Ability is not an Inside Job

On a recent exam, one of my students observed that her rat had the ability to get the reinforcer.” Relatedly, star athletes often are said to have “great athletic ability,” scholars are said to…

The ABCs of Antecedents

Lost to history is the name of the first person who applied the expression “A-B-C” to the relation between antecedent events, behavior, and its consequences.  The expression stuck as a shorthand…

The Power of Alternative Reinforcement

There are, in principle, several ways to get rid of unwanted behavior: you can extinguish it, punish it, or reinforce some other behavior in its place. In my experience, it seems that the first thing…

Bad Behavioral Engineering

I am a Francophile. I have great respect for French values, history, cuisine, and culture. But I do not like all things that come out of France. One such thing is the recent whacky idea of placing…

Symptoms, Causes, and Behavioral Enviroscience (a.k.a. Behavior Analysis)

Way back in the 1950s and ‘60s, early behavior analysts waged a war of ideas with the established psychiatric practices of treating behavior problems. Those proto-behavior analysts attacked something…

The Yin and Yang of Reinforcement

Most everyone who is a behavior analyst and works with helping people change, focuses on the use of positive reinforcement to do so. Positive reinforcement is, indeed, one of the premier principles…

Labeling Actions and their People

In a paper that I recently edited for a professional journal, I encountered the following description of the behavior of a young girl with developmental delays: “She exhibited aggression (i.e.,…

The Learning Curve

The learning curve is one of the classic findings of psychology, dating at least to the end of the 19thcentury. Two different learning curves are shown in the figure accompanying this commentary.…

Give Me that That Ole Time Religion?: On Differences and Similarities

A long time ago one of the most influential scientists in behavior analysis, Murray Sidman wrote on the subject of comparative psychology that differences between species were easy to find, but, he…

The Pleasure of Reinforcement

I don’t know about you, but I would describe most of the things that positively reinforce my behavior as “pleasurable.” But, hold on, you say. One of the first things one learns when being taught…

Shaping the Shaper

Shaping is the process whereby we selectively (differentially, for the more technically inclined) reinforce closer and closer approximations to our goal or target behavior to eventually achieve that…

Queens Paideia School: Educational Excellence

Let me introduce you to one school that we think has much of offer American education.  Aubrey Daniels and I went to visit Dr. Francis Mechner’s kindergarten through 8th grade Paideia School in…

The Temper Tantrum Heard ‘round the World: What’s a Mother to Do?

Well, this was a little embarrassing for someone. A recent article in the Washington Post described, and included a picture of, a 2-year old having a “full-on” (in the reporter’s words;  a…

The Long and Short of Consequences

Everyone on the planet must by now be familiar with the notion of short and long-term consequences of things we do. For those of you familiar with the PICNIC Analysis® made famous by Aubrey…

What is Behavior?

This is a web site largely concerned with the advancement of behavior analysis, but what exactly do we mean by the word behavior? Dictionary definitions indicate that behavior is something an…

Behavior and the Role of Unintended Consequences

Behavior and the Role of Unintended Consequences: Examples from Process Engineering and Bold Community Initiatives Organizational ethics takes more than good people seeking to do good. It takes more…

Unconditional Positive Regard and Response-Independent Reinforcers

The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that a most important feature of human interactions was unconditional positive regard, which is defined as “basic acceptance and support of a person…

Behavior Analysis in Mexico: A Long-Standing Tradition

(Note: As part of our From the Field series on behavior analysis around the world, Professors Alicia Roca and Rogelio Escobar of the National Autonomous University of Mexico have kindly written the…