Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Consequences Shape Action?
Trace the logic of devaluing an outcome after training and testing without fresh reinforcement. Compare the evidence needed for outcome knowledge with the evidence needed for sensitivity to its current value.
Why you’re reading it. Introduce operational criteria for goal-directed action and behavioral autonomy. This placement connects the foundation’s distinction to the schedule and contingency questions developed here.
A question to consider. An animal still performs a well-practiced response after its outcome is devalued. What checks would you require before interpreting that persistence as habitual control?
Why this reading
Dickinson turns the distinction between acting for an outcome and responding habitually into an experimental question. Changing an outcome’s value provides evidence that repetition alone cannot supply.
Before you read
Outcome devaluation makes a previously valued consequence less attractive. Testing without delivering that consequence helps distinguish responding based on earlier knowledge from fresh learning during the test. Here, habit has a narrower meaning than simply doing something often or quickly.
Read for
- Identify the controls showing that the outcome actually lost value.
- Compare responding after different training histories and reinforcement schedules.
- Examine why Dickinson questions repetition alone as the explanation of habitual control.
Consider afterwards
- If someone continues a routine after its usual benefit disappears, what would you need to establish before calling the routine habitual?
Editorial context
The evidence is primarily from laboratory rats. The operational distinction is useful, but it does not license classifying every repeated human action as a habit. Wood and Rünger’s later review extends the discussion to human habit research.