How did Skinner distinguish between respondent and operant behavior?
In the past era, Watson modeled his psychology after the Russian psychologists and Skinner refined his psychology after Thorndike. Watson and Pavlov tried to correlate the behavior with the adjustment of environmental stimuli. Thus, Skinner was greatly interested in the reflexive type of behavior.
Hence, Skinner explained two different types of behavior that are known as respondent behavior and operant behavior that are well-distinguished from each other are listed as follows:-
| Respondent behavior | Operant behavior |
| 1. It refers to the behavior that is elicited by a known kind of stimulus. | 1. It refers to the behavior that is emitted by an organism and not elicited by a known type of stimulus. |
| 2. It is elicited by a known type of stimulation factors. | 2. It is elicited by the entry of organism’s actions. |
| 3. It does not act towards the environmental factors. | 3. It majorly operates towards the environmental factors. |
| 3. It is not distinctly controlled by the stimulus of specific organism. | 3. It is distinctly controlled by the action of specific organism. |