Name, define, and provide concrete real life scenarios for all of Homans’s behaviorist propositions. Also define and explain his term distributive justice.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The stimulus proposition states if the previous occurrence of a particular stimulus has been the occasion on which an individual’s action has been rewarded, then the more similar the current stimulus is to the past one, the more likely the person is to repeat the action. The success proposition states the more often an action is followed by a reward, the more likely a person will repeat the behavior. The value proposition states the more valuable a particular reward is to a person, the more often he will perform a behavior so rewarded. The deprivation-satiation proposition states the more often in the recent past an individual has received a particular reward, the less valuable any further unit of that reward becomes (and following the value proposition, the less likely the person is to perform the behavior for which he was so rewarded). The frustration-aggression proposition states if a person’s action receives a punishment he did not expect, or if the person does not receive the reward he did expect, he will become angry and more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior, the results of which will become more valuable to him. Individual concrete examples for each proposition will vary by individual student. Striking a fair balance between the rewards and costs each experience is a problem of distributive justice: each party to the exchange must perceive that they are not paying too high a cost relative to the rewards they are gaining. In other words, both parties must be convinced that the profit each derives from the exchange is just.