Childhood Choice Making Patterns as a Function of Contingency Shaping Versus Instructional Control

The term contingency shaped refers to any response class governed by its direct consequences (Catania, 1973). In a theoretical paper on problem solving Skinner (1966) discriminated between contingency shaped and rule-governed behavior by stating that no matter how similar in form they may appear each have independent controlling variables and functional properties. In a later analysis (Skinner, 1974) he elaborated on rule-governed behavior by pointing out that one distinct form of rule-governed behavior is instruction following. An instructional episode, however, consists of more than any verbal or non-verbal statement of contingencies, but includes the consequences in question as well (Cerutti, 1989). Given this definition, it is apparent that humans are constantly encountering instructional episodes. As a result, all verbal humans clearly have a socially reinforced repertoire of behavior that is under instructional control by the time they reach an early age. As a distinct class of behavior, instruction following often comes to be highly reinforcing as instructions serve to expedite reinforcement or escape from punishment