Understanding Behavior

What thoughts come to mind when you read the word, "reinforcement"? For many, terms such as "bribery", "sticker charts", "candy", and "good" might come to mind. Behavior analysis, on the other hand, does not assess a state of good or bad to terms such as reinforcement (or punishment, which you will likely read about next). We use it to talk about the direction a behavior is headed. If a behavior is increasing, it has been reinforced. Sometimes this occurs because something was provided to the person following a certain behavior and other times, it occurs because something non-preferred or aversive went away after the behavior.

Likewise to reinforcement, punishment does not mean "bad". It only means that a behavior is decreasing in either rate, intensity, duration, or some other way of measuring that behavior. Behaviors that we want to see occur more frequently can be punished if they do not result in the desired outcome or receive enough contact to make it worth it to exhibit the behavior again.

We all like to control our environment. While this may vary from person to person, every human alive attempts to regulate the amount of social contact we give and receive, the amount of tasks we do, when we engage with things that we like, and how we feel at any given moment. Many of us have appropriate ways of regulating these factors, but many of us have also used behaviors that would be considered less socially acceptable to get our needs met. When dealing with behavior that is challenging, the first step is to identify the "why" behind the behavior; and the "why" is tied to the factors mentioned above. We call this the "function".

There are four reasons that behavior occurs: to establish or maintain the attention of others, to escape aversive stimuli, tasks, events, etc., to gain access to preferred items, activities, events, etc., and to obtain some sort of sensory stimulation. They are also called escape, access, tangible, and sensory/automatic.