. A child rewarded for acting politely around relatives will
probably act politely around new acquaintances. The polite response has been
generalized from the stimulus of the relative to the new stimulus, the stranger.
When we observe polite behavior consistently across situations, we say thispattern is part of the child’ s personality.
As long as the generalized response is met with reinforcement, the behavior
is likely to continue. But if the pigeon is not rewarded for pecking at orangecircles, it will soon learn to discriminate between rewarded and nonrewarded
stimuli and will peck only at the red ones. Similarly, the polite child may come
in contact with adults who punish friendly behavior with harshness. Soon
the child will learn to discriminate between people who are friendly and people
who aren ’t. The difference between a good and a great tennis player or
between a second-string baseball player and a star may be the ability to make
fine discriminations between those actions that lead to a reinforcement (a win-
ning shot or a home run) and those that do not.
SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY
It is difficult to overstate the impact traditional behaviorism had on psychology
and subsequently the field of personality. Watson and his followers provided a
scientific, easily testable account of human behavior that complemented thegrowing empirical flavor of psychology in American universities. The basic
principles of learning were so universal they could be tested on lower animals.
The image many people have of the lab-coated psychologist, pencil in hand,watching rats running through mazes comes from this era. But somewhere in
the 1950s or 1960s the enthusiasm for traditional behaviorism began to wane.
Psychologists questioned the assertion that all human learning is the result ofclassical or operant conditioning. “The prospects for survival would be slim in-
deed if one could learn only from the consequences of trial and error, ”one350 CHAPTER 13 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach