Being Objective about Objectivity
Everyone concerned with evaluating human behavior is concerned with objectivity. Jurors are screened to ensure that they do not have preconceived opinions about a defendant’s guilt or innocence.…
Being Sensible about Ignoring Behavior
There’s an old adage in psychology that when dealing with behavior problems one should reject the behavior and not the person. It’s pretty good advice, we think, and consistent with the idea…
Allen Neuringer: Behavioral Variation
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…
Sustainability in Your Process Improvement
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…
3D Printing, Laser Cutting, and Behavior Analysis
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…
Extinction 102
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…
Paying Criminals Not to Get Caught?
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…
“Mind the Gap”: Inconsistencies between Rules and Consequences
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 101
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,…
Over-Instructing
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…
When Rule-Following Is and Is Not Negotiable
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…
The Ethics of Reinforcement
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.…
Why Reinforcement Isn’t Bribery
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…
Replication and Another Misrepresentation of 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…
Office Worker Health is Under Attack!
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…
Seven Tips for Retaining Your Talent
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…
There’s No Such Thing as “Human Nature”
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 and Resurgence: A Halloween Analysis
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…