Contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior: instructional control of human loss avoidance.
Accurate instructions survive because they deliver reinforcement; inaccurate ones die when they meet loss.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Adults played a simple game. They could press buttons to avoid losing money.
Some players got true hints: "Press the left key to stay safe." Others got false hints.
The scientist watched what happened when the hints stopped matching the real money rules.
What they found
People kept following true hints even when the task changed. The hints worked like reinforcers.
People dropped false hints fast once they lost money. The wrong rule extinguished.
Rule-following, like any behavior, lives or dies by its consequences.
How this fits with other research
Vaughan (1985) repeated the idea with stricter wording. Commands ("You must...") held tighter than soft suggestions.
Calamari et al. (1987) later renamed rules "function-altering stimuli." They said rules don’t just cue; they re-wire what the payoff means.
Burack et al. (2004) moved the test to kids in classrooms. Modeling beat telling once the payoff schedule shifted. All three studies keep the core: words only stick if they still pay off.
Why it matters
Check your client’s rules against real contingencies. If the rule still works, it will self-maintain. If it fails, let natural losses kill it—don’t argue. When you write behavior plans, state clear, accurate rules and make sure reinforcement backs them up.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Instructions can override the influence of programmed schedules of reinforcement. Although this finding has been interpreted as a limitation of reinforcement schedule control in humans, an alternative approach considers instructional control, itself, as a phenomenon determined by subjects' reinforcement histories. This approach was supported in a series of experiments that studied instructional and schedule control when instructions either did or did not accord with the schedule of reinforcement. Experiment I demonstrated that accurate instructions control discriminative performances on multiple avoidance schedules, and that such control persists in a novel discrimination. Experiments II and III showed that elimination of instruction-following occurs when inaccurate instructions cause subjects to contact a monetary loss contingency. Experiment IV demonstrated the reinforcing properties of accurate instructions. Skinner's view of rule-governed behavior is consistent with these findings, and can be extended to account for many aspects of instructional control of human operant behavior.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1979 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1979.31-53