Operant conditioning relates the relationships between environmental stimuli and our own behavior; it is also called instrumental learning. The term “operant” refers to the fact that an organism learns by reacting to the environment (Martin, Carlson, & Buskist, 2010). When a particular action has good consequences, it will tend to be repeated. On the other hand, when a particular action has bad consequences, the action will tend not to occur. Operant conditioning was first discovered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a 24-year-old man who would later become one of the most influential teachers of the 20th century. psychologists, Edward L. Thorndike. Thorndike placed a hungry cat in a “puzzle box.” The animal could only escape and eat food after activating the latch that opened the door. At first, the cat behaved randomly. Eventually, the cat would accidentally activate the latch and open the door. Over the course of successive trials, the animal's behavior became more and more efficient until it activated the latch without hesitation. Thorndike called this process “learning by trial and accidental success.” Thorndike explained that the cat learned to make the correct response because only the correct response was followed by a favorable outcome, namely getting out of the box and being able to eat the food. The occurrence of a favorable outcome reinforces the response that produced it. Thorndike called this relationship between a response and its consequences the law of effects (O'Donohue and Noll, 1995). Although Thorndike discovered the law of effects, Harvard psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner championed the application of behavior analysis and its methods to solve human problems. ...... middle of paper ...... or it happens because it was previously instrumental in producing certain consequences. The reinforcement of this program is to surf the Internet for an hour more when fruits and vegetables are consumed. Therefore, this behavior occurs over and over again to ensure that I receive the reinforcement but not the punishment. Punishment is considered a negative outcome, which will decrease the response rate (Domjan, Grau, & Krause, 2010). Much evidence has been offered to support the idea that instrumental behaviors are originally acquired as goal-directed acts under control of their consequences. For example, changing the value of an outcome previously obtained by the instrumental response has been consistently shown to have a dramatic and selective effect on the subsequent performance of that response in an extinction test (Colwill, RM, & Triola)., 2002).