Behavior is the activity of living organisms. Human behavior is the entire gamut of what people do including thinking and feeling.[24] Behavior can be determined by applying the Dead Man's test:
If a dead man can do it, it ain't behavior. And if a dead man can't do it, then it is behavior. Behavior is that portion of an organism's interaction with its environment that is characterized by detectable displacement in space through time of some part of the organism and that results in a measurable change in at least one aspect of the environment.[26] Often, the term behavior is used to reference a larger class of responses that share physical dimensions or function. In this instance, the term response indicates a single instance of that behavior. If a group of responses have the same function, this group can be classified as a response class. Finally, when discussing a person's collection of behavior, repertoire is used. It can either pertain specifically to a set of response classes that are relevant to a particular situation, or it can refer to every behavior that a person can do.
Operant Conditioning
Operant behavior is that which is selected by its consequences. The conditioning of operant behavior is the result of reinforcement and punishment. Operant conditioning applies to voluntary responses, which an organism performs deliberately, to produce a desirable outcome. The term operant emphasizes this point: the organism operates on its environment to produce some desirable result. For example, operant conditioning is at work when we learn that toiling industriously can bring about a raise or that studying hard results in good grades.
Respondent Conditioning
All organisms respond in predictable ways to certain stimuli. These stimulus–response relations are called reflexes. The response component of the reflex is called respondent behavior. It is defined as behavior which is elicited by antecedent stimuli. Respondent conditioning (also called classical conditioning) is learning in which new stimuli acquire the ability to elicit respondents. This is done through stimulus–stimulus pairing, for example, the stimulus (smell of food) can elicit a person's salivation. By pairing that stimulus (smell) with another stimulus (e.g., a light), the second stimulus can obtain the function of the first stimulus, given that the predictive relationship between the two stimuli is maintained.
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