Five years from now, the thing that will stick out the most to me from Psychology class will be the process of shaping. I thought that the whole shaping process was very interesting and genius at the same time. It made it even better to learn that it was introduced by the University of Minnesota's very own, B.F. Skinner. It was cool to see how Skinner and his colleagues trained certain behaviors to animals such as pigeons, dogs, and dolphins. One of the reasons why this will be remembered is because you can use the shaping process with humans as well. A parent can shape their new born by rewarding the child with something positive for behaving a certain way or doing something right. Inversely, they can give the child a negative consequence for behaving wrongly. This is a good way to teach "rights" and "wrongs" at an early stage in development for not only humans but animals as well! I just think that it is so interesting how an individual is capable of shaping and training another individual simply be rewarding or disciplining for certain behaviors. As long as they are being rewarded for behaving a certain way then they are most certainly going to keep acting that way for the positive reinforcement. That is the process that I will remember the most five years from now!
Shaping
I though that shaping was also really cool to learn about and definitely wont forget about it. The classical and operant conditioning were probably the most interesting to me and i thought it was cool how Skinner was affiliated with the U of M.
I find the idea of shaping very fascinating too, however, sometimes I wonder how many people in the world take it too far, especially when raising their kids. We talked in class about extinction and events that are more likely to occur, etc., but I feel like I am still curious about whether this conditioning can cause harm since it is not exactly a natural process of learning from mistakes, etc.
I agree.
I want to believe that I am positively shaped by PYS 1001 class.
There is a book you might be interested in: Don't Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training. It talks about a lot of these principles!
Shaping is a very interesting topic to learn about. It truly is fascinating to learn about the behaviors animals can learn to perform. However, I am not sure how much of it I will remember because I don't ever see myself needing this in the future.
This topic was in my brainstormed list of things I wanted to blog about. I completely agree that this will be something we use for not only the next 5 years of our lives, but for the rest of our lives. I feel like this comes into play so often. Like you said, it's frequently used to teach children and even pets. I think this was one of the most important and interesting things that we learned about this year, I feel like it will help us once/if we are parents because you're usually pretty clueless as a new parent. But with the knowledge of this I think it's a great thing to build off on! Great call!