📖 Reading Passage
The concept of “behavioral momentum” refers to the tendency of a behavior to persist even when faced with disruptions or challenges. Just as physical momentum keeps a moving object going until an external force stops it, behavioral momentum suggests that established patterns of behavior are resistant to change. This resistance is built through a history of reinforcement, where consistent rewards strengthen the behavior, making it more likely to continue despite interruptions or changes in the environment.
🎧 Listening Lecture
Professor: Let me give you an example from a study. Researchers trained a group of rats to press a lever in a cage to get food. For weeks, every time they pressed the lever, they received a pellet. This consistent reward built strong behavioral momentum. Then, the researchers introduced a distraction—a loud noise that played randomly in the cage. Rats without prior training stopped pressing the lever almost immediately, but the trained rats continued pressing the lever for a long time, even though the noise was disruptive. The key was that the trained rats’ behavior had high momentum because of the consistent reinforcement history. Even when the noise made the environment less predictable, their lever-pressing behavior persisted, showing how reinforcement can create resistance to disruption.