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Record W2095406546 · doi:10.1037/h0099898

Praise's magic reinforcement ratio: Five to one gets the job done.

2000· article· en· W2095406546 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Stephen Ray Flora

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Behavior Analyst Today · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicBehavioral and Psychological Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsReinforcementPraisePsychologyMAGIC (telescope)Social psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

All behavior analysts, teachers and parents can use as a reinforcer. Experimental and applied behavior analyses have established that praise, attention, and do in fact function as reinforcers. Social interaction is both a primary and a conditioned reinforcer. Contingent social interaction can shape operant behavior (lever pressing) of rats and maintain responding on fixed ratio schedules that does not differ significantly from behavior shaped and maintained with food reinforcement (Evans, Duvel, Funk, Watson, & Neuringer, 1994). Rats can be shaped to lever press when the only reinforcement is being petted and praised (good girl') by a human (Davis and Perusse, 1988). As the term starved for affection suggests, social approval and function as reinforcers for humans as well. When adult is contingent on vocalization, infant vocalization increases and when infant vocalization no longer produces adult attention, vocalizations decrease (extinction; Rheingold, Gewirtz, & Ross, 1959). Just as deprivation and satiation of food alter food's effectiveness as a reinforcer, establishing operations such as deprivation and satiation of approval systematically alter the effectiveness of approval as a reinforcer. When children are deprived of approval, approval's effectiveness as a reinforcer increases. Conversely, when children are satiated with and admiration, approval's effectiveness as a reinforcer decreases (Gewirtz & Baer, 1958). When adult eye contact and smiling are contingent upon infant smiling, smiling is reinforced (increases) and crying, fussing and frowns decrease (Etzel & Gewirtz, 1967). In fact, attention and are so well established as reinforcers that their use is seldom questioned in applied behavior analysis. Attention is regularly identified as a reinforcer in functional analyses (e.g. Berg, Peck, Wacker, Harding, McComas, Richman, & Brown 2000; Durand & Carr; 1991; Meyer, 1999). Praise and are recognized as effective motivators by some in the business world. There are two things people want more than sex and money, according to Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, recognition and praise (Nelson, 1994, p. 9). Accordingly, Robert Preziosi, President of Management Associates argues that there never seems to be enough recognition. After a brutal day, walk up to employees and say 'you were great. I'm so glad about what you did today.' You'll be surprised how far a simple gesture will go (Nelson, 1994, p. 137). As a free, virtually always available reinforcer, is a very pragmatic reinforcer for behavior analysts, educators, parents, clinicians, coaches and social workers. When teachers of students with emotional and disorder (EBD) are taught to increase their rate of behavior-specific praise, students' rates of on-task behavior increase (Sutherland, Wehby, & Copeland, 2000). College students who receive verbal for doing homework spend more time completing their homework assignments (Hancock, 2000). When parents of young children with behavioral problems were taught to their children's compliance and task engagement, the resulting increased produced improved compliance and decreased inappropriate behavior (Greene, Kamps, Wyble, & Ellis, 1999). The prompt, pause and procedure is an effective and recommended remedial technique for children making slow progress in reading (Merrett, 1998). Unfortunately, despite praise's proven effectiveness as a reinforcer and it's free cost, is vastly underutilized. In an analysis of studies conducted in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and St. Helena, Robyn Beaman and Kevin Wheldall of Macquarie University in Sydney Australia found that there is little evidence to suggest that teachers, universally, systematically deploy contingent as positive reinforcement in spite of the considerable literature testifying to its effectiveness. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.061
Threshold uncertainty score0.204

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.002
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0610.029

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.133
GPT teacher head0.351
Teacher spread0.218 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations40
Published2000
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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