Spooked
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 in Behavior Analysis
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 “…
The Naked Truth about Treating Behavior Problems
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…
Stimulus Control and the Avoidance of Evils
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…
Leadership Behavior: Focused Listening
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…
Ability is not an Inside Job
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…
The ABCs of Antecedents
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…
How to Manage Through Uncertainty
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…
The Power of Alternative Reinforcement
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…
Bad Behavioral Engineering
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…
Is “Deskilling” a Threat to Safety in Your Workplace?
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…
Symptoms, Causes, and Behavioral Enviroscience (a.k.a. Behavior Analysis)
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…
The Yin and Yang of Reinforcement
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…
Labeling Actions and their People
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.,…
A Review of “Believing in Magic” by Stuart Vyse
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…
Leadership Behaviors: An Introduction
“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
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.…
Give Me that That Ole Time Religion?: On Differences and Similarities
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…