Premack's principle: what it is and what role it plays in behaviorism

Premack's principle arises in the context of operant conditioning and sustains the existence of a determinant 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 her interactions with said event.

This principle represented one of the great postulates of operant conditioning in the mid-20th century, since it established a break with the traditional definition of the "reinforcer", which had important consequences in the models of learning and in the studies of the motivation.

• Related article: "Operant conditioning: main concepts and techniques"

The Premack Principle: definition and origins

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

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; later 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 implies a greater preference over the first.

Put another way, the premack principle holds that if there is a behavior or activity that arouses little interest, most likely, this behavior does not occur spontaneously. However, if immediately after performing it, the opportunity arises to carry out another conduct or activity that does arouse interest, then the first (the one that doesn't interest) will significantly increase your chance of repetition.

• You may be interested: "Behaviorism: history, concepts and main authors"

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, with which, It was about any stimulus that had the capacity to increase a behavior as long as it was operating. this did that the reinforcer itself was at the center of efforts for increasing any behavior.

But, testing Primack's hypothesis, Skinner's operant conditioning theory gives important twist: Far from working absolutely, reinforcers work completely. relative.

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

The response deprivation theory

Subsequently, other experiments and research carried out in the context of operant conditioning have questioned the operation of Premack's principle.

Among them is the theory of response deprivation. 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 increase motivation for the first, and therefore the series of behaviors associated with it. In a nutshell, it suggests that the less a behavior can be accessed, the more motivation it generates.

The value according to this theory

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

organisms order world events according to a hierarchy of values.

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

If an event that is more valued is presented immediately after another that is less valued, the behaviors of the latter are reinforced. Likewise, the least valued event and the behaviors that intervene in it, acquire “instrumental” value.

If the opposite effect occurs (a lower value event occurs immediately after a higher value one), what happens is the punishment of instrumental behavior, that is, it decreases the probability that the least valued behavior will be repeated.

Likewise, "value" is defined as a psychological dimension that individuals assign to events, just as other properties are assigned (size, color, weight, for example). In the same sense, the 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, that is, the effect of reinforcement or punishment. Because of this, to ensure that a behavior occurs or is extinguished, it is essential to analyze the value that the individual attributes to it.

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

The pinball and candy experiment

To specify all of the above, we conclude by describing 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 (which are called “answers”): eat a sweet or play with a pinball machine.

In this way it was possible to determine which of these two behaviors are 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 piece of 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 the following: only the children who had a greater preference for "eating a sweet", they reinforced their least likely or least interesting behavior, "playing with the pinball machine."

Bibliographic references:

• Premack's Principle (2018). Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved September 6, 2018. Available in 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 SandovalM. (1994). Premack's theory and motivational analysis. Psychological Sum, 1(1): 26-37.
• Premac, D. (1959). Toward empirical behavior laws: I. Positive reinforcement. Psychological Review, 66(4): 219-233.