Week 6 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 6 — What Changed the Behavior? A Learning Brief — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 6 of the term — compute two short counts from this week's studies and scenarios, label what kind of learning and which consequence each case shows, and tell someone new to psychology what negative reinforcement really means.

This week you learned three ways experience changes behavior: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. In Week 2 you learned to read an experiment and to judge whether a study treated its participants ethically; both tools come back here, in the Little Albert and Bobo doll studies. In this assignment you work two short problems, interpret each one, and explain to someone who has never studied psychology what negative reinforcement really means. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Analysis Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Watson and Rayner (1920) conditioned fear in an infant by pairing an object he had not feared with something that frightened him. In Bandura's Bobo doll study (1961), children who had watched an adult attack an inflatable doll were more likely to act aggressively toward it themselves, with no reward of their own. The everyday learning scenarios are the can opener, hot stove, parking ticket, snooze alarm, punch card, paycheck, slot machine, and surprise inspection; only the can opener is classical conditioning.

Work these two problems, showing your arithmetic:

Watson and Rayner's Little Albert study was published in 1920, and Bandura's Bobo doll study was published in 1961. How many years separate the two studies?
The week's everyday learning scenarios number 8, and 1 of them is a classical conditioning case. How many of the scenarios are operant cases?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation. For problem 1, label the parts of the Little Albert study with this week's terms (which event was the UCS and which once-harmless object became the CS), name two research ethics standards the study fails, and explain what the Bobo doll study showed that conditioning by direct consequences does not predict. For problem 2, label the snooze alarm and the parking ticket with the four consequences, saying for each what was added or removed and whether the behavior went up or down, and explain why the slot machine's variable-ratio schedule keeps a player pulling.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who has never studied psychology says, "I use negative reinforcement with my teenager: when she breaks curfew, I take her phone away for the weekend." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, what the friend is actually describing, what negative reinforcement would look like instead, and one limit: a label depends on what really happens to the behavior afterward. Explain any technical term in everyday words.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor who asks why their dog barks every time a doorbell rings on television. Model answer: "Your dog learned that the doorbell sound means someone is arriving, so the sound alone now sets off the barking. A TV doorbell sounds close enough to yours that it triggers the same reaction; psychologists call that spread generalization. If the TV doorbell keeps ringing with no visitor, the barking at it may fade over time. Dogs differ, though, so some will keep reacting longer than others."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own explanation and evidence.

Deliverables

Submit a single learning brief containing:

the two answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation;
your message to the friend, explaining in everyday words what the friend is describing, what negative reinforcement would look like instead, and one limit; and
a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your brief as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the four consequences with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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