The Management Theory Toolbox

Episode 11: Leading Through Operant Conditioning and Evolutionary Psychology with Dr. Max Krasnow

• Season 2 • Episode 11

Share episode

Key Discussion Points:

  • Understanding Mechanisms for Institutional Change: How different mechanisms influence behavior and the importance of choosing the right one to avoid unintended results.
  • Broad Definition of Learning: Learning extends beyond knowledge acquisition to include changes in behavior based on experiences.
  • Operant Conditioning: Explanation of consequence-based learning, where behaviors are influenced by rewards or punishments.
  • Behaviorism and Its Applications: Insights into B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism and its real-world applications, including in animal studies and human behavioral modification.
  • Evolutionary Perspective: Discussion on how evolutionary psychology provides a broader understanding of learning mechanisms beyond operant conditioning.
  • Failures of Operant Conditioning: Examples where operant conditioning fails to explain human behavior and the importance of alternative mechanisms like social learning.
  • Gene-Culture Coevolution: How human genetic evolution interacts with cultural practices, illustrated by the evolution of lactose tolerance.
  • Practical Implications for Leaders and Managers: The necessity of understanding multiple social mechanisms to effectively manage and influence behavior in organizational settings.

Additional Resources from Dr. Max Krasnow:

  • Lab Website: Evolutionary Psychology Lab
  • Key Publications:
    • Mehr, S. A., Krasnow, M. M., Bryant, G. A., Hagen, E. A. (preprint). Origins of music in credible signaling.
    • Krasnow, M. M., Delton, A. W. (preprint). Is it modeling the world or hacking the model?
    • Eisenbruch, A., Krasnow, M. M. (preprint). Why warmth matters more than competence: New evolutionary models. Link to preprint
    • Howard, R. M., Spokes, A. C., Mehr, S. A., Krasnow, M. M. (preprint). Welfare tradeoff psychology is present in children and adults. Link to preprint
    • Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., York, H. W., Glowacki, L., Krasnow, M. M. (2018). Form and function in human song. Current Biology, 28(3) 356-368.

Upcoming Episodes:

  • Next Episode: Diving deeper into operant conditioning with a focus on positive and negative reinforcement.

Call to Action:

  • Feedback Mechanism Exercise: Sketch out feedback mechanisms in your work environment that produce positive or negative consequences and consider their broader impact beyond simple conditioning.

Max Krasnow [Guest], received his Ph.D in Psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in the area of Developmental and Evolutionary Psychology. His primary line of research focuses on the evolutionary origins and computational design of the mechanisms underlying human cooperation and social behavior. One line of this research, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has explored how facets of the ancestral information landscape—that the future of any interaction is uncertain—conspire with distinctive features of the hominin social niche to select for organisms that are more generous, trusting and cooperative than an otherwise rational analysis would predict. In related work, he has shown in a series of behavioral experiments how these and other fundamental components of human social behavior, like our concern for the treatment of others and our punitive sentiments towards bad actors, show intricate design to support the cultivation of mutually beneficial cooperative relationships and to improve their terms when they begin to function poorly.

Speaker 1:

One of the ways to be successful in organizing groups of humans is to understand which mechanism you're tapping when you're attempting to make an institutional change to elicit a different behavior, because if you end up interfacing with the wrong mechanism, you can get an unintended result.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to the Management Theory Toolbox toolbox. I'm your host, Travis Mallett, and I'm thrilled to have you join me on this journey of continuous learning and growth as we navigate the dynamic world of management.

Speaker 2:

Now this isn't your typical management podcast. Yes, there are plenty of resources out there that will give you the ABCs of how to run a meeting, hire someone or even how to fake a sick day without getting caught, but here we like to talk about the behind the scenes topics, those concepts and ideas which transcend specific management practices, rather than simply restate them. We aren't going to give you specific tips and tricks for becoming an effective manager. Here at the Management Theory Toolbox, we're interested in the why behind it all the discoveries of behavioral science, psychology, business and economics that will open our eyes to what's happening behind the scenes. Our journey into organizational theories have led us to this topic of learning, and in the past two episodes we started exploring the ideas of individual and organizational learning at a high level, looking at different metaphors to describe human learning, as well as some specific ideas related to learning and development in an organizational setting, like upskilling and reskilling. If you're like me and someone mentions the topic of learning, you immediately think about knowledge acquisition. Images of studying from a textbook, being able to recall information on demand for a test, or learning a new skill that can be exercised at will, are all commonly associated with the word learning. But if you think about it, almost all of our behaviors, whether we're conscious of them or not, are learned behaviors. We weren't born with the habit of shaking someone's hand when we meet them the first time, or with knowing how to get to work on time, or even understanding why or if that's important how to drive, write an email, follow an R&D development process, address a superior, negotiate a salary, work for a paycheck, create a good impression to others, dress or act professionally, work diligently with a focus, follow cultural norms or time management skills. These are all behaviors and skills we learn after we are born. And if we broaden our definition of learning to include processes where individuals change their behavior in general, then we have a much wider and deeper field to work with.

Speaker 2:

And that brings us to a topic called operant conditioning, which is an explanation for consequence-based learning. That assumes learning results from simple conditioning and higher level mental functioning is often irrelevant. For example, in elementary school we all probably made the mistake of saying some overly mean things to a friend, only to have them shun us for the rest of the school year. For many people, that experience may result in a learned behavior of avoiding conflict or significantly tempering what they say, to avoid disrupting social connections. Similarly, when we're praised by a manager for doing diligent work, that positive consequence may result in increased intensity of work. Another learned behavior conditioned by the consequences, but I'm no expert in operating conditioning, so we're going to need some help for this exploration. So let's give our time travel guide George a call. Hi George and welcome back. Hi George and welcome back.

Speaker 4:

My dear friend, where might we venture today? Or, to be more precise, to which moment in time shall we journey?

Speaker 2:

We're exploring the topic of operant conditioning. Do you know where we might start?

Speaker 4:

Ah, the scent of inquiry is indeed sweet. The path you seek is so well-trodden that one might have ventured there with little guidance. Yet it is always a joy to accompany a fellow sojourner. Let us set our course for Harvard University some decades past. It is there, amidst the hallowed halls of academia, that our adventure finds its genesis.

Speaker 2:

Forward my friend.

Speaker 4:

So what are we here for?

Speaker 2:

Behold, william James Hall looms before us a bastion of learning and a beacon to minds thirsty for knowledge.

Speaker 4:

Here I'll get the door when to Upwards we ascend to the seventh floor, there resides Dr BF Skinner, a sage of the modern mind, a herald of behaviorism. What's behaviorism? An excellent question indeed. Behaviorism, at its very heart, is a philosophy of the mind concerned most keenly with observable behaviors rather than internal thoughts or feelings. It posits that behaviors are acquired through conditioning and thus can be altered through similar means. It is the external rather than the internal that shapes us, so to speak.

Speaker 4:

So it's about how what happens around us influences what we do Precisely my dear chap, our actions are responses to the stimuli that the world presents, and by understanding these one can predict and modify behavior. Now let us not tarry longer here in the hallway. A mind most brilliant awaits us. Dr Skinner, it's always a delight. Allow me to introduce Travis, a seeker of knowledge. We're here to understand some of what you've learned in the field of operant conditioning.

Speaker 3:

Travis, please enter and observe my laboratory.

Speaker 2:

Well, this is interesting. I'm not sure what I expected from a psychologist's lab, but I wasn't expecting it to look like a pet store.

Speaker 3:

Indeed, in this laboratory, we engage in numerous experiments with animals to derive principles applicable to human behavior. Allow me to demonstrate using what has come to be known as the Skinner box, though I typically call it an operant conditioning chamber. How does it work exactly? Watch closely now. Initially, the rat exhibits random movement within the chamber. However, it will by chance, activate the lever. Observe the immediate consequence it receives a food pellet. The rat rapidly learns that lever pressing is linked to this reward. This phenomenon is called positive reinforcement, where a behavior is strengthened by a resulting pleasant outcome.

Speaker 2:

So how do you apply this principle to humans?

Speaker 3:

This principle is crucial for understanding human behavior as well. Humans, much like the rat, modify their behavior based on the outcomes of their actions. This process of reinforcement is instrumental across various applications education, therapeutic interventions, parenting and even personal behavior management. Our behaviors are continually molded by the consequences they elicit. By understanding these principles, we can craft environments that promote beneficial behaviors and discourage harmful ones.

Speaker 2:

That's really insightful. Well, thank you for sharing your work with me.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for visiting Travis. It's been rewarding to share these insights with you. Farewell, and keep exploring the science of behavior. And keep exploring the science of behavior.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for bringing me here, george. So, if I'm understanding it correctly, the point of all this is that if we can figure out what influences or conditions people's behavior, then leaders and managers can be more adept at managing behavior or designing systems and processes to achieve a desired result.

Speaker 4:

Indeed, you have grasped the essence quite rapidly. Yet therein lies an irony the human ability to learn after a short conversation itself poses a significant blow to the very theory of operant conditioning. We explore Really Quite so conditioning. We explore Really Quite so While operant conditioning splendidly predicts certain aspects of human behavior and learning, it is but a thread of this rich fabric. Yet let not your enthusiasm wane, for operant conditioning is still laden with a myriad of insights. Before you venture deeper, may I suggest that you speak with someone familiar with the field of evolutionary psychology to get a better understanding of operant conditioning and its limitations. In fact, if you're ready, let's remain here on Harvard's campus and advance the clock by several decades.

Speaker 2:

So you want me to speak to someone else at Harvard.

Speaker 4:

Yes, specifically an evolutionary psychologist. Take a seat. While I retrieve our guest Travis, let me introduce you to Dr Max Krasnow. Thanks again, George. Always a delight, Remember. Time is the river on which we sail, and understanding its currents is the art of navigation. Farewell.

Speaker 2:

Hi Max and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Travis. Great, I'm really looking forward to talking with you today, but before we get started, go ahead and tell us a bit about your background and your work.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. My name is Max Krasnow. I'm currently an instructor in the Harvard Division of Continuing Education. I teach courses through the master's program in the Extension School. Before I started this job, I was a professor and principal investigator in the Harvard Psychology Department in their PhD program. I ran the evolutionary psychology lab at Harvard, and the particular focus of my research has been how have we evolved to be such a social species, and so, in multiple ways that converge from several angles, I've been studying the evolution of our social cognition.

Speaker 2:

Excellent, and thanks again for joining us. So in today's episode we're talking about operant conditioning and evolutionary psychology, but for our listeners who are new to the topic, can you provide a brief overview of what operant conditioning is and what it explains? Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

Operant conditioning is a model of learning that had its origin in the behaviorist tradition.

Speaker 1:

People often associate that with BF Skinner, who interestingly enough, had his office on the seventh floor of William James in the psychology department at Harvard, and my own graduate advisor worked in that lab. Operant conditioning is a model where an organism changes its behavior on the basis of the feedback that it gets after it engages in a behavior. So if it takes a behavior where it then receives a reward, that behavior is more likely to occur in the future. If it engages in a behavior and then receives a punishment, that's a behavior that is predicted to be less likely to occur in the future. There are limited circumstances where operant conditioning makes successful predictions about human behavior, for example and this is a somewhat controversial topic in the treatment programs for children with autism spectrum disorder, particularly on the more extreme end of that dimension. The whole fundamental organizing principle of applied behavioral analysis is operant conditioning. So the program is about identifying what does that child find rewarding, what does that child find punishing, and then using that information to construct a behavior change program.

Speaker 2:

So I don't know much about autism, but is that because it significantly disrupts social connections that it falls back on just operant conditioning?

Speaker 1:

I think that's a really good summary of why that is a particularly relevant approach to use in that case.

Speaker 2:

Now, can you tell us about what we know, about how the mechanisms behind operant conditioning have evolved in humans if we know anything at all and how the mechanisms behind operant conditioning have evolved in humans if we know anything at all and are there cases where operant conditioning fails to explain a behavior but evolutionary psychology tends to fill in that gap?

Speaker 1:

So there is somewhat of a dearth of explicit research testing this theory, and it's in part because there are particular ways of testing evolutionary theories as opposed to other psychological forms of theory. But there is a analysis that I'm somewhat partial to, and the idea is that what operant conditioning is from an evolutionary perspective is the fallback mechanism in the case of confusion. There are some situations a species recurrently experiences. For example, for hundreds of thousands of years we've lived in groups, and in those groups there have been reliable structures present such that the woman who nursed you is almost certainly your mother, and the children that mother has also taken care of are almost certainly your siblings typically full siblings and so the mind can come pre-prepared with those expectations, and then the mechanisms that use that information can have specific structure that is appropriate for that situation. One of those regularities that our species has experienced is we've reliably been in groups of people across deep stretches of evolutionary time where those people knew things that we didn't, including knowing how to use tools, knowing how to process food, knowing how to forage in particularly effective ways, how and when to hunt, and how the approach of an animal makes it more successful, what animals are dangerous, and so these are cases where selection pressures on mechanisms of social learning would be predicted to have evolved and there's excellent evidence that humans have diverse mechanisms of social learning would be predicted to have evolved and there's excellent evidence that humans have diverse mechanisms of social learning. On the other hand, there are situations that an organism is going to encounter that are not part of that reliable structure, that the mind has not come pre-prepared to deal with in any specific way, and in that case the best you can do is learn through trial and error reinforcement. So the failures of this particular form of learning theory operant conditioning and behaviorism in general. These theories start with a very strong assumption that this is how we learn everything and that the learning principle is applied equally in all circumstances. Based on the description that I just gave, it could be obvious that there's many recurrent situations that humans and human ancestors have experienced that natural selection would have opportunity to select for mutations that caused better, more successful behavior than you could achieve if you simply were using operant conditioning. And these are the examples that for the past 70 years have time and time again shown that operant conditioning is unsuccessful in explaining the acquisition of that behavior.

Speaker 1:

For example, take a species that has a particular experience. Throughout its history, like raccoons, have been scavengers, that they frequently encounter dirty food. And when raccoons are exposed to an operant conditioning program, this is often called a shaping regime, where you sequentially reward closer and closer approximations to the desired behavioral end goal. A particular end goal was not able to be conditioned. They weren't able to get raccoons to do a thing because it conflicted with the way that they're prepared to learn. In this particular case, they were conditioning using food, getting raccoons to see something as food, and raccoons don't give away food, they keep it and they don't treat food as itself clean. They often will wash it. And so in this particular experiment, which was done by Skinner's star students, the Breelands, they found that they couldn't get raccoons to do the thing they were trying to shape them to do, and they got the spontaneous emergence of a behavior that they didn't condition.

Speaker 1:

It's important to remember that humans are more complicated than imagined by behaviorists. There's problems that we encounter frequently where people behave in ways that we don't want. If you're a parent that has had your kids in daycare, you probably have experienced the daycare center having a problem with parents picking their kids up on time. They can be very encouraging of parents picking up on time. There was an interesting case of a daycare center trying to apply behaviorist principles to discourage parents from picking up late, and so what they did is they applied a punishment. They said if you pick up your kid late, we're going to impose a fine. Contrary to the predictions of operant conditioning, that actually led to an increase in late pickups. And if you talk to the parents and this, I think, also makes intuitive sense it now felt like they were buying a service. They valued the extra 15 minutes more than they valued the money and they felt justified in doing it. In that case, they no longer felt bad about doing it.

Speaker 2:

Operant conditioning does make some useful predictions about how humans respond to rewards or punishments, but there are some situations where operant conditioning gives a completely wrong prediction. Are there any other cases where operant conditioning fails to explain human learning, and maybe what are some alternative explanations for those cases?

Speaker 1:

The general category of failures for operant conditioning is that humans and other species learn a lot more rapidly than the theory considers. Language, for example, is one of the most well-studied cases. That is just an absolute failure of operant conditioning or classic behaviorist learning theory to actually account for. Children will learn new words in a single instance of exposure. This is called one-shot learning, and there is absolutely no way that an operant conditioning program running on its own without specialized information can explain the acquisition of words in that way. And so generally, humans learn a lot faster than you would expect if all we had was operant conditioning, and I think that this is part of the perspective that you get from evolutionary psychology that tends to be missed in other analyses. Part of the success of our species is the fact that we do have multiple mechanisms that each have specialized features, but they also interrelate in a complicated architecture such that you get a multiplicative effect on our abilities. Adding language to a pre-linguistic hominid didn't simply allow it to talk. It allowed it to learn better and coordinate better.

Speaker 1:

There's clearly the case that we've had cultural evolution and the movement of culture through time to allow us to exist in cultures that never existed before. So, for example, there's lots of ways in which ancient mechanisms now in new cultures that our ancestors never experienced, are able to acquire information that our ancestors never acquired. Some of this is a relatively straightforward simply slotting new information into old slots. Our ancestors had what Chomsky calls universal grammar. We come with the ability to learn human languages. A thousand years ago there wasn't modern English, so our ancestors didn't have a lot of the words we have, but our language acquisition device is able to acquire these new words, and we have words for concepts that our ancestors didn't have, and so we have the ability to form conceptual representations that are new. This process, we can see, plays out in ways that bypass natural selection on genes. In ways that bypass natural selection on genes, we expect natural selection on genes to be relatively slow, not being able to show up, for example, within the lifespan of an organism where natural selection couldn't possibly have applied to their genes. When my parents were born, they didn't have as many elements on the periodic table as I had when I was born, and there are more elements on the periodic table now than there were when I was born, and so obviously we're able to, within a new generation, accommodate information that our genes were not able to evolve in order to specialize on.

Speaker 1:

There are also ways, though, in which culture and genetics interrelate in a way that's often called gene culture coevolution. Some interesting examples of that are how exception of individuals within a species who have mutations or perturbations of development such that they're lactose intolerant or allergic to milk all mammals drink milk as babies, but, except for humans, all mammals stop drinking milk when they get older. What humans seem to be unique in is, even though we get to be adult in many other aspects, we have this preserved ability to digest milk, and in understanding how that worked, we can see that over the last tens of thousands of years, we started to raise livestock, we've started to farm other mammals, and we had their milk as a resource that we had available to us. We can think of that originally as a cultural invention.

Speaker 1:

The first time that happens, that wasn't something that our ancestors had genetic adaptation to, but once that was a regular feature of our environment, natural selection could act on mutations in our digestion genetics to prolong the age at which we're producing the lactose enzyme, which allows you to digest milk sugars, and so, as cultures reliably had the presence of mammals as livestock genes were under selection to preserve that ability. So we can see co-evolution between the culture that we have and the genetics that we have. That ended up with certain populations of humans those that descend from ancestors who pastured animals tending to have more lactose tolerance, and other populations of modern humans who, in their recent ancestry, didn't descend from people who did pasture animals. So it's a population having lower levels of lactose tolerance as adults and that's a genetic difference.

Speaker 2:

I think the big question for our audience is what are some of the implications for practitioners, especially managers or leaders in an organizational setting?

Speaker 1:

I think one of the main implications from taking an evolutionary analysis of social behavior is this recognition that there are multiple mechanisms of social behavior, both social learning, but also other aspects in which we solve social problems. When should we deploy trust, when should our punitive sentiment be aroused? When should we get angry? When should we apologize? And each of these mechanisms has an internal logic because they're solving different problems in different ways. One of the ways to be successful, therefore, in organizing groups of humans is to understand which mechanism you're tapping when you're attempting to make an institutional change to elicit a different behavior, because if you end up interfacing with the wrong mechanism, you can get an unintended result. I think an interesting example and this is not in a small-scale organizational context, but I think it's relevant for a kind of a contemporary political issue is how we understand problems relating to social welfare. You see reliable differences in how conservatives and liberals think about the homeless. Conservatives tend to think about the homeless as lazy, that they're homeless or unemployed because of a lack of work, that it's an individual decision making that makes them responsible for their outcomes. Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to see these problems as the result of luck and circumstance such that, on the flip of that coin or the toss of a dice, anyone could be in those circumstances, and that it has much less to do with any individual's hard work. From an evolutionary analysis, there's been a lot of work that has demonstrated that we have multiple mechanisms of social organization and multiple mechanisms that produce social intuitions, and that we can look at two particular mechanisms. In this case, one of them evolved in order to help us solve problems related to cooperation that if you're going to work with somebody else for mutual benefit, you don't want them to exploit you. If they're not helping you out in return for you helping them, they're a bad cooperation partner and continuing to engage with them would be failing that problem.

Speaker 1:

Finding cooperative partners is part of the solution to the ancestral problem of cooperation. We are also a species that lived in a world where there was tons of risk present. There's some estimates that 30% of hunter-gatherers would have died if it were not for the help they got from their family and friends. We help each other out when we get injured, when we get sick, and injury and illness is much more often a product of luck than it is intentional action. Also, some of the ways in which we make a living, like hunting or our ancestors made a living at least are much more luck-based than some of the other ways that we made a living, like gathering plant foods and just through sheer luck you might be unsuccessful in retrieving animal protein.

Speaker 1:

Day after day after day, we seem to have a relatively specialized, evolved system for pooling the risk in our social environment, such that we interpret non-contribution or non-cooperation differently when we're thinking of a relationship as a risk pooling relationship than we do when we're thinking about it as a cooperation relationship. And actually research has shown that you can get conservatives to have liberal intuitions and liberals to have conservative intuitions when you manipulate which of these mechanisms you're tapping by the information you give them. And so I think this is the kind of insight that business leaders and managers would profit by being mindful of, that there's a literature that helps us understand the specific nature of our multiple mechanisms of social cognition, and that there is profit to be gained, that there's a way to have a more successful organization by applying that specialized knowledge.

Speaker 2:

This reminds me a bit of Daniel Lieberman's book Exercised. He's also here at Harvard over in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and one of the things that he argues is that we evolved in many ways to be lazy, to conserve energy and calories every opportunity we get, and that's what makes it so hard for us to have the motivation to get out and exercise. Now his focus is a lot on the physical aspects of that burning less calories through less physical movement, but I imagine there's similar mechanisms in psychology with respect to mental energy as well. Are there evolutionary pressures that conflict with our higher mental states, as in? We might have some innate drive to succeed or become self-actualized, if we're thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But can that also conflict with other evolutionary pressures that could end up impacting job performance and motivation as well?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely and this is a fundamental organizing principle that essentially all species face that natural selection has been able to express feedback like preserve some mutations at the expense of other mutations only when those mutations have yielded benefits.

Speaker 1:

If hard work didn't result in tangible benefits, those mutations wouldn't have been selected by natural selection, and we can imagine that there's lots of circumstances where additional work wouldn't have yielded substantial benefit.

Speaker 1:

Or in the sense that there's opportunity costs to everything that you do. By putting effort in to solve one problem, that's the same as not putting effort in to solve a different problem. That, thinking about the return rate of effort across the multiple problems that humans solved ancestrally, there would have been many, many cases where the relative return rates flipped around in the order of magnitude where, once you had given enough effort to one project and gotten the sufficient reward from that, it was now more profitable to switch effort into something else. Now we have a particular way of understanding laziness in the modern world, and particularly in the work world. We think about the work that an employee puts in, but we didn't evolve to be workers in companies, and there's many, many more things that we as individuals put our effort into, and so I think that helps us give a different understanding to the modern conception of work and laziness.

Speaker 2:

Well, we're about out of time, so I just want to say thank you so much for joining us. This was quite fascinating. I hope we get a chance to chat again Before we sign off. Can you tell our listeners how they can find you and your work?

Speaker 1:

My lab website still exists and on that website you can find a list of my publications. That website is projectsiqharvardedu backslash EPL, standing for Evolutionary Psychology Lab. But probably the easiest way to find my research is simply to go on Google Scholar and type in my name.

Speaker 2:

Great Well, thank you very much for joining us.

Speaker 1:

My pleasure. It's been a great conversation. Thank you, take care.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that was a lot of information. Over the next several episodes, we're going to be exploring the concepts of operant conditioning in more depth, since this is extremely applicable to modern workplaces, which are riddled with behavior feedback structures. But, as we learned from Dr Krasnow, there are often multiple mechanisms at play at any moment and leaders should be aware of these to avoid unintended consequences. For example, employee of the Month awards provide a form of positive reinforcement for high-performing employees, but the public aspect of the reward can also enhance observational learning, where employees learn strategies from those who are rewarded, which is a form of social learning and, from an evolutionary perspective, public recognition can trigger an increase in social standing and respect among peers, which historically could influence survival and reproduction, but which may also fuel unintended informal hierarchies and power structures within teams. Or consider the reward systems, as some companies, which are designed such that only top performers receive significant rewards. While this might be a very effective way to tap into operant conditioning and other mechanisms like social status, the results can produce a cutthroat competitive environment where employees focus on outperforming peers rather than working with them, leading to decreases in innovation or other metrics than working with them, leading to decreases in innovation or other metrics this week.

Speaker 2:

Take some time to sketch out a few of the feedback mechanisms in your work environment that produce either positive or negative consequences for certain behaviors. For each of these structures, take a guess at how they might tap into multiple learning mechanisms beyond just simple conditioning of behavior. What unintended consequences may result? Are there remedies for those? And so, with that, thank you for joining me on another episode of the Management Theory Toolbox. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we dive straight into the ideas of positive and negative reinforcement. In the meantime, keep learning, keep growing and keep building your management theory toolbox, thank you.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Travis Mallett, ALM

Host
Head Shot

Max Krasnow, Ph.D.

Guest