Premack’s principle: what is it and what role does it play in behaviorism?

A hypothesis that explains how certain behaviors appear and disappear in humans and animals.

Premack's principle arises in the context of operant conditioning and supports the existence of a determining psychological dimension in the repetition or extinction of a behavior. This dimension is the value that the individual attributes to a particular event, which is generated through his interactions with that event.

This principle represented one of the great postulates of operant conditioning in the mid-twentieth century, since it established a break with the traditional definition of the "reinforcer", which had important consequences in learning models and motivation studies.

Premack's Principle: definition and origins

Between 1954 and 1959, the American psychologist David Premack, and his wife and collaborator Ann James Premack, conducted several investigations on operant conditioning by analyzing the behavior of monkeys belonging to the genus cebus by analyzing the behavior of monkeys belonging to the cebus genus..

Initially, these investigations were carried out at the Yerkes Primate Biology Laboratory, located in the state of Florida. Then at the University of Missouri, Columbia State, then at the University of California and finally at the University of Pennsylvania.

Premack's hypothesis was as follows: any response A will reinforce any response B, if and only if the probability of occurrence of response A is greater than that of response B.. That is, they wanted to prove that an infrequent behavioral response can be reinforced by another response, as long as the latter involves a greater preference over the former.

In other words, the premack principle holds the following: if there is a behavior or activity that arouses little interest, this behavior will most likely not occur spontaneously.. However, if immediately after performing it, there is an opportunity to perform another behavior or activity that does arouse interest, then the first one (the one that does not interest) will significantly increase its likelihood of repetition.

Contributions to operant conditioning

In Skinner's operant conditioning, reinforcers are stimuli that have the intrinsic property of increasing the incidence of a behavior. Thus, the very definition of "reinforcer" was given by its effects on behavior, which meant any stimulus that had the capacity to increase a behavior as long as it was operant. This meant that the This meant that the reinforcer itself was at the center of efforts to increase any behavior. to increase any behavior.

But, when Primack's hypothesis was proven, Skinner's theory of operant conditioning took an important turn: far from functioning in an absolute way, reinforcers function in a relative way.

That is to say, the reinforcer does not matter in itself, what matters is how many response opportunities it offers to the individual. In this sense, what determines the effect of an event is the value the subject attributes to the event itself.. For this theory, it is the responses that are central, so that what increases the occurrence of a behavior is not so much "a reinforcer" as a series of "reinforcing events".

The response deprivation theory

Subsequently, other experiments and research conducted in the context of operant conditioning have challenged the operation of Premack's principle.

Among these is the response deprivation theory. Broadly speaking, it suggests that there are situations in which the restriction of access to the reinforcing response, far from increasing the preference for the instrumental response, what it does is to increase the motivation for the formerand therefore the series of behaviors associated with it. In short, it suggests that the less access to a behavior, the more motivation it generates.

Value according to this theory

According to Pereira, Caycedo, Gutiérrez and Sandoval (1994), because of the importance that Premack's principle attributes to the motivation generated by reinforcing events, one of the central concepts in Premack's principle is "value", whose definition can be summarized and defined as follows:

Organisms order the events of the world according to a hierarchy of values..

Value is measured by the probability that an organism will respond to a stimulus. In turn, probability can be measured by the duration of interaction with that response. That is, the more time spent performing an activity, surely the greater the value the activity has for the individual.

If an event that is more highly valued is presented immediately after an event that is less highly valued, the behaviors of the latter are reinforced. Likewise, the less valued event and the behaviors involved in it acquire "instrumental" value.

If the opposite effect occurs (an event of lower value occurs immediately after one of higher value), what occurs is the punishment of the instrumental behavior, i.e., the probability of the instrumental behavior decreases.that is, the probability of repeating the less valued behavior decreases.

Likewise, "value" is defined as a psychological dimension that individuals assign to events, just as they assign other properties (size, color, weight, for example). In the same sense, value is assigned according to the particular interaction that an individual establishes with the event.

It is this psychological dimension that determines the probability of occurrence or disappearance of a behavior, i.e., the reinforcement or punishment effect. Because of this, to guarantee that a behavior will occur or disappearIn the case of the event to be reinforced, it is essential to analyze the value that the individual attributes to it.

This implies analyzing the individual's present and previous interactions with the event to be reinforced, as well as the opportunities to generate other responses or events.

The pinball and candy experiment

To summarize the above, we conclude by describing an experiment that David Premack and his an experiment that David Premack and his collaborators carried out with a group of children. In the first part, they were presented with two alternatives (called "responses"): eating a piece of candy or playing with a pinball machine.

In this way it was possible to determine which of these two behaviors was more likely to be repeated for each child (and with this, the level of preference was determined).

In the second part of the experiment, the children were told that they could eat a candy as long as they played the pinball machine first. Thus, "eating a candy" was the reinforcing response, and "playing with the pinball machine" was the instrumental response. The result of the experiment was as follows: only the children who had a greater preference for "eating a candy" reinforced their less likely or less interesting behavior, that of "playing with the pinball machine".

Bibliographical references:

• Premack's Principle (2018). Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved September 06, 2018. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premack%27s_principle.
• Klatt, K. and Morris, E. (2001). The premack principle, response deprivation, and establishing operations, 24(2): 173-180.
• Pereyra, C., Caycedo, C., Gutierrez, C. and Sandoval M. (1994). Premack's theory and motivational analysis. Suma Psicológica, 1(1): 26-37.
• Premack, D. (1959). Toward empirical behavior laws: I. Positive reinforcement. Psychological Review, 66(4): 219-233.