The hypothesis tested was that the type of reinforcement (with regard to the administrator and the recipient) is responsible for differentiating the efficiency of learning in humans. The first type, termed external reinforcement, is one in which the experimenter controls and the subject receives the reinforcement. The second type is self-reinforcement, i.e., the subject controls and receives the reinforcement. The third type ( internal reinforcement) reverses the subject-experimenter relationship employed in the first type. The fourth type ( alien reinforcement) occurs when the experimenter replaces the subject's role played in the second type. In Exp. I, 30 male undergraduates learned to choose as correct a nonsense syllable among four such syllables on each test card. A male graduate student served as the experimenter. Results indicated that the subjects can learn the task under the conditions of the fourth type of reinforcement as well as the first type. The fourth type was superior in its effect on learning. In Exp. II, 19 male undergraduates learned to choose one of the four meaningful words, and a female graduate student served as experimenter. Neither the second nor the third type was effective. It was concluded that the type of reinforcement in which the experimenter is reinforced by himself seems most effective in facilitating learning, due probably to some motivational factor.
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