As with differential reinforcement, the shaping procedure involves only combinations of the reinforcement and extinction processes. But both differential reinforcement, which we sometimes call simple differential reinforcement, and shaping involve these two processes in slightly different ways.
This example particularly benefits from some visual imagination responses on your part, responses that this statement is designed to begin evoking for you. The example starts with a human resource problem (not enough faculty). This problem once left a colleague teaching an overbooked Introduction to Behaviorology course (BEHG 101). The course roster showed 160 students in a large lecture hall that actually had a broken sound system.
We begin our contingency–engineering foray into procedures and interventions with differential reinforcement. This application “merely” involves a rather simple combination of reinforcement and extinction processes. We use this name, differential reinforcement, because the procedure involves reinforcing some responses differently from other responses. That is, some responses get reinforced while other responses get extinguished.
Our understanding of why human behavior happens begins now to go in the additional direction of engineering applications and interventions. We want to know more than merely about why behavior happens, more than merely about what causes human behavior, more than merely about contingencies.
