Editing Behaviorism (section)

=== Limitations ===
Staddon (1993) found that [[B. F. Skinner|Skinner's]] theory presents two significant deficiencies: Firstly, he downplayed the significance of processes responsible for generating novel behaviors, which it is term as "behavioral variation." [[B. F. Skinner|Skinner]] primarily emphasized reinforcement as the sole determinant for selecting responses, overlooking these critical processes involved in creating new behaviors. Secondly, both [[B. F. Skinner|Skinner]] and many other behaviorists of that era endorsed contiguity as a sufficient process for response selection. However, [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rescorla%E2%80%93Wagner_model&oldid=1138116120 Rescorla and Wagner] (1972) later demonstrated, particularly in [[classical conditioning]], that competition is an essential complement to contiguity. They showed that in [[operant conditioning]], both contiguity and competition are imperative for discerning [[cause-and-effect]] relationships.<ref name="Beer-1995">{{Cite journal |last=Beer |first=Colin |date=1995 |title=Behaviorism: Mind, Mechanism and Society. Interpretations. John Staddon |url=https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/419257 |journal=The Quarterly Review of Biology |language=en |volume=70 |issue=4 |pages=546–547 |doi=10.1086/419257 |issn=0033-5770|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

The influential [[Rescorla–Wagner model|Rescorla-Wagner model]]  highlights the significance of competition for limited [[Association value|"associative value,"]] essential for assessing predictability. A similar formal argument was presented by Ying Zhang and John Staddon (1991, in press) concerning operant conditioning: the combination of contiguity and competition among action tendencies suffices as an assignment-of-credit mechanism capable of detecting genuine instrumental contingency between a response and its reinforcer.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Scholars@Duke publication: ON THE ASSIGNMENT-OF-CREDIT PROBLEM IN OPERANT LEARNING |url=https://scholars.duke.edu/publication/915273 |access-date=2023-12-08 |website=scholars.duke.edu}}</ref> This mechanism delineates the limitations of [[B. F. Skinner|Skinner's]] idea of adventitious reinforcement, revealing its efficacy only under stringent conditions – when the reinforcement's strengthening effect is nearly constant across instances and with very short intervals between reinforcers. However, these conditions rarely hold in reality: behavior following reinforcement tends to exhibit high variability, and superstitious behavior diminishes with extremely brief intervals between reinforcements.<ref name="Beer-1995" />