Effects of social satiation on efficacy of social and nonsocial reinforcers

The social deprivation-satiation effect is interpreted in terms of the perceived contingencies of the S-E interaction and the attributions made by S on that basis. According to this interpretation, the children are satiated with E and not with the stimuli. It was predicted that satiation with social stimuli would affect to the same degree performance for social and nonsocial reinforcers. Middle-class second-grade boys and girls (N = 40) were subjected to a 10-minute satiation treatment, in which the stimulus word Yqfeh (“Good” in Hebrew) was emitted by E two or 20 times. The treatment was followed by a 75-item binary discrimination task, in which correct responses were reinforced either with Yafeh or with a plastic token. A significant satiation effect was found for both social and nonsocial reinforcement. These results are in conflict with other studies reporting no social satiation effect for nonsocial reinforcement. In these studies the nonsocial reinforcement was not administered by E, but dispensed by a machine, while in the present study the nonsocial reinforcement was directly given by E. Thus, both sets of results confirm the suggested theory.