Rated
Nov 06 2007
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1 review
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marketing, psychology, advertising, google adwords, adwords
• betabunny.com
Intermittent reward or punishment has a stronger motivational affect on behavior than consistent reward or punishment. Advertisers, governments, parents, and others who are inconsistent can elicit the most compliance through doing this. (The FEAR of anything is far more influential than the potential punishment and the DREAM (of hitting the lottery for example) is the motivating factor.
The lottery and slot machines use intermittent rewards to increase and maintain interest in gambling. I propose that this is also what is going on with Google AdWords. You read it here first, folks.
From the page: "What is Operant Conditioning?
The basic principal of operant conditioning is simply that the frequency of a behavior will increase if is rewarded, and decrease if it is punished. For instance, a hungry rat in a Skinner box will at first act in a manner that is natural to a hungry rat; e.g., running around the cage, squeaking, trying to escape, etc. If while it is performing these activities, one response - in this case pressing a lever - leads to the reward of securing food, the rat will gradually learn that pressing the lever leads to the reward of food. The behavior will be repeated and thus learned. The behavior that results in the reward becomes especially important to the rat. The same process can be applied to an action that allows the rat to escape from or avoid unpleasant stimuli.
Another principal of operant conditioning is that once a behavior is learned, the frequency of the reward can be reduced. For the behavior to be learned it may be necessary at first to reinforce every occurrence of the behavior. Once learned, the reinforcements can be provided on an intermittent basis, and over time it is possible to reduce the frequency of rewards and still maintain the behavior. For instance, the number of times the lever has to be pressed to achieve a reward can gradually be increased from each time, to every ten times, to every hundred times, and so on, or the lever may need to be pressed repeatedly for a set period of time to achieve a reward. Behavioral psychologists have spent much time experimenting on what effect various schedules of reward have on behavior."
