According to the Law of Effect, what impacts whether a behavior will be repeated?

The Law of Effect, formulated by Edward Thorndike, states that behaviors followed by satisfying outcomes are likely to be repeated, whereas behaviors followed by unpleasant outcomes are less likely to occur again. This principle highlights the relationship between responses and their consequences.

Focusing on why the selected option is significant, the "closeness of response to behavior" indicates how immediate the outcome of a behavior is relative to the behavior itself. In other words, when a behavior results in a reward closely in time, it reinforces the connection between the behavior and the positive outcome. This immediacy strengthens the likelihood of that behavior being repeated in the future, as the individual learns to associate the action with the favorable result quickly.

Other factors, such as the frequency of the behavior in the past, the type of environment, or the duration of the behavior, do not directly address the core principle of the Law of Effect as clearly as the closeness of the response to the behavior does. While these factors might influence behavior in a broader sense, they do not capture the essential mechanism of reinforcement that the Law of Effect describes. The theoretical underpinning lies in the immediacy and relevance of the consequence to the specific behavior at hand, which is why the notion of response clos