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Demand awareness, subject sophistication, and the effectiveness of a verbal “reinforcement”
Author(s) -
Page Monte M.
Publication year - 1970
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1970.tb00010.x
Subject(s) - psychology , reinforcement , contingency , sophistication , demand characteristics , conditioning , cognitive psychology , nonverbal communication , cognition , operant conditioning , social psychology , developmental psychology , social science , linguistics , philosophy , statistics , mathematics , neuroscience , sociology
S ummary A cognitive or problem‐solving interpretation of verbal conditioning was extended by making explicit the role of demand awareness and cooperation motivation in mediating the behavior. It was found that the word “reinforcement” itself was effective in producing verbal conditioning, and as predicted there was a highly significant difference between subjects who had taken a course in psychology and those who had not Postexperimental measures of contingency awareness, demand awareness and cooperation motivation all correlated with experimental performance That the strongest association was obtained when demand awareness plus cooperation motivation were considered was interpreted as indicating the crucial importance of these variables in mediating so‐called verbal conditioning Data were interpreted as questioning the appropriateness of using the concepts of instrumental appetitive conditioning to describe so‐called verbal conditioning. The effect seems to be an artifact of subjects cooperating with experimental demand characteristics