Allen Neuringer’s Insightful Research on Behavioral Variation  The Aubrey Daniels Institute is pleased to recognize the outstanding contributions of Allen Neuringer, Professor Emeritus at Reed…

Lean and Six Sigma are very useful tools for process improvement initiatives with the intent of reducing waste and variability in work processes and the product.  These reductions can lead to a…

Note from the Institute: Dr. Rogelio Escobar is a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. He is an expert in not only the experimental analysis of behavior, but also…

The first commentary in this series of three on extinction addressed some basic observations about extinction. As with many things in life, extinction is a little more complicated than it may appear…

At the US Open in 1925, golfer Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself, a penalty that no one saw. That one stroke caused him to lose the tournament.  When people began to praise him for his…

Anglophiles will recognize the first part of the title as being borrowed from the London Underground (subway, for the uninitiated). It is an instruction admonishing users to be aware of the space…

Extinction has two meanings in behavior analysis. It first refers to the procedure of withholding or eliminating reinforcement. A technical aside is that it also can refer to the procedure of,…

As noted in the previous Behavior Watch commentary, rules, a.k.a. instructions, are valuable in establishing and maintaining behavior wherever people live and work. Rules are created to both…

  It is hard to overstate the value of instructions, or, more broadly, rules, in working with both things and other people. They often are an efficient way of establishing new behavior without…

Let’s start with the premise that reinforcement is as much a part of the “natural order of things” as is Boyle’s law, Newton’s second law of thermodynamics, or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.…

Reinforcement is something quite different from bribery, despite the occasional equating of the two in some quarters. Because reinforcement is so important in behavior analysis both theoretically and…

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…

Attracting and keeping your best performers continues to be not only a smart business decision but a very strategic one that all companies invest in. While some believe attracting talent is the first…

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 “…