The Similarities Between Weight Watchers And Operant Conditioning

The program I picked was weight watchers, I chose this because my mother was in it at one point, and she is now in a different weight program. There was a common similarity between those two programs. The most blatant being in some of the strategies that they have for changing their behavior and lifestyle about food and exercise, they both used operant conditioning to change their opinions. Weight watchers is very open with their use of behavior conditioning “WW is a behavior change organization, rooted in behavioral science.” (Weight Watchers, 2021).They use positive and negative conditioning to change their thoughts and ideas, firstly they use negative conditioning to start eliminating their appetite and eating junk food between meals. They

This means some individuals may accidentally max out their points on non-filling food and then cheat on their points to actually get full, or potentially risk a very negligent diet of junk food with no nutritional value. One way weight watchers tries to fix this is by recommending diets for people to use. They try adding in personal favorites of the individuals and building the plan around those foods to make the diet easier for certain invidious to achieve. I remember when my mother was going through this and how constantly she was looking on her app to just constantly check their points for certain foods. At first, putting in the meals that she cooked and the nutritional value, it always just seemed like an immense amount individuals had to go through for tracking the points. One problem found and that they addressed was no strong positive reinforcement system for putting in points unless individuals receive satisfaction from coming under points and balancing them perfectly. I would argue that the point system they use would be related to Skinner’s ideas of a token

For the two different types of motivation I think that this is clearly a sign of intrinsic motivation, it relies on the individuals to have a motivation to lose weight. There are no outside rewards or punishments for not following the weight watchers program, it is the fact that people are already paying for this service so there is no punishment. The result is that they have to already have a desire to improve themselves and lose weight by following the diet. The intrinsic value for losing weight would only be hampered by actually having rewards for the people to aim for. Potentially it could diminish their personal interest in accomplishing the goal “You are performing an activity for its own sake rather than from the desire for some external reward. The behavior itself is its own reward. … studies have demonstrated that offering excessive external rewards for an already internally rewarding behavior can reduce intrinsic motivation” (Cherry