Premium
REVISITING THE ROLE OF BAD NEWS IN MAINTAINING HUMAN OBSERVING BEHAVIOR
Author(s) -
Fantino Edmund,
Silberberg Alan
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.2010.93-157
Subject(s) - reinforcement , stimulus (psychology) , uncorrelated , psychology , stimulus control , negative information , cognitive psychology , social psychology , neuroscience , mathematics , statistics , nicotine
Results from studies of observing responses have suggested that stimuli maintain observing owing to their special relationship to primary reinforcement (the conditioned‐reinforcement hypothesis), and not because they predict the availability and nonavailability of reinforcement (the information hypothesis). The present article first reviews a study that challenges that conclusion and then reports a series of five brief experiments that provide further support for the conditioned‐reinforcement view. In Experiments 1 through 3, participants preferred occasional good news (a stimulus correlated with reinforcement) or no news (a stimulus uncorrelated with reinforcement) to occasional bad news (a stimulus negatively correlated with reinforcement). In Experiment 4 bad news was preferred to no news when the absence of stimulus change following a response to the bad‐news option was reliably associated with good news. When this association was weakened in Experiment 5 the results were intermediate. The results support the conclusion that information is reinforcing only when it is positive or useful. As required by the conditioned‐reinforcement hypothesis, useless information does not maintain observing.