Premack’s Principle: What it is and What Role it Plays in Behaviorism

Premack’s principle arises in the context of operant conditioning and maintains the existence of a psychological dimension that determines the repetition or extinction of a behavior. This dimension is the value that the individual attributes to a particular event, which is generated through his or her interactions with said event.

This principle represented one of the great postulates of operant conditioning in the mid-20th century, since it established a break with the traditional definition of the “reinforcer,” which had important consequences in learning models and motivation studies.

The Premack Principle: definition and origins

Between the years of 1954 and 1959, the American psychologist David Premack, and his wife and collaborator Ann James Premack, conducted various investigations into operant conditioning. through the analysis of the behavior of monkeys belonging to the genus cebus.

Initially, these investigations were carried out at the Yerkes Primate Biology Laboratory, located in the state of Florida. Then at the University of Missouri, Columbia State; later at the University of California and finally at the University of Pennsylvania.

Premack’s hypothesis was the following: any response A will reinforce any response B, if and only if the probability of occurrence of response A is greater than that of response B. That is, they wanted to prove that an infrequent behavioral response can be reinforced by another response, as long as the latter implies a greater preference over the first.

In other words, the premack principle states the following: if there is a behavior or activity that arouses little interest, Most likely, this behavior does not occur spontaneously. However, if immediately after performing it, the opportunity arises to carry out another behavior or activity that does arouse interest, then the first one (the one that is not interesting) will significantly increase its possibility of repetition.

Contributions to operant conditioning

In Skinner’s operant conditioning, reinforcers are stimuli that have the intrinsic property of increasing the incidence of a behavior. Thus, the very definition of “reinforcer” was given by its effects on behavior, meaning it was any stimulus that had the capacity to increase behavior as long as it was effective. This did that the reinforcer itself was at the center of the efforts for increasing any behavior.

But, when Primack’s hypothesis is proven, Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning takes an important turn: far from working absolutely, reinforcers work relatively.

That is, the reinforcer does not matter in itself, what matters is how many response opportunities it offers to the individual. In this sense, What determines the effect of an event is the value that the subject attributes to the event itself. For this theory, the central thing is the responses, therefore, what increases the appearance of a behavior is not so much a “reinforcer” as a series of “reinforcing events.”

The response deprivation theory

Subsequently, other experiments and research carried out in the context of operant conditioning have questioned the functioning of Premack’s principle.

Among them is the response deprivation theory. Broadly speaking, it suggests that there are situations in which restricting access to the reinforcing response, far from increasing the preference for the instrumental response, what it does is increase motivation for the first, and therefore the series of behaviors associated with it. Simply put, it suggests that the less a behavior is accessible, the more motivation it generates.

The value according to this theory

According to Pereira, Caycedo, Gutiérrez and Sandoval (1994), due to the importance that the Premack principle attributes to the motivation generated by reinforcing events, one of the central concepts in the Premack principle is “value”, whose definition It can be summarized and defined as follows:

The organisms order world events according to a hierarchy of values.

Value is measured by the probability that an organism will respond to a stimulus. In turn, the probability can be measured by the duration of interaction with said response. That is, the more time spent performing an activity, the greater the value that the activity has for the individual.

If an event that is more valued is presented immediately after another that is less valued, the behaviors of the latter are reinforced. Likewise, the least valued event and the behaviors that intervene in it acquire “instrumental” value.

If the opposite effect occurs (an event of lower value occurs immediately after one of higher value), what happens is the punishment of instrumental behavior that is, it decreases the probability that the least valued behavior will be repeated.

Likewise, “value” is defined as a psychological dimension that individuals assign to events, just as other properties are assigned (size, color, weight, for example). In the same sense, value is assigned according to the particular interaction that an individual establishes with the event.

It is this psychological dimension that determines the probability of occurrence or disappearance of a behavior, that is, the effect of reinforcement or punishment. Because of this, to ensure that a behavior occurs or is extinguished it is essential to analyze the value that the individual attributes to it.

The above implies analyzing both the present and previous interactions of the individual with the event that wants to be reinforced, as well as the opportunities to generate other responses or events.

The pinball and candy experiment

To specify all of the above, we conclude by describing an experiment that David Premack and his collaborators carried out with a group of children. In the first part, they were presented with two alternatives (which are called “responses”): eating a piece of candy or playing with a pinball machine.

In this way, it was possible to determine which of these two behaviors were most likely to be repeated for each child (and with this, the level of preference was determined).

In the second part of the experiment, the children were told they could have a piece of candy as long as they played the pinball machine first. Thus, “eating a candy” was the reinforcing response, and “playing with the pinball machine” was the instrumental response. The result of the experiment was the following: only the children who had a greater preference for “eating a candy” reinforced their less probable or less interesting behavior, that of “playing with the pinball machine.”

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