Effects of Congruent Social and Task Reinforcement Upon Acquisition of Imitative Responses

Abstract

In an earlier study (Kanareff & Lanzetta, 1958) the effectiveness of a task reinforcer in modifying an imitative response was found to vary with the prevailing social sanctions towards imitation. These sanctions had been induced through instructions stressing either the desirability of separate judgments or the facilitating effect of working in a group. Apparently the few minutes spent in orienting Ss at the start of the session were sufficient to establish an attitudinal set toward the appropriateness of imitation. There are, nevertheless, several disadvantages to the instructional method of inducing social sanctions. For one, neither evaluation nor control of the strength of the induced sanctions can be achieved with such a procedure. Further developments in the area of social behavior, e.g., quantitative comparisons of the relative strength of social and task reinforcement under various situational demands, and control over the strength of means-goal conflict (simultaneous operation of incongruent task and social reinforcements), are attendant upon the development of a procedure permitting such evaluation and control. For another, vagaries of interpretation of the instructions may increase individual differences so as to obscure relationships that may exist. And finally, it would be highly desirable if expectations of social sanctions (social reinforcement) could be subjected to the same probabilistic confirmations as expectations of task reinforcement so that the patterns and probabilities of social reinforcement encountered in everyday life as well as of task reinforcements could be reproduced in the laboratory. The present study introduces a procedure for providing continuous and precise control over the social sanctions such that task and social reinforcements can be independently manipulated and made to operate concurrently on given behavior patterns. The task reinforcement may consist of any impersonal task informative feedback device indicating the instrumentality of the available behavior patterns with respect to the imposed task goals. For example, the task reinforcement (an indication of correctness or incorrectness) for imitation and opposition in the present study was provided by the conjunction of the