Final answer:
The shaper plays a critical role in behavior shaping by rewarding successive approximations of a target behavior, which is vital for learning complex behaviors in both humans and animals, with stimulus discrimination ensuring specificity of the response.
Step-by-step explanation:
In behavior shaping, the role of the shaper is crucial. The shaper reinforces successive approximations of a target behavior, rewarding actions that get closer to the desired behavior over time. This method is essential because complex behaviors are unlikely to be displayed spontaneously without a gradual teaching process. For example, if parents want their child to clean their room, they would start by rewarding the child for cleaning up one toy, and then gradually increase the expectations until the child is cleaning the entire room. This is not just applicable to humans but also used in animal training, where behaviors are reinforced step by step until the whole sequence is learned. An important aspect of shaping is stimulus discrimination, ensuring that the conditioned response is specific to the conditioned stimuli and not other similar stimuli.