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…

If you look around the workplace today, whether your company is thriving or fighting to stay alive, it’s not uncommon to see and feel uncertainty. The instability of the marketplace, vying for top…

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…

Maybe you’ve heard the term de-skilling. It refers to the loss of knowledge or skills on the part of a person as a result of technology doing more of the work for them.  In work environments…

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…

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, then you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams   It has been almost a decade since Measure of a Leader was published yet…

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.…

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…

Have you ever had someone perceive you to be a certain way as if they know what you’re thinking? I just received an invitation to a webinar that teaches managers to read people’s minds.  What a…

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…