Question

What motivates you to study for exams or work hard in your classes?

Pick a behavior and design your own operant conditioning plan. What kinds of punishment/rewards do you believe would work best for you?

Do you think that you could do this for yourself, that is, execute your operant conditioning plan, or would you need external punishment/reward (e.g., like a coach, professional help, or a buddy that would monitor and dish out the rewards/punishments)?

Answer 1

Subjectively, motivation comes out of attempting to maintain a disciplined life, and to do something productive each day.

The Operant Conditioning plan would be as follows. Since we all have a favourite thing to do, or a favourite past time, which in this case is watching netflix. Watching netflix would be a positivev reinforcement, and not watching it would be a negative reinforcement. Plus, since the motivation is drived out of doing something productive each day, if I fail, the guilt is the punishment. Now if successfully the work to be done on that day has been finished, the reinforcement that would follow is watching netflix, and if the work is done ahead of time, a possible extra reinforcement is cooking something good and then watching netflix eating that. On contrary, if something is not done on time, Extra time would be spent doing that work, hence, no netflix (Neative Reinforcement).

Since the guilt is the punishment and satisfaction is the overall reward, i.e., the motivation is internal, there is no need of an external source to help in order to stick to the plan.