Behavior Analysis

No sooner do I write about how neat it is that behavioral psychology has built-in mechanisms of replication in many of its investigations than journalist Andrew Ferguson confuses, indeed, seems to…

Institute’s Note: Our guest commentator, Nick Green, received his M.S. in organizational behavior management at the Florida Institute of Technology and is now a doctoral student in psychology at the…

Well, of course there is, but “human nature” is not what many seem to think that it is. Human nature is not a thing (see my commentary on “things”) that exists somewhere at our “very human core” that…

Zombies are known as the living dead, creatures that arise from their graves, eat human flesh, and do other disgusting stuff just to stay semi-alive. Even though this is a well-documented phenomenon…

This being the Halloween season and all, it seems appropriate to bring up the subject of being spooked. Someone is said to be spooked by a circumstance or situation when they exhibit fear. The person…

Research replication is a core tenant of science. Thus, the surprising recent report that only 60 psychology research studies out of 100 attempts were replicated has raised general concerns about “…

Institute’s Note: Our guest commentator, Tyler Nighbor, is a doctoral student in behavior analysis at West Virginia University. He earned his M.A. degree in behavior analysis from the University of…

When a child learns that asking his mother for money results in getting that valued item and that asking his father does not, it isn’t hard to guess who he’s gonna ask. In out lingo, we say that Mom…

Institute Note: Jamie Daniels is an experienced behavioral consultant who an was a senior member of Aubrey Daniels International for many years, co-authoring with Aubrey Daniels, The Measure of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.,…

Reviewed by Mirari Elcoro, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Armstrong State University (Savannah, GA) Are you superstitious? Whether the answer is yes or no, Stuart Vyse, Professor of…

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.…