An Analysis of Feedback from a Behavior Analytic Perspective.
Call feedback what it is—immediate reinforcement or punishment—and use it like any other operant procedure.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors looked at every feedback study they could find. They asked one question: do we need new rules, or does plain old reinforcement explain the results?
They wrote a story-style review. No new numbers. They just sorted studies into two piles: feedback that gave something good or took something bad, and feedback that did the opposite.
What they found
Every pile fit the three-term contingency. Praise right after a correct response acted like a reinforcer. A frown right after an error acted like a punisher.
No study needed fancy cognitive words such as "self-regulation" or "metacognition." The authors say skip the extra labels and call it what it is: reinforcement or punishment.
How this fits with other research
Sleiman et al. (2020) crunched 96 workplace feedback papers and found huge effect sizes. Their numbers back up the claim that feedback works because it is powerful reinforcement.
Morris et al. (1982) warned us not to let cognitive terms sneak into behavior analysis. This paper keeps the same guard up, but for feedback.
Furrebøe et al. (2017) show the same guard in another field. They use operant rules to explain "irrational" economic choices. The message across all three papers: stay close to the environment, skip the mental middlemen.
Why it matters
When you give feedback, treat it like any other reinforcer or punisher. Deliver it right away, tie it to one clear behavior, and watch the effect. If the behavior grows stronger, you picked a reinforcer. If it weakens, you picked a punisher. No extra worksheets or self-talk lessons needed. Just good, quick contingencies.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Praise your therapist the second you see a correct trial; say exactly what was right and nothing else.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present paper presents a systematic analysis from a behavior analytic perspective of procedures termed feedback. Although feedback procedures are widely reported in the discipline of psychology, including in the field of behavior analysis, feedback is neither consistently defined nor analyzed. Feedback is frequently treated as a principle of behavior; however, its effects are rarely analyzed in terms of well-established principles of learning and behavior analysis. On the assumption that effectiveness of feedback procedures would be enhanced when their use is informed by these principles, we sought to provide a conceptually systematic account of feedback effects in terms of operant conditioning principles. In the first comprehensive review of this type, we compare feedback procedures with those of well-defined operant procedures. We also compare the functional relations that have been observed between parameters of consequence delivery and behavior under both feedback and operant procedures. The similarities observed in the preceding analyses suggest that processes revealed in operant conditioning procedures are sufficient to explain the phenomena observed in studies on feedback.
The Behavior analyst, 2015 · doi:10.3758/BF03205222