Conditioning Natural Reinforcers¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

A natural reinforcer is a reinforcer naturally present in the setting where a behavior occurs — grades in classrooms, the applause of fans on a ballfield, money in the workplace, story hour or parental attention at home. Skinner's own definition is more specific: a natural reinforcer is a change in stimulation that results from the behavior itself, rather than from another person's delivered consequence. The pleasurable sound of hitting the correct piano keys, or a first-grader's satisfaction at seeing correctly formed letters appear on the page, are natural reinforcers in this stricter sense — the behavior's own product is what reinforces it, with no external praise or reward required. Children who enjoy solving puzzles, writing poetry, or reading novels are being naturally reinforced in this way.

Behaviorism is often criticized for producing learners hooked on artificial, extrinsic consequences (de Charms, 1968, 1976), but behavioral scientists (Skinner, 1953, 1974; Lindsley, 1991, 1992a, 1992b; Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968) have long advocated the deliberate use of natural reinforcers as an alternative — and, further, a documented process for transferring control from extrinsic to natural reinforcers over time, called conditioning a natural reinforcer (Horcones, 1985, 1987, 1991, 1992). Many learners are not naturally reinforced by classroom activities they nonetheless need to perform (writing, reading, answering questions); for these learners, external reinforcers serve two purposes: they let a teacher shape and strengthen the desired behavior through positive reinforcement, and — if deliberately faded — they let control over the behavior transfer to the learner's own natural, intrinsic reinforcers.

In classroom-management terms, natural reinforcers are specifically ones already available in the school setting at almost no cost — extra time to do homework, lunch with the principal or a favorite teacher, extra recess, an educational game, library time for pleasure reading, or computer access. Because these cost nothing to supply, a teacher can use them far more consistently than reinforcers that must be purchased and brought in, which is itself one reason to prefer natural reinforcers when setting up a procedure to reinforce a replacement behavior (see step 4 of the Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence Model's five-step behavior-change procedure).

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• An initial extrinsic reinforcer strong enough to get the target behavior started and reliably performed
• A deliberate plan to fade the extrinsic reinforcer over time, rather than sustaining it indefinitely

Constraints¶

• Extrinsic reinforcers that are never faded remain dependent on someone consistently delivering them — impractical at the scale of a full classroom, and absent whenever the deliverer isn't present — whereas natural reinforcers are available to the learner at all times
• Some learners stop the target behavior entirely once an unfaded extrinsic reinforcer is removed, since the behavior was never transferred to natural reinforcement
• Ethical use requires awareness of concerns about paying students for behaviors (e.g., reading, staying off drugs) that ideally should come to be intrinsically motivated

Target Learners¶

• Learners who do not yet find a required activity naturally reinforcing and need extrinsic support to begin engaging with it at all

Target Learning Goals¶

• Building genuine, self-sustaining engagement with an activity (reading, practicing an instrument, solving problems) that persists once external reinforcement is withdrawn

Instructions¶

1. Identify a behavior the learner does not yet find naturally reinforcing but needs to perform.
2. Use consistent, immediate extrinsic reinforcement (praise, tokens, points) to get the behavior started and strengthened.
3. As the behavior becomes established, gradually reduce the frequency and salience of the extrinsic reinforcer.
4. Pair the fading extrinsic reinforcer with the activity's own natural consequence (the satisfaction of correct performance, the pleasure of the activity itself) so the learner's attention shifts toward it.
5. Monitor whether the behavior persists as extrinsic reinforcement is withdrawn; if it does not, the fading was likely too fast, or the natural reinforcer is not yet salient enough to the learner.

Related Strategies¶

• Token Economies — a token economy is a common starting point for this fading process; conditioning a natural reinforcer describes how to transition away from it
• Effective Presentation for Errorless Learning — reducing errors during the extrinsic-reinforcement phase makes the eventual natural reinforcer (successful performance) more reliably available to notice

Related Elements¶

• Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence Model — natural reinforcers as the preferred choice in that model's replacement-behavior-reinforcement step

Examples¶

Key Sources¶

• Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Macmillan.
• Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. Knopf.
• Lindsley, O. R. (1991, 1992a, 1992b). [Precision teaching and natural reinforcement, cited via secondary source without full publication details]
• Baer, D. M., Wolf, M. M., & Risley, T. R. (1968). Some current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1(1), 91-97.
• Horcones (Communidad Los Horcones). (1985, 1987, 1991, 1992). [Work on intrinsic reinforcement and conditioning natural reinforcers, cited via secondary source without full publication details]
• de Charms, R. (1968, 1976). [Critique of behaviorism and extrinsic reinforcement, cited via secondary source without full publication details]
• Arduini-Van Hoose, N. (2020). Behaviorism in the classroom. In Educational psychology. Retrieved from https://edpsych.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.