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I love William James’s observation that, “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in concrete…

Getting a baseline of our target behavior before introducing a treatment is essential to assessing the effectiveness of what we are doing, whether it is trying to change a personal bad habit or help…

In the ABC series, What Would You Do? host John Quiñones places ordinary folks in situations that force them to make tough, ethical decisions. Will they step in when someone is being mistreated? If a…

Every day I read, see or hear something that drives me crazy. The latest is the headline on a piece that’s circulating the news outlets, “Too Much Praise Can Turn Your Kids into Narcissistic Jerks,…

It sometimes is said that the best predictor of future behavior is present behavior. Like most blanket, categorical statements about what someone will do next, this one invites some reflection. Taken…

The current behavior of living creatures is determined by four things: the creature’s phylogeny (evolutionary history), its current physiological state, the current contingencies impinging on it, and…

Our behavior analysis community has been built by many people who have found B. F. Skinner’s ideas about human behavior compelling. Bill Abernathy, who died on March 4, 2015 after a long illness…

In the long-running TV reality series Survivor, starting and maintaining a fire has always been a fundamental and immediate need. Without the proper tools, merely generating a spark can be…

My most recent Behavior Watch commentary described a scenario in which my eldest granddaughter was trying to persuade her pet Pug to cease disrupting our card game by plopping down on the floor in…

My husband and I went to see the controversial new Clint Eastwood-directed film, “American Sniper.” It is a vivid story of an American man, romanticized or not depending on your perspective, who did…

The other night I had the great pleasure of babysitting two of my granddaughters, ages 9 and 11. As we tried to play a card game on the floor, their pet Pug rudely kept using our playing field as his…

Who am I?  “I am a behavior analyst,” I answer in whatever circumstance the question arises. I then have to explain why my first identity is not that of psychologist (yes, I am a professor of…

Like Bill Murray in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, every day for some people feels like a repeat of the last. Seemingly no matter what they do, nothing changes. Each day greets them with the same…

We are pleased to have as our guest commentator this week behavioral education expert Ronnie Dietrich, a Senior Fellow of the Wing Institute in Oakland, California. Ronnie has been involved in the…

A reminder-string around the finger surely wasn’t the first self-management technique, but it may be the best-known (regardless of whether or not anyone really does that anymore). Self-management is…

It seems that the world is becoming obsessed with measurement.  We are measuring steps, heart rate, calories, sleep—you name it and there is a device to measure it. People are going to waste a…

For those unfamiliar with them, stretch goals are the practice in business, sports, and personal life of progressively increasing the targets expected of a person or team. If I am a salesperson and…

A lot of really interesting science has been undertaken using animals that either are naturally part of our home life or, in a few cases, have been specially adopted and adapted to the scientist’s…