 Motivation, this one's a bit different than what we typically think about when it comes to motivations. Here we go Traditional definitions of motivation suck That's all there is to it. We can just end the lecture there. Just that's enough, right? The point is is that these traditional definitions of motivation Let me qualify that before I go on they suck in terms of like from a scientific perspective They may make sense on the surface and of course they make sense on the surface Otherwise, it wouldn't be around we call that face validity. The problem is they have no experimental validity They're just completely circular, right? So traditional definitions focus on these internal drives You have this internal state and that is what is motivating you to do the particular task your Your low in this one Thing in this one, you know, whatever it is So you want to do it and you have this and you have that and it's this internal thing that's Moving you forward, right? And it's like, whoa, okay. How do we observe that? Well, we can't What we can observe is a few other things, right? Again, those are typically circular and why are they circular? Well, the idea is that well, why did I do X because I was motivated to do so? Well, why were you motivated? How do we know you were motivated to do so because I did it Why does the child learn to you're gonna hear my cat? my cat just decided to climb into a Suitcase and he got into a spot that's gonna be very hard for him to get out But we're just gonna let him hang out there. So you might hear some weird noises in the background That's my cat freaking out as he's trying to get out of the suitcase Or he's just gonna take a nap. So we'll come back to that topic later. I Guess there's something reinforcing about that. Anyway, so again, why does the kid learn? Well, because he's motivated to learn. Well, how do you know that he's motivated to learn? Well, because he's actually learning yay nice wonderful circular argument completely useless for science completely useless for a Further understanding of what motivation really is So we need to look at motivation from a more scientific a more empirical perspective and of course behavior analysis has taken a more empirical Perspective now it gets kind of odd I'll grant you that and talking about motivation from this perspective can be a bit challenging So but it works right and there's a lot of evidence to support that this is a very parsimonious and clean way to present What motivation really is? But I do want you to realize that this doesn't fit very well with our society It doesn't fit very clearly with the views that we typically have and I'm not talking about scientific views I'm talking about the views that we have as a culture And if you start spouting off things about CMEOs and EOs and NEMOs and all this stuff people are gonna be like You're just crazy So this is one of those frustrating things is that our culture is Loves these circular arguments because they sound great on the surface right so an internal drive in an internal state Which motivates you to do something? That's all well and good and makes sense on the surface and you can go back a few hundred years and blame dick Heart for this whole thing, but the reality is that's what's going on. That's what what sounds good in our culture But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's actually what's happening Just remember think about it from this perspective at one time the world thought the world was flat, right? Everybody thought that the earth was flat. That was what was culturally appropriate to say and saying something else got you in trouble Right that sort of thing happens when you talk about motivation believe it or not It happens when you talk about a lot of this behavior analysis stuff people just freak out That's okay, you know, it's it's part of changing the way we view the world and that's not a fast process So from this other perspective Motivation relates to something in the environment that can be observed to measure So something that influences you to do something right so we you might go oh reinforcers They're what influenced me to do something. Yeah, that's part of it right and in fact, that's a major part of motivation But we're gonna talk about things that modify reinforcers We're gonna talk about these things called motivating operations and we're gonna break them up into four categories and those four categories are actually Back up and we're gonna break motivating operations into two categories those two categories And they're gonna break broken down into two more categories each So four categories overall to deal with the motivating operations that have been directly observed These are not inferred. These are things that have been directly observed There are two categories right off the bat establishing operations and abolishing operations establishing operations Increase the effectiveness of a reinforcer and more accurately they increase the value of a reinforcer So if we're thinking about the three term contingency and you have the SD the response and the SR are the consequence, right? Establishing operations and motivating operations in general modify the consequence They're not something that act directly on your behavior They modify the consequence of the behavior so they change the value of the reinforcer or the punisher, right? So establishing operations are going to increase the value of the reinforcers Abolishing operations are going to decrease the value of the reinforcers Again, they affect consequences both punishers and reinforcers got a hauler for the fighty knock it off. Hey He's still playing in the bag. Anyway, there's something motivating about that Probably because he never gets to do it. I'm recording this lecture in a room that the cats typically don't get to play in so They're going crazy in here and having the time of their life and that's because Appropriately we have established the the value of this room to be greater. Why? Because they don't get to come in here very often There's stuff I don't want to mess in with in here They have a tendency to knock the books off the shelf and those types of things So there might be all sorts of noises that are going on but They're in here now and they're playing around so it's we definitely increase the value of this room It could decrease the value of this room. So I've changed the change the motivating operation By letting them hang out in here all the time, but there's stuff they can get into that. I don't want them getting into so anyway That was actually a really good example of this situation I could just kind of finish the lecture, but we're going to go ahead and move forward to again The idea is They affect the consequences they change the value of that of that consequence of the reinforcer the punisher And I'm going to talk about this in terms of just reinforcers, but you can apply this to punishers as well There's the condoms again, right? Let's just tend to pop up everywhere Anyway, it's a changing value an abolishing operation will decrease the effectiveness of a reinforcer This goes really well with the picture, right? I mean really think about it What's the reinforcer for having sex the feeling you get, right? Um, that's at least part of the reinforcer. Well, guess what a condom does Decreases that value it decreases the feeling right it makes things less sensitive. So When you're using condoms you're decreasing the value of the sexual baby Have the brain for sure that's available for sex And it makes absolute sense why someone would be less likely to choose condoms Over having sex without a condom If they've experienced both right because when you put the condom on it is going to decrease the value of that sexual act For both people now there's a way around this by the way and it's Has to do with deprivation of sex. So if you deprive yourself of sex long enough Then sex with a condom is much more is much more valuable. So deprivation is one of those things we can use We'll talk about that more here in a moment Okay, so again, so the condoms are actually an abolishing operation For the value of the sexual behavior When something increases the effectiveness of a reinforcer we call that an establishing operation So again, if I deprive you of sex or if you deprive yourself of sex then Sex becomes much more valuable. You know, there was an interesting study Wasn't even a study. What was it? It was it was like the social change thing that happened in in a couple of places and though I think it started out in hilly and then it got picked up in kenya and It was absolutely hilarious and it worked perfectly and it was a great example of an establishing operation and What happened was is that these ladies all got together and they were like we've had enough of our husbands being assholes And by assholes, I don't mean they were like beating them or things like that But they just weren't taking care of things. They just weren't being a good husband. So The general idea is that the ladies were like fine. No more nicky for you until you start doing the things you're supposed to do So what did they do? They made the value They increased the value of those other things like completing their chores, right? Because if they were able to complete their chores for a month, then they were able to get that to have sex so They they increased the effectiveness of the various reinforcers by abolishing everybody Withholding it, right? So they deprived their husbands of sex which then made sex more reinforcing for them And of course they put some other tasks on that use some great behavior modification techniques I mean that that's just hilarious when if you start to think about what all the different things that they used In terms of doing that, I mean they were using rules. They were using goals. They were using motivating operations Reinforcers effectively. They were changing the environment. They were selecting for new responses They were they got response generalization going on. They got stimulus. It is actually a great little technique You can look it up and see it on the internet There's an interesting story about how that all worked out and there was a large number of women that got together and did that And the basic idea is that they're just trying to change their husband's behavior The trick with motivating operations and what makes them motivating is that they happen before the reinforcer is delivered So you put the condom on that happens before the reinforcer, right? And that immediately changes the value of that reinforcer So These things I mean in that three-term contingency I don't like to put them in front of the sd's but some people do I kind of put them off to the side And put an arrow directly towards the consequence because that's what they're doing They're really affecting that they don't affect the discriminative stimulus They don't affect your behavior directly. They affect the reinforcer, which then may in turn affect the behavior And again, it's only changing the value. It doesn't that doesn't like get rid of it It's not a consequence and into itself. It just changes the value of that consequence Interestingly enough these do not depend on learning learning history at least one category of them doesn't That categories the the unconditioned ones, right? So you have uncondition motivating operations uncondition Establishing operations and uncondition abolishing operations, right? So those are the ones that don't depend on learning history and the condition motivating operations They only depend partially on learning history. They depend on the fact that those CMEOs and CMAOs are They've already been conditioned for those reinforcers to work or those punishers to work But again, it doesn't the changing the value of those things Is not Learned sort of thing. It's just literally through deport deprivation and satiation and other techniques Right poor kiddo and tears, right so deprivation We deprive you of something generally anything that we deprive you of it increases the value of it We talked about that before right so we talked about With holding access to a reinforcer to make that reinforcer more valuable what we were really talking about was establishing operations There may be some others out there that you can think of okay, but deprivation in general is a very effective technique so you want to make Accident you want to make one behavior more reinforcing than Or more likely to occur than withhold access to it for a while And we talked about this with the premac principle right the low probability behavior and high probability behavior stuff So I can even make low probability behavior reinforcing by preventing you from doing it And by preventing you from doing it for a while that Basically means that you're not going to get the reinforcers for that and as a result it increases the value of it Okay Abolishing operations satiation fill you up guess what so if I've got you completely full on something So if I let you eat all the m&ms in the world that you want You let me eat all the chips in the world. I want that type of thing then Guess what it's going to decrease the value of those reinforcers And in fact, you know I have this search in a group of students that are reinforcing my behavior For showing up for class on time and what what they've done is Use Cheetos or various chips in order to reinforce my behavior Well in order for that to work I continue to work one of the things that I actually self-manage here is making sure that I don't buy chips at other times All right, so you're not going to see chips in my house You're not going to see chips in my office unless they're the ones that I'm getting as reinforcers The idea is is that I'm not satiating myself on chips because if I satiated myself on chips Then the ones that are brought to class to reinforce my behavior Are the being on time are not going to work. In other words, I will have abolished the effectiveness of it All right, there may be some others your job to think about that So let's look at the condition versus unconditioned stuff pretty straightforward With uncondition motivating operations of value effect value altering effect is innate if I deprive you of food You don't have to learn anything about that that will work right off the bat Okay, in fact, this is one of those things that we use When we're doing animal research as we Deprive them of food. We get them to a particular free feeding weight And once we achieve the you know, so they're at their free feeding weight Let's say I don't whatever number of grams that that would be for a squirrel or chipmunk whatever that is their squirrel Then within withhold some food for a while We deprive them of some food until they drop below their free feeding weight At that point food is a very very valuable reinforcer And we have established the effectiveness of that reinforcer and the animal will work hard for that So but the behavior that is affected by this value altering effect is learned So think of the chipmunk person or the the squirrel person the lever or the rat person lever Whatever it is in the operating chamber that lever is learned, but the value of the the reinforcer is not It's something that it's absolutely innate With condition motivating operations the value effect is due to learning. So The example I gave earlier, right About in previous lecture about that imagined pressure, right? It's the guy doing the golfing thing. So he's adding that imagined pressure to himself The idea is is that that is some sort of Value altering effect. So if you imagine that yourself's under pressure imagine He hopes like it's the 18th hole the u.s. Open and you're tied And you got to make this one putt for birdie in order to win And you what you're trying to do is alter the value of the Reinforcer in other words alter the value of making the putt to make it more likely that you'll do it make it more valuable when you do But that's something you had to learn to do, right? That's not an innate sort of thing One of the other ones that we talked about is money, right? So deprivation and satiation of money is actually a condition motivating operation It may seem unconditioned, but you had to learn what the what the value of money was in the first place How are these things different than sd's and s deltas? The idea is that a discriminative stimulus is a signal that tells you that a reinforcer is available for a particular behavior So the sd's are connected to a response, right in the sense that that response will be reinforced That's what an sd is saying Cmo's are events or conditions that alter the effectiveness of the consequence So these things are targeted at the end. They're not targeted at a response, right? So they're changing the value of the reinforcer, which then could be used for any response So they're not the discriminative stimuli. They're not signaling what to do. They're not signaling any of that stuff They're just saying that all they're going to do is change the value of the reinforcers They are very very temporary You don't get stimulus control developing with cmo is like you do with a discriminative stimulus The you know once they once you've been undeprived so to speak once you're back to your free feeding weight Then food is less valuable This is an interesting one to think about Oftentimes rules and goals are not really discriminative stimuli. We kind of talk about them as being sd's They kind of are they kind of hurt but some people have argued that rules and goals are actually conditioned motivating operations The idea that especially with goals the idea with the goals that by stating that goal i'm Altering the value of doing the behavior that is being set up in that goal All right, because then now I have achieved it in that achievement Um, it is more important than like reaching the goal, right? So I've reached the goal rather than just oh, yeah, I did the behavior Oh, yeah, I was um successful today at not smoking a cigarette. Yay Okay, but if you say hey, I've been my first I achieved my first goal my first step and getting rid of Getting rid of smoking cigarettes Um was today and I did it right so it increases that value you set that goal and it increased the value of the reinforcer So I do believe that's it. So we'll talk to you soon and I hope you've enjoyed this set of lectures