The token economy is a form of “conditioned reinforcement” or “secondary reinforcement” (Malott & Trojan-Suarez, 2006). This is because the tokens are not naturally occurring reinforcers. Naturally occurring reinforcers like food or water would be classed as “unconditioned reinforcers” or “primary reinforcers” because they do not need to be paired with anything.
The money you earn by going to work is a form of conditioned reinforcement because the money itself is not naturally reinforcing. It is the fact that you can use this money to get desired items and activities like a house, food, cars or holidays.
To expand a little more, imagine you go to work and get given some plastic tokens at the end of the day. It’s unlikely that you’re going to be in any way happy about this. However, if you were told that those tokens could be traded in for an extra day off work, all of a sudden those tokens will become something that you’re going to want to get more of (well for most people anyway).
In this case, the tokens become conditioned reinforcers because they have now been “paired” with the ability to get a day off work. In other words, getting tokens leads to getting a day off work while no tokens means no day off.
In the case of school children, the tokens serve as a way of gaining access to preferred items and activities – therefore, getting tokens leads to getting activities and no tokens means no activities.
Conditioned versus "Generalised" Conditioned
In the example about trading tokens for a day off work, if the tokens could only be traded for a day off then these tokens would be termed “conditioned reinforcers”. If the tokens could be traded for various different desired items and not just one specific thing then they would be termed “generalised conditioned reinforcers”.