The Future just got a Restart on the Meaning of UnpredictableIn the Spring of 2020, the world is engaged in very large behavioral changes that we hope will lead to positive outcomes.

Punishment, by definition, reduces, weakens, or eliminates (depending on one’s theoretical bias) the responses on which it depends. But punishment also reinforces other behavior, notably that of the one administering the punishment.

“Wash your hands for as l

In an old experiment, Boren (1966) placed two Rhesus monkeys in separate operant chambers so that

In a recent piece in the New York Times titled, “

The stability of an ecosystem, including the species that occupy it, can be disrupted when an invasive species appears in it.

“Complex” has two uses in psychology.

Ever think about where operant behavior comes from? What is it before that first reinforcer occurs? In speaking of the origins of operant behavior, Skinner famously observed that “[o]perant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay.

Contrary to a popular myth among many behavior analysts, Skinner invented neither the cumulative record nor the cumulative recorder. The origins of cumulative frequency plots, as they were known, date back to at least a couple of centuries ago, and now appear frequently in popular media.

What comes to mind when you hear the word brand?

Someone recently sent me a rather gloomy article titled, “You

Rules are everywhere, from the Ten Commandments to those whose violations bring us into traffic court. It is no surprise that rule-governed behavior occupies such a prominent place in behavior-analytic theory.