SENG3011
🐶 8.2 - Influencing Behaviour
In this lecture
- Theory of reinforcement
- Types of reinforcement
- Delivering reinforcement
- Incentives, rewards and punishments
Examples of classic 'incentives'
- In a business context:
- Wages/salaries
- Bonus for reaching annual targets
- Performance appraisal (quarterly review)
- Employee of the month
- Disciplinary procedures
- In a university context:
- Marks
- Activity is fun
- At home (for kids)
- Treat foods
- Screen time
Recap: Why do people behave the way they do?
- The individual
- Personality
- Capability
- The organisation
- The situation
- People behave how they have been conditioned to behave
- Everyone's behaviour makes sense from their point of view
Behavioural consequences
- Behaviour is a function of its consequences
- People do what they do because of what happens to them when they do it
- Performance is what about happens every day
- Behavioural consequences - those things and events which follow a behaviour and change the probability that the behaviour will be repeated in the future
- Most of the behavioural consequences we encounter we don't think about (e.g. turning on a light, typing on a keyboard)
How to influence behaviour
- How to make people stop doing things:
- Identify behaviours that are producing the poor outcome and arrange consequences that will stop them
- How to make people start doing things:
- Identify behaviours that are producing desirable outcomes and arrange consequences that will positively reinforce them
Four ways to change behaviour
ABCs of Human Behaviour
- Antecedent (the situation preceding the action)
- Behaviour (the action itself)
- Consequence (the outcome of the action) - reinforcer
- AKA - Given, When, Then
- Difference between can't do and won't do
- If someone did something correctly in the recent past, but isn't doing it anymore - it's probably a won't do
Three dimensions to a reinforcer
- Positive / negative - is the consequence positive or negative from the perspective of the performer?
- Immediate / future - does the consequence occur as the behaviour is happening (immediate) or some time later (future)
- Certain / uncertain - what is the probability that the performer will experience the consequence?
Example: Recycling
Example: Writing tests for your code in SENG3011
Can we spot a pattern of consequences types?
Trust
- Trust is doing (consequence) what you say you are going to do (antecedent)
- Tell someone something's going to happen => It happens => +ve reinforcement
- Tell someone something's going to happen => It doesn't happen => -ve reinforcement
- Be careful of over-promising
The price of negative reinforcement
- Positive reinforcement incentivises maximum performance, while negative reinforcement gets a level of performance that is just enough to get by to escape the unpleasant consequence
- Indicators that negative reinforcement is present:
- People get things done just in time
- Most of the work happens in the last few days (J-curve)
- Negative talk
- Performance goes flat after reaching a goal
- When you remove a performance requirement and performance drops
Negative reinforcement has its place
- Negative reinforcement serves us well when all we need is compliance/minimum performance
- If you can't find anything to positively reinforce, then the person is probably in need of some negative reinforcement
- Negative reinforcement needs to be paired with positive reinforcement of improvement
- B. Franklin "Write people's accomplishments in stone and their faults in the sand"
The tricky thing about negative reinforcement
- Negative reinforcement is more likely to provide us (the reinforcers) with a PIC than positive reinforcement
- We need to wait until the next time a behaviour occurs to see if the reinforcement work (PFU)
Positive reinforcement
- Discretionary effort - the level of effort people could give if they wanted to, but is beyond what is required
- Natural - e.g. turning on a light
-
Created - must be added by a person
- Social - involves doing or saying something to another person and has trophy value (e.g. a compliment)
- Tangible - an object and has salvage value (e.g. a toaster)
- All tangible reinforcers should be paired with social reinforcement
- Find reinforcers for people: ask, try, observe
- Different people will have different reinforcers
Positive reinforcement
- Grandma's Law - if you eat your veggies, you can have dessert
- Pair actions that aren't reinforcing with ones that are
- Sources of positive reinforcement:
- Work-related reinforcement - when we arrange a task so that reinforcement is automatically associated with the task (e.g. green CI ticks, tests passing)
- Peer-related - from peers at work - in best position to deliver PICs, can observe performance more closely and more often
- Management-related
Decreasing behaviour
- Punishment + Penalty
- Don't shoot the messenger
- Delayed punishment is no more effective than delayed reinforcement
- Punished behaviours should be paired with positively reinforced replacement behaviours
- Recovery - old behaviour resurfaces
Extinction
- Doing nothing changes behaviour
- Extinction - withholding or not delivering reinforcement for previously reinforced behaviour
- "Just ignore it and it'll go away"
- Signs of extinction
- Extinction burst (e.g. lift button)
- Erratic/emotional behaviour
- Resurgence
Errors in delivering reinforcement
- Perception - does the performer find it reinforcing?
- Contingency - must be if and only if (desired behaviour) then (reinforcement)
- Delay - optimal reinforcement is immediate
- Frequency - has to happen at a frequent rate (annual, quarterly, monthly isn't frequent enough)
- 5 to 1 rule - 1 negative remark equals 5 positive remarks
- ... "but" ...
-
Shit sandwich - avoid pairing positive reinforcement with punishment
- Shit sandwich is still good for feedback
Let's revisit our incentive examples
- In a business context:
- Wages/salaries
- Bonus for reaching annual targets
- Performance appraisal (quarterly review)
- Employee of the month
- Disciplinary procedures
- In a university context:
- Marks
- Activity is fun
- At home (for kids)
- Treat foods
- Screen time
How has everything changed?
- "Why do we have to do all this reinforcement stuff today? We didn't use to have to do it, and we got along OK"
- We are conditioned to behave the way we do
- How many positive reinforcers do you get a minute playing a computer game/watching YouTube?
Further Reading
SENG3011 23T1 - 8.2 - Influencing Behaviour
By npatrikeos
SENG3011 23T1 - 8.2 - Influencing Behaviour
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