Narrow down the results
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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Behavioristic Bliss
Aging and contributions seem far more functional than The Atlantic author appreciated. His view is very formal and structural, “Hit the magic age, and it is time to move on.” It certainly may be a good idea for some people.
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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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Engineering Safe Behavior in a COVID-19 Environment
Social distancing to many public health le
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Psychology Spectrum Disorder (PSD)
In a famous article entitled “Are Theories of Learning Necessary,” published in 1950, Skinner
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Operant Behavior and Snowflakes
Sitting here at my desk on a cold, snowy morning watching the snowflakes gently descend to blanket the landscape outside my window (such descriptions reveal why I am a behavior analyst and not a poet), reminds me of the operant (another reminder, too, of why I am not a poet). The operant is one of our most important concepts. Operants are classes of responses that have a similar effect on the environment. That effect can be to operate something that allows their measurement (like a child’s block-stacking or a pigeon’s key peck) or to produce a reinforcer or punisher.
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Praying Deer
For the past six months I have had the pleasure of living in the beautiful city of Nara, Japan, during a s
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Getting to the Cause of Things
“Why did Johnny just throw the mother of all temper tantrums?” is a question many of you have asked and been asked, in some form or another. The response to this question, under scrutiny, may have been different. The perpetrator may have been different. The circumstances may have been different.
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Rules Rule, or Do They?
Rules often are derived to guide behavior under certain, often well-specified conditions.
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Stay the Course?
Persistence is a topic of folk wisdom and behavioral science. Admiral Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead!” or sayings like “Never say die” all point to staying the course, even when it’s rough. Behavioral psychologists have, for a very long time, been interested in the circumstances under which behavior does or does not persist.
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Covid-19 Dreamin’
I, like many people of my age, am gravely concerned about getting infected by the coronavirus and coming down with a devast
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Honk More—Wait More
The following article appeared recently in the New York Times. It describes how police in Mumbai, India, undertook an experiment to control the excessive blowing of car horns by drivers caught in what must be nightmarish traffic in that largest of Indian cities.
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