PSY/420 DRO contingency worksheet

The five concepts on this worksheet are close enough that guessing is unreliable, so use a procedure rather than intuition. Ask two questions of each scenario, in order. First: does the behaviour become more likely or less likely? More likely means reinforcement or an avoidance contingency; less likely means punishment. Second: what happens to the consequence — is something presented, is something removed, or is something prevented from arriving? Those two answers pick out the label between them, and writing both down before choosing is what stops the near-neighbours collapsing into each other. Do this for every scenario even when the answer seems obvious, because the scenarios that seem obvious are the ones the worksheet is built to catch. Writing the two answers down also gives you a justification for free, since the deciding feature is exactly what you recorded, and a labelled answer with no reasoning cannot be marked as understanding even when it happens to be right.

Then hold the definitions precisely. Differential reinforcement of other behaviour reinforces the absence of a target behaviour during an interval, so the reinforcer arrives for not doing the thing, and the target behaviour decreases without punishment being used at all. An avoidance contingency increases a behaviour because performing it prevents an aversive event — the behaviour goes up, which separates it from every punishment label. Punishment by loss of a reinforcer removes something the person already had, which is the response-cost case: a fine, a withdrawn privilege. Punishment by prevention of a reinforcer stops something arriving that otherwise would have, so nothing is taken away because it was never received. Avoidance of loss increases a behaviour because performing it stops something being taken — the mirror image of response cost, with the behaviour going up rather than down. Name the behaviour, the consequence and the direction of change for each scenario, and the label follows from those three.