Incentive Lecture

An incentive is something I thought about is bribing someone or knowing you would get a reward for doing something. This lecture talks about extrinsic motivation and incentive value, which have a lot of influence in incentives and decision making. Reinforcers and punishers and consequences that can either be good or bad. A reinforcer is a consequence that selects behavior, it makes someone want to do the behavior more often. A punisher is a consequence that deselects a behavior, making someone not want to do that behavior.  These are all things that we probably practice every single day but I have never looked at them broken down into detail like I did in this lecture. I liked the comparison in the “Losses Loom Larger Than Gains” slide when it was describing earning and losing money. It is so accurate when thinking about this scenario that losing money is so much more upsetting than being happy when you gain money. It is because the value of losing the money is much stronger than the gain of money. I liked thinking about it this way and found the lecture to stick in my brain a lot more when thinking about it this way.