When have you unintentionally reinforced an undesirable behavior of someone you know? What was the behavior? How did you reinforce it? What resulted because of this reinforcement?

Principles of operant conditioning

According to the principles of operant conditioning, reinforcement seeks to increase the chances of a behavior continuing, so we should only reinforce those behaviors that we would like to see again. There are times when we may intentionally reinforce behavior of someone for our convenience and not understand by doing so how it fosters such undesirable behavior to continue in the future.

Discuss your answers to these questions with your classmates:

When have you unintentionally reinforced an undesirable behavior of someone you know? What was the behavior? How did you reinforce it?
What resulted because of this reinforcement?
Once you realized the continuation of the undesirable behavior how did you manage to guide the individual to desirable behavior?
Do not use yourself as the person with undesirable behavior you reinforced.