The voluntary operant and the operant nature of volition: Three views
Volition is just operant behavior; which part gets reinforced decides what looks voluntary.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Neuringer (2023) compares three behaviorists’ takes on free will.
The author maps how Skinner, Rachlin, and Neuringer himself treat voluntary acts as operants.
No new data are shown; the paper is a guided tour of theory.
What they found
All three camps agree: voluntary means maintained by consequences.
They split on what the consequence strengthens. Skinner points to single responses, Rachlin to long patterns, and Neuringer to novel, unpredictable action.
The paper ends with a call to test these views in the lab and clinic.
How this fits with other research
Zigman et al. (1997) set the stage. That essay said reinforcement strengthens environmental control, not just response odds. Neuringer (2023) keeps the same core idea but adds the volition layer.
Thrailkill et al. (2018) show richer reinforcement makes more spontaneous recovery later. Their data fit Neuringer’s view: strong histories create flexible, voluntary-like returns.
Bachá-Méndez et al. (2007) found whole response sequences come back during extinction. This supports Rachlin’s pattern idea featured in the target paper.
Why it matters
If you treat voluntary behavior as operant, you stop asking “Do they want to?” and start asking “What maintains it?” Pick the view that fits your case. Use high-rate reinforcement when you want durable, flexible skills. Watch for sequence-level resurgence when you fade prompts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Many philosophers, psychologists, and lay folk associate volition with autonomy (actions are independent of an individual's environment) and free will (individuals originate their actions). Most behaviorists hold these views to be incompatible with behavior analyses. The present paper describes volition as interpreted by B. F. Skinner, Howard Rachlin, and Allen Neuringer. Skinner relates volition to positively reinforced operant behavior. That works because, like operants, voluntary actions are free, in the sense of not physically constrained; they affect their environments, often resulting in positive outcomes, and are sometimes unpredictable. Rachlin, while incorporating Skinnerian methods, interprets volition within his own Teleological Behaviorism framework. For Rachlin, reinforcement of an individual response is often incompatible with voluntary control, thereby disagreeing with Skinner. Responses are voluntary only when they are members of extended response patterns. Neuringer also begins with Skinner's operants, but argues that, under the control of reinforcing consequences, both voluntary actions and operant responses are sometimes predictable and other times "truly" unpredictable. Neuringer does not assume that environments determine voluntary actions, thereby disagreeing with Skinner and Rachlin. Taken together, the agreements and disagreements among these three behaviorists may help to shed light on the relationship between operants and volition.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2023 · doi:10.1002/jeab.808