Personality Development

Noncontingent reinforcement is a form of reinforcement that involves the use of reinforcement that is not directly tied to the occurrence of a specific behavior (Turkington & Anan 2007). To explain further, noncontingent reinforcement is delivered on a fixed-time schedule independent of if the person displays the specific behavior during the set interval; as such, the person’s behavior does not have an impact on whether the reinforcement is provided or not. Superstitious behavior is behavior that arises when the delivery of the reinforcement, whether a positive or a negative one, ensues in temporal contiguity with independent manners (Anyaegbunam et al., 2021). A superstitious behavior that I have is picking up lost pennies that I find with the belief that they bring good luck. In my opinion, this superstitious behavior was conditioned through operant conditioning, whereby any positive outcome I had when I collected a coin was linked to me collecting the said coin. As such, this led to me repeating the behavior in hopes of more positive outcomes. Further, my brain’s pattern recognition function and my need to impose order or some type of control on nature also played a huge part. The variable interval schedule maintains my superstition because there is no predicted amount of time for reinforcement to occur; accordingly, reinforcement could occur at any time, and I attribute it to the penny (Hulac et al., 2016).

One superstitious behavior I tend to display when taking a quiz or before submitting a paper is going over it three times. Suppose I do this less than three times, I always feel like I missed something, which will then lead to me failing, but when I go over it three times or more, I feel reassured, and this calms my anxiety about how I did on the paper. Regarding my personality, this behavior says that I have a trait of neuroticism, as demonstrated by Anyaegbunam et al. (2021), which is basically having a tendency towards anxiety and stress.

References

Anyaegbunam, M. C., Omonijo, D. O., & Ogunwa, C. E. (2021). Exploring the Relationship Between Personality Traits and Superstitious Beliefs. Journal of International Cooperation and Development, 4(1), 60-60.

Hulac, D., Benson, N., Nesmith, M. C., & Wollersheim Shervey, S. (2016). Using variable interval reinforcement schedules to support students in the classroom: An introduction with illustrative examples. Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 6(1), 6.

Turkington, C., & Anan, R. (2007). The encyclopedia of autism spectrum disorders. Infobase Publishing.

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It’s Superstition (330)

Your friend insists on wearing their “lucky” socks for the team playoffs since every time they wear them, the team wins. Such behavior is called superstitious behavior because it appears as if the person believes their ritual, and not accident or coincidence, is responsible for producing the reinforcer – the team winning. Your friend forgot that the first three times they wore those socks, the team lost. Superstitious behavior results from noncontingent reinforcement.

Personality Development

Explain noncontingent reinforcement. Do you have any superstitious behavior? What is it, and how do you think it was conditioned? How do you think the reinforcement schedules for the unit discussed in the reading may have maintained the superstition? From the article on superstitions in college students, there were many behaviors related to reducing anxiety and fear. Do you have a superstition like this or something you do each time before you take a quiz or submit a paper? What is your superstitious practice? If you do not have one, explain your reasoning for not having this behavior. What does this superstitious behavior say about your personality?