Reinforcers and Schedules of Reinforcement
Reinforcer: a desirable outcome or avoidance of an undesirable outcome that increases desirable behavior and reduces undesirable behavior. An example of a reinforcer is receiving a good grade after putting a great deal of effort in it. Therefore, the good grade reinforces you to invest time in your homework in a future assignment. Another example of a reinforcer is avoiding a citation by wearing your seatbelt.
Instrumental Conditioning: elicited behavior is a result of a stimulus, which may be desirable or undesirable. For example, a dog who jumps through a loop and is rewarded with a treat (desirable stimulus). Receiving the treat reinforces the behavior; that is, it makes it more likely to occur in the future. A dog that disobeys a command is ignored (undesirable stimulus). Both kinds of stimuli have the same outcome: to get the other organism to behave the way you want.
Here is an example of the power of instrumental behavior, which can generate incredible behavior. Notice how the birds are reinforced with food for their behavior:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozgcKw4MyvY
So why does all of this matter? Most animals have the ability to respond to instrumental conditioning and yes, that includes humans and women.
Schedules of Reinforcement: in order to regulate behavior, reinforcers are delivered on schedules, each of which is ideal to different scenarios.
Fixed Ratio (FR): a schedule of reinforcement in which a reinforcer is delivered after the organism responds to a stimulus to attain a response. For example, a rat may be reinforced with food after each time it presses a level five times. Another example: a boy gets reinforced each time he finishes his portion of vegetables.
Fixed Interval (FI): a schedule in which reinforcement is delivered after a certain period of time upon a response from the organism. For example, your washer and toaster (without adjustment) work on a fixed interval schedule. You know that if you press the lever to wash your clothes or toast your bread, it will take the machine a fixed period of time to give you what you want. Hence, you don't open the washer or toaster over until it finishes and you are reinforced with clean clothes and warm bread.
Variable Ratio (VR): contrary to fixed ratio, a schedule in which reinforcement is delivered after an organism responds to a variable number of required responses, with a constant average. For example, a rat may be reinforced with food for pressing a lever three times in one trial, reinforced for pressing the lever five times the next trial, and reinforced for pressing it four times the next trial. The average responses needed is four lever presses.
Variable Interval (VI): contrary to fixed interval, the lapse of time needed to attain a reinforcement varies from one trial to the other. Rather than a required number of responses, however, what varies is the time interval for the reinforcer to be delivered. When you dry your clothes, for instance, you are operating on a VI schedule, as the time it takes to dry your clothes depends on the number of clothes inserted and the humidity in the dryer, etc.
Why should you care about these technical terms?
When it comes to texting, giving a woman attention, seeing a woman, she is operating via your schedule of reinforcement. This is why we do not double text a woman (rewarding undesirable behavior) or respond immediately after getting her texts (reinforcement that is too quick). This is also why No Contact works (the withdrawal of a desirable outcome, in this case, attention).
If you are not perfectly clear on these concepts, here is a graph demonstration of how deliver of reinforcement changes responses. The short lines marked on the longer lines represent delivery of a reinforcement. Notice how responding freezes on FR and FI schedules of reinforcement. As David D'Angelo stated "getting kills wanting."
http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/intro/ibank/ibank/0076.jpg
I'm going to let this marinate and come back if you guys have questions.
Source: Domjan, M. (2014). The principles of learning and behavior. Cengage Learning.