Question

How do operant stimuli control behavior?

Answer 1

I am going to assume that you mean operant conditioning. I don't remember learning about operant stimuli, but I do remember learning about operant conditioning, which is a type of learning in which the organism learns through the consequences of its behavior. So it controls behavior through what happens.

I'm going to make it easier to you by giving you a silly, but memorable example that my tutor used to explain this to me and my peers. Many of us don't fart in public because if we do, people start laughing at us and it's embarrassing and humiliating. This is basically operant conditioning because we learn from our consequences that we don't want to do this again. Consequences aren't bad though. Many of us are scared to ask a question because we might think we look stupid, but maybe you ask the question to your teacher and she praises you for your participation. This would probably make you more likely to participate in class and ask more questions.

This basically leads us to the law of effect and to reinforcement. The Law of Effect is a principle by E. L. Throndike that states that behaviors that lead to positive consequences will be strengthened and behaviors that lead to negative consequences will be weakened. And to understand reinforcement, look at this diagram: https://figures.boundless-cdn.com/31539/large/yjh0qdsqlzlkxwt2zwgs.png

Hope I helped!

Darry