Final answer:
The third principle of effective shaping in operant conditioning recommends reinforcement contingency for responses that are neither too difficult nor too easy, ensuring that tasks are within the Goldilocks zone. It relies on rewarding successive approximations and using reinforcement schedules like fixed ratio and fixed interval to guide the organism toward the desired behavior.
Step-by-step explanation:
The third principle of effective shaping in operant conditioning requires that the reinforcement contingency should demand a response that is neither too difficult, nor too easy. It should ideally be within the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the task is suitably challenging to motivate the organism but not so hard that it cannot achieve the desired behavior.
This concept of shaping involves rewarding successive approximations toward a target behavior, increasingly refining the behaviors until the final desired behavior is reached. This method is crucial for teaching complex behaviors and is structured in such a way to make it possible for the organism to succeed progressively through achievable steps.
By using reinforcement schedules like fixed ratio and fixed interval, the organism is guided toward the desired behavior. A fixed ratio schedule, like in the example of Carla selling glasses, rewards after a set number of responses, which often leads to high rates of response for quantity-focused tasks. However, this can sometimes compromise the quality of the performance.