Operant Conditioning: Changing Sleeping Patterns

1. My roommates go to bed too early every night.  They have the lights off at around 10:30 pm.

2. The target behavior is to have both of my two roommates not want to go to bed until 12:30 am.

3. In order to elicit this desired behavior, I will install a reinforcer every time they go to bed after 10:30pm.  I will give each of my roommates one dollars for every half hour they stay awake past 10:30 until 12:30am, making for a possibility of 4 dollars each night. This conditioning plan uses a positive reinforcement as I am introducing something new and desirable for achieving the target behavior.

4. The reinforcer will be given to my roommates after the desired behavior has begun to start developing. For example, every half hour after 10:30pm the roommates stay awake, they will receive the positive reinforcer. This timing will be effective as they will want to stay up later in order to receive more of the reinforcement.

5. I will be using a fixed-ratio schedule. In the beginning of the experiment, there will be FR 1 in which the roommates will receive a dollar for every half hour awake past 10:30pm. After two weeks, the ratio will increase to FR 2 where the roommates will get a dollar for every hour awake past 10:30. After two more weeks the FR will increase once more. This is the most appropriate schedule as it is slowly conditioning the roommates to develop different sleeping patterns.

6. Successive approximations would be used within the experiment to reach the desired condition. The first approximation would be that of being on the computer at night. After reinforcing this, I would then reinforce watching TV or some other activity which would ensure a later bed time. By reinforcing preferred variations in the subject’s behavior, the target behavior will be gradually attained.

7. I believe this program will be quite effective as the desired behavior is being reinforced with money, something every college student never has enough of.  Some things that could hurt my ability to condition this specific behavior include: the energy of my roommates, if they are very tired from a long day the reinforcement may not be as desirable as sleep; also, if my roommates are already asleep before I come home from class, then my experimental design would be flawed. No, I do not believe that I could condition this behavior better using another method.