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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’s Free About the Free Operant?
There is another question to be answered before considering the question in the title of this commentary: “What is a free operant, anyway?” It is an expression that sometimes appears in talks and articles, but it isn’t as common
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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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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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Rules, Contingencies, and the Battle of Britain
The distinction between contingency governed (or “shaped”) and rule-governed behavior is an old saw for most behavior analysts. Like most dichotomies, this one doesn’t hold up under careful analysis.
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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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Kudos for One of the Home Team
… Behavior Management Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual meeting of the Association of Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) , in Chicago, Illinois this May. A long list of notable behavior analysts has preceded her as … Behavior Management Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual meeting of the Association of Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) , in Chicago, Illinois this May. A long list of notable behavior analysts has preceded her as … Behavior Management (2014), Wiley https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118468135.ch26 … … ABA … Behavior Analysis … Leader … Leadership … LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT … OBM … Organizational Behavior Management … Kudos for One of the Home …
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Traduciendo la Ciencia del Análisis de la Conducta
ABA son las siglas para Applied Behavior Analysis, en español Análisis Aplicado de Conducta, ciencia que estudia la conducta humana y los principios que la regulan. Décadas de investigación han mostrado que las prácticas y tecnologías derivadas del la ciencia del análisis de la conducta son efectivas en distintas poblaciones, siendo el tratamiento de los trastornos del espectro autista, una de las áreas con mayor evidencia.
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Invasive Behavioral Events: Lessons from Invasive Species
Sometimes when invasive species appear, the ecosystem assimilates it without destroying extant species, but at least equally as often, there is a clear winner and a clear loser. The same is true of behavioral systems.
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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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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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Celebrating Positive Deviance at Work: What COVID-19 can Teach Us
We will need to develop many skills having to do with persistence, flexibility, creativity, and dealing with the unexpected.
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Precision Teaching for Classroom Success
Humans are constantly in search of the newest, brightest solution for problems in everyday life. We download countless apps for tracking calories, learning languages, working out, budgeting—you name it. In education, we do the same. But the newest, brightest thing in teaching and learning might not be the solution
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Generalists and Specialists
Some children from an early age appear to know the direction they wish to take and set out to make it happen. Others are less focused and may indeed engage in reinforcer sampling. Both groups of children need parental encouragement and support.
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Is Corporate Training the Answer?
Performance problems plague organizations both big and small. Wherever humans work, performance is happening, and so too are problems. Though each company’s performance issues are unique, often a formulaic—read: cookie-cutter— approach is the chosen remedy.
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