How do operant conditioning and superstition related

If so, you are definitely not alone. There are quite a few famous athletes who have reported a long list of superstitious behaviors.

Michael Jordan wore his University of North Carolina basketball shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform, tennis superstar Serena Williams is known to bounce the ball five times before her first serve and two times before her second, basketballer Kevin Garnett and many others since him insist on eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before games.

How might these behaviors be linked to the concepts you learned about conditioning in this module? Curiously, even B. Heltzer, R. Intermittent consequences and problem solving: The experimental control of "superstitious" beliefs. Psychological Record, 44 , Herrnstein, R. Superstition: A corollary of the principles of operant conditioning In W. Honig Ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Higgins, S. Social transmission of superstitious behavior in preschool children.

Jahoda, G. The psychology of superstition. London: Allen Lane. Jenkins, H. Judgment of contingency between responses and outcomes. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 79 , Killeen, P. Superstition: A matter of bias, not detectability. Science, , Langer, E.

The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32 , Lattal, K. Response-reinforcer dependence and independence in multiple and mixed schedules. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 20 , Combinations of response-reinforcer dependence and independence. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 22 , Reinforcement contingencies as discriminative stimuli.

Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 23 , Reinforcement contingencies as discriminative stimuli: II. Effects of changes in stimulus probability.

Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 31 , Leigland, S. An experimental analysis of ongoing verbal behavior: Reinforcement, verbal operants, and superstitious behavior. Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 13 , Lindeman, M. Paranormal beliefs: Their dimensionality and correlates.

European Journal of Personality, 20 , Matute, H. Learned helplessness and superstitious behavior as opposite effects of uncontrollable reinforcement in humans. Learning and Motivation, 25 , Human reactions to uncontrollable outcomes: Further evidence for superstitious rather that helplessness.

Illusion of control. Detecting response outcome independence in analytic but not in naturalistic conditions. Psychological Science , 7, Illusion of control in internet users and college students. Illusions of causality at the heart of pseudoscience. British Journal of Psychology, , Mellon, R. Superstitious perception: Response-independent reinforcement and punishment as determinants of recurring eccentric interpretations.

Behaviour Research and Therapy, 47 , Morse, W. A second type of superstition in the pigeon. American Journal of Psychology, 70 , Neuringer, A.

Superstitious key pecking after three peck-produced reinforcements. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 13 , Ninness, H. Superstitious math performance: Interactions between rules and scheduled contingencies.

Psychological Record, 48 , Contingencies of superstition: self-generated rules and responding during second-order response-independent schedules. Psychological Record, 49 , Ono, K. Superstitious behavior in humans. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 47 , Verbal control of superstitious behavior: Superstitions as false rules In S.

Hayes, L. Hayes, M. Ono Eds. Reno, NV: Context Press. Pear, J. Spatiotemporal patterns of behavior produced by variable-interval schedules of reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 44 , Reberg, D. Animal Behaviour, 26 , Superstitious behavior for food and water in the rat. Physiology and Behavior, 19 , After pairing is repeated the organism exhibits a conditioned response CR to the conditioned stimulus when the conditioned stimulus is presented alone.

For example, whenever you come home wearing a baseball cap, you take your child to the park to play. So, whenever your child sees you come home with a baseball cap, he is excited because he has associated your baseball cap with a trip to the park. This learning by association is classical conditioning. Classical conditioning can help us understand how some forms of addiction, or drug dependence, work.

For example, the repeated use of a drug could cause the body to compensate for it, in an effort to counterbalance the effects of the drug. Classical conditioning refers to learning that occurs when a neutral stimulus e. After the association is learned, the previously neutral stimulus is sufficient to produce the behaviour. Metacognition is the ability to examine how you process thoughts and feelings.

This ability encourages students to understand how they learn best. It also helps them to develop self-awareness skills that become important as they get older. Further, based on the results of the basic literature with non- human animals, delayed conditioning should establish conditioned reinforcers more effectively than simultaneous conditioning.

Higher-Order Conditioning is a type of conditioning emphasized by Ivan Pavlov. It involves the modification of reaction to a neutral stimulus associated with a conditioned stimulus that was formerly neutral.

This indicates that the stimulus can be changed and that salivation will still occur. Higher-order conditioning phenomena allow one to distinguish more precisely between processes involved in transmission of sensory or motor information and processes involved in the plasticity underlying learning. Search for:. Putting It Together: Learning Learning Objectives In this module, you learned to explain learning and the process of classical conditioning explain operant conditioning, reinforcement, and punishment describe latent learning and observational learning.

Watch IT Research into superstition has shown that, even if the behaviors seem silly, they can be effective in improving performance, most likely due to the increased confidence and security people feel when they engage in these rituals. DeLessio, Joe , June Licenses and Attributions.