Behavioral Conditioning

Discussions focus on how incentives, rewards, punishments, and psychological concepts like operant and Pavlovian conditioning shape and modify learned human behaviors.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Science
2,298
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#4524
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
4
2008
11
2009
34
2010
56
2011
44
2012
53
2013
94
2014
53
2015
89
2016
146
2017
122
2018
178
2019
163
2020
178
2021
194
2022
207
2023
237
2024
185
2025
230
2026
20

Keywords

AI UI NOT reddit.com wikipedia.org behavior reinforcement conditioning rewarded punishment reward learned positive behaviour undesirable

Sample Comments

mbrodersen • Jun 11, 2021 • View on HN

People do what gets rewarded. People stop doing what gets punished.

energy123 • Apr 18, 2025 • View on HN

Behavior won't change until incentives that cause the behavior change.

Jonnax • Feb 16, 2019 • View on HN

Some people only learn through consequence.

mikemitchelldev • Jun 17, 2024 • View on HN

It's unfortunately a learned behavior.

VladRussian • Mar 22, 2011 • View on HN

considering how your behavior was rewarded "we can expect to hear it and variations repeated in every thread forever"

numpad0 • May 1, 2025 • View on HN

signaling humans for bad behaviors tend to backfire. it program us to recreate that situation in anger. we aren't smart enough to naturally learn lessons that way.

iwasanewt • Jul 25, 2013 • View on HN

What you're talking about is operant conditioning ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning )

watertom • May 25, 2020 • View on HN

Psychology of habit plays into this.

vinay_ys • Dec 28, 2020 • View on HN

Sounds like a psychological conditioning (behavior modification) regimen. Beware, it has a very sharp slippery slope towards unethical conditions.

WalterSear • Oct 2, 2016 • View on HN

This is learned behaviour. It can be unlearned.