Question 1:Before experiment:
What behavior do you want to modify? Who is your study participant (or animal)?
- I have noticed Esther biting her fingers very often in the school. As I looked at her fingers, it looked terrible to have rough skin there. In the past time, I also had the same habit which is to chew/bite my finger nails and I had hard time modifying this. I have decided to remove this bad habit from her through conducting this experiment.
Question 2:Before experiment:
Describe how you will attempt to modify the behavior of your participant. What is your operant conditioning plan? (Be specific. What method(s) will you use? Positive reinforcement, negative punishment...etc.?)
- In order to modify this bad behavior, i decided to conduct an experiment on Esther. I’ve designed this experiment to hit Esther’s hands whenever she tired to put her hands near her mouth. In other words, I tried to modify her bad habit by applying pain. To be specific, the method I have used in this experiment is positive punishment.
Question 3:During experiment:
Day 1 : 1 modification observed / 8 fails
Day 2 : 3 modification observed / 5 fails
Day 3 : 3 modification observed / 5 fails
Day 4: 5 modification observed / 3 fails
Question 4: After experiment:
Describe how your experiment progressed and concluded.
What behavior do you want to modify? Who is your study participant (or animal)?
- I have noticed Esther biting her fingers very often in the school. As I looked at her fingers, it looked terrible to have rough skin there. In the past time, I also had the same habit which is to chew/bite my finger nails and I had hard time modifying this. I have decided to remove this bad habit from her through conducting this experiment.
Question 2:Before experiment:
Describe how you will attempt to modify the behavior of your participant. What is your operant conditioning plan? (Be specific. What method(s) will you use? Positive reinforcement, negative punishment...etc.?)
- In order to modify this bad behavior, i decided to conduct an experiment on Esther. I’ve designed this experiment to hit Esther’s hands whenever she tired to put her hands near her mouth. In other words, I tried to modify her bad habit by applying pain. To be specific, the method I have used in this experiment is positive punishment.
Question 3:During experiment:
- Gather some data related to your participant's behavioral changes. (For example, how many times did they modify their behavior? How many times did they fail to modify behavior?)
Day 1 : 1 modification observed / 8 fails
Day 2 : 3 modification observed / 5 fails
Day 3 : 3 modification observed / 5 fails
Day 4: 5 modification observed / 3 fails
- What are some challenges you are facing while conducting your experiment? (For instance - are you experiencing anything that could make your results invalid, or, are you doubtful that you will succeed in conditioning your participant's behavior given the time constraint?) - Since I could not be with Esther, looking at her all the time, the data might not be so accurate. She might be biting her fingers when I was not watching her. Such error might make my result invalid. However I was sure that this conditioning would work to change her behavior as the number of modifications were increasing day by day.
Question 4: After experiment:
Describe how your experiment progressed and concluded.
- Did you have moments of notable success or failure? -I definitely had moments of notable success and failures. She noticed that I was watching her whether she bites her fingers or not, and stopped from doing this. However, when she did not notice this, she sometimes did it without hesitation.
- How did your participant respond to the conditioning process? -My participant responded me relatively positive during my experiment because she knew that her behavior was bad. She was glad that she went through some modification in doing that as she told me that her dad was trying the similar thing as I did.
- What were the results of your study? - The result of my study is that by using positive punishment, I could change certain behaviors of people. What mattered was that how close I could observe and give punishment when the behavior has been noticed. In the case, the behavior would be more efficiently be modified and able to remove bad habits.