Contingency management
A contingency can be understood as a rule that states that some event, ‘B’, will occur if and only if another specific event, ‘A’, occurs. In contingency management, there is always an external agency which tries to employ this principle so as to bring about desired response. Simple classical conditioning can be understood with one example: The US will occur only when the the CS occurs first. It is sometimes seen that in operant conditioning, there exist an contingency between response and reinforcer that is the reinforcer occurs if and only if the specific response occurs. According to B.F Skinner, there are actually three components present in the operant conditioning contingency: (1) the response itself; and (2) the stimulus that follow the response (i.e., the reinforcer) (3) the context or situation in which a response occurs (i.e., those stimuli that precede the response); To put it in another way, the contingency in operant conditioning usually takes different form: In the presence of a specific stimulus, that is known as a discriminative stimulus, the reinforcer will occur if and only if the operant response occurs.