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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’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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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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The Term DRO
Bad or Possibly Redeemable Label?A procedure in which each target response postpones a scheduled reinforcer most often is described in both the basic and applied research and practice literature as a differential-reinforcement-of-other-behavior
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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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Kudos for One of the Home Team
… While a Ph.D. student, she studied with faculty very interested in the then-developing field of OBM, among the first operant programs to offer a specialty in behavioral systems, influencing the rest of her career. Her dissertation was on … While a Ph.D. student, she studied with faculty very interested in the then-developing field of OBM, among the first operant programs to offer a specialty in behavioral systems, influencing the rest of her career. Her dissertation was on …
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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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