Narrow down the results
Engineering Safe Behavior in a COVID-19 Environment
Social distancing to many public health le
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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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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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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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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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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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Psychology Spectrum Disorder (PSD)
In a famous article entitled “Are Theories of Learning Necessary,” published in 1950, Skinner
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Measuring Thoughts
“Neuroscientists Decode Brain Speech Signals into Written Text.” If you suspect that the National Enquirer wrote this recent newspaper headline, you would be wrong. It was published by the respected British newspaper, The Guardian.
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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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A Signal Experience
The discussion centered around whether or not it is good Behavior-ese to describe a discriminative stimulus as signaling the availability of reinforcement.
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Catch-Up Contingencies
Ever heard the expression “closing the barn door after the cows are out?” It basically means coming up with a solution Leaving the barn door open that is too little, too late, to work.
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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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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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