Edward Thorndike believed that to learn you should do trial and error. He made the puzzle box experiment which consisted of putting a cat in a puzzle box to see how it behaved and what would the cat do to escape and get food. Thorndike explains what he learned with the “Law of Effect” which was that the animals would repeat what gave them a good effect; they did that because they associated and that gave them a good result. He also came up with the “Law of Exercise” which said that practice would give you strength and that if you stopped practicing you would get weaker. Operant conditioning was reinforcement and punishment changed our behavior. What reinforcement does is increase behavior. What the punishment does is for behavior to occur less. Positive reinforcement is better than punishment in altering behavior, punishment was not simply the opposite of positive reinforcement.
http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch08_animals/thorndikes_puzzle_box.html
