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What is Social Behavior?
“What constitutes social behavior?” The general conception is that social interaction involves two organisms in some form of interaction with one another. Learn more about this behavior from our experts here!
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Treating Dangerous Behavior
Dangerous behavior simply can’t be ignored. The person engaging in it is going to either hurt herself or someone else if it continues. Saying that is easy, knowing what to do about it is a rabbit hole. At what point does the behavior become more than “disruptive” and cross the “dangerous” threshold?
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What Does it Mean to Say Ours is “A Science of Behavior?"
Every behavior analyst (hopefully) has learned that ours is a science of behavior. We do not learn that ours is a science of the individual or a science of the person. Why is that? Are we not, however, concerned with people, you may ask? Are we not concerned with the human condition? Are we not humanists?
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Complex Behavior
When behavior is described as complex, it could mean “I don’t understand it” and the reason “I don’t understand it” is because there are many variables that contribute to it, making it difficult to isolate the causes of the behavior.
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When Punishment is a Reinforcer
The behavior of punishing. When behavior is reinforced it becomes more likely the next time, and the next, often in an ever-escalating spiral.
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As Useful as a Third Ear
When I was a graduate student in clinical psychology, lo those many years ago, I was as
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Out of Thin Air?
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.
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Happiness
Happiness pervades modern life. It is a major topic of talk-show interviews, best-selling books, psychotherapeutic interactions, everyday gossip (“How can she really be happy with him?”), and personal ruminations. Poets, cartoonists, and novelists have done as good a job as psychologists in understanding it. I personally have always preferred Charles Shultz’s (the creator of the comic strip “Peanuts”) rather structural definition of happiness as “a warm puppy.”
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Behavior Analysis’s Not-So-Secret Agent
It is the difference between a science focused on the self or personality as an initiating agent of action and a science focused on behavior-environment relations.
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A Self-ish Behavior Analysis?
I just googled the word “self”: 3,540,000,000 hits, more or less. That’s three-point five billion, just to be clear. Wow. What a word. What a construct. Whoever came up with the idea of self? (In his recent book, Flesh in the Age of Reason, which I highly recommend, Roy Porter suggested it might have been the 16th-century French philosopher Déscartes.)
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Behavior in Translation
Have you ever heard a paper presented at a conference or elsewhere about research with rats or pigeons, and it seems like the findings might be helpful in working with your clients? But then you wonder, is there really a connection between the two?
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Agency and Shaping
Shaping, or the differential reinforcement of successive approximations, is thought by many to be the most important tool in the behavior analyst’s toolbox. Shaping is usually thought of as something one human does to change the behavior of another living organism, most often to a human but also to a pet or a laboratory subject of the nonhuman persuasion. In such cases, the human is the agent of the shaping in that the human decides the conditions under which successive approximations do or do not merit reinforcement.
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Engineering Safe Behavior in a COVID-19 Environment
Social distancing to many public health le
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Pragmatism and Playing Well with Others
Many applied behavior analysts find themselves in a different world from that in which they were trained. Most are trained by other behavior analysts in programs or even departments where the principal worldview is that of behavior analysis. Fast forward a couple of years (or more) and many of those same people find themselves in multidisciplinary settings, working with people who not only have different specialty areas—for example, medicine, rehabilitation therapy, social work—but, more importantly, a totally different way of looking at problems, both conceptually and methodologically
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Obsessing Over OCD in these Days of COVID-19
The current hygienic practices of many of us blurring the lines between normal and OCD, I imagine that it also might be disconcerting to someone suffering from OCD to see personal behavior patterns for which there were at least mild societal and social punishers become not only acceptable but also necessary.
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