Chapter 9 – Getting a New Behavior to Occur With Shaping

Sometimes a new behavior develops when an individual performs some initial behavior and the environment then reinforces slight variations in that behavior across a number of trials. In a shaping program, it is crucial to know not only where you are going the final target behavior but also the starting behavior at which the individual is currently performing. The purpose of the shaping program is to get from one to the other by reinforcing successive approximations from the starting behavior to the final target behavior. Using chewing gum as a reinforcer, the experimenter took the patient through the shaping steps of eye movement toward the gum, facial movement, mouth movements, lip movements, vocalizations, word utterance, and, finally, understandable speech. In attempting to specify the steps from the starting behavior to the final target behavior, behavior modifiers might imagine what steps they would go through.