Operant Conditioning is for reinforcement and punishment, where if done right the person will associate pain, disappointment, sadness, or bad thoughts with doing or saying something wrong. Whereas the opposite is associated with reinforcement, in which doing the right thing and good behavior will be connected with rewards.
For example, a child wants a toy,so she cries and throws a fit. In this case the child’s behavior is bad and is treated that way with punishment. So with the punishment the child learns what they did wrong and knows not to do the same thing again and instead may ask for it politely.
Trial and error however is trying until the correct result is reached. Most of the time the result is not satisfactory and will have to be tried again.
So they are not technically different in any way, instead they are used together. So back to the child to understand this. The child was punished and did not get what she wanted ,which is the end result of the situation. The child understands this is not the result she was looking for so it was not the “correct end result”. So you have conditioned the child with operant conditioning to help the child reach the correct way of receiving or asking for the object, Which in turn will make the child eventually try again to get the object and she might possibly fail or maybe succeed, either way she uses trial and error to eventually receive the correct end result.
Trial and error is narrowing down the right way to do something based on prior unsuccessful attempts.
Operant condition is praising good decisions and punishing bad ones as they come to let the subject learn the difference between the choices. Case in point: A dog pees somewhere in the house vs going out the door being held open for him so that he can pee in the yard.
Learning is done prior to Reinforcement….
Operant Conditioning is reinforcing the already learned/conditioned behaviour as learned through Classical Conditioning by providing incentives to increase the the likelihood of occurrence of a desired response. E.g.- by providing chocolate to kid for exhibit good manners and respect for old.
Trial and error is to try and exhaust all possibilities for finding the solution to a problem e.g.-just like trying all keys which are expected to open the lock. This provides the guarantee of solution to be figured out at the expense of the time consumed at trying all the possible solutions.
Trial and error method is a learning method just like Heuristics which employs a practical method of finding the solution. While new things are learnt in Trial and Error….. in Operant Conditioning the already learnt behaviour is reinforced /strengthened (for increasing the likelihood of occurrence of the desired behaviour already learnt and exhibit before)