Motivation in Behaviorism

Applied Behavior Michael, J. (1993). Establishing operation. The Behavior Analyst, 16(2), 191-206. Michael (1993) argued that the consideration of motivation, that he conceptually terms establishing operations, is substantive to the understanding of behavior. Michael offers the following definition of establishing operations: "…an environmental event, operation, or stimulus condition that affects an organism by momentarily altering (a) the reinforcing effectiveness of other events and (b) the frequency of occurrence of that part of the organism's repertoire relevant to those events as consequences" (1993, p. 191).

A key point in Michael's position regarding establishing operations is that the difference between learned and unlearned establishing operations is of paramount importance in the ability of researchers and practitioners to "identify and control the various components of multiple determinations" of human behavior. The multiple determinants to which Michael refers include discriminative and motivative variables. Discriminative variables refer to the availability of certain attributes to reinforce particular behaviors.

That is to say that a particular reinforcement has more available in the presence of the stimulus condition (discriminative stimuli or SD) than in the absence of the stimulus condition. Motivational variables are different capacities of environmental events to act as reinforcers. The important distinctions between discriminative and motivative variable are the availability of the first and the reinforcing effectiveness of the second. Michael also considers the distinction between conditioned establishing operations (CEOs) and unconditioned establishing operations (UEOs).

The two examples of unconditioned establishing operations to which Michael refers are pain stimulation and food deprivation. And the example of conditioned establishing operations used by Michael is the learning history of a person or other learning organism. A conditioned establishing operation may be paired with an unconditioned establishing operation, and through this pairing, become more capable of motivating the organism than before the association occurred. An example of a different type of conditioned establishing operation is the warning stimulus that is utilized in avoidance procedures.

This conditioned establishing operation is considered to be reflexive in nature as it brings about its own end as a result of its function. That is to say that the conditioned establishing operation serves as a form of reinforcement, which evokes or brings about the very behavior that causes the end of the reinforcement.

Yet another conditioned establishing operation is referred to as transitive, in that it is a type of conditional conditioned establishing operation which establishes another stimulus as an effective reinforcement, thereby evoking the behavior that produced the other stimulus. This can be thought of as a simply closed loop response, which Michael further clarifies by explaining that, "any stimulus that is positively correlated with the onset of painful stimulation becomes a CEO, in that its own offset will function as reinforcement and it.