Inside Behavior Analysis
Volume 1 | 2009 | Number 2 | On-line ISSN: 2151-4704
A Little Push in the Right Direction
By Shawn R. Charlton
A "domino-effect" occurs when one event initiates a cascading change in a sequence of similar events. I describe receiving the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis's (SABA) Experimental Analysis of Behavior (EAB) Fellowship as having just such an effect on my academic career. When I completed my application for this fellowship, I did so with an idea for one study. Five years later, this single study has grown into a general research program. To highlight how the EAB Fellowship is responsible for much of this growth, I chose to outline the development of the first two studies supported by this program.
With the support of the EAB fellowship, I initiated a study into the influence of delay on various types of reinforcers. In these projects, we (Charlton & Fantino) demonstrated that delay to reinforcement has a differential effect on various commodities. Specifically, metabolic products such as food and alcohol lose their reinforcing value the most rapidly as the delay to their availability increases. At the other end of the continuum, we found that increasing the delay to availability had the least impact on money. To this point, our findings replicated the established relationship between the discount rates (how quickly a commodity loses its reinforcing value) of food and money. Novel to this study, however, was the demonstration that the rate at which sensory entertainment (music CDs, books, and DVDs) loses value fell between the rates of food and money. Instead of the anticipated two groups of discount rates (representing primary and secondary reinforcers), we found discount rates to fall along a continuum. Although our results were consistent with the division of the commodities into three groups, a correlational analysis found strong positive correlations between all five commodities, suggesting at least some degree of relationship between the tested commodities (the full results from these studies are reported in Charlton & Fantino, 2008).
The results from these studies were intriguing. If there is a continuum of discounting, what other "groups" might exist? In what appeared, to me at least, a natural extension of this original study, I next asked whether social outcomes, such as interacting with a friend, might also be subject to temporal discounting. To test this, I used a standard psychophysical adjusting procedure to determine the preference between 30 minutes of immediate face-to-face interaction with a good friend and a variable, but greater, amount of interaction after one of seven delays. I repeated this procedure for face-to-face interactions, phone conversations, text messaging, and on-line chatting. Preference for the immediate social interaction increased as the delay to the larger, later social interaction increased. All four social interactions produced this same pattern of results. Similar to non-social commodities, a hyperbolic discounting model provided the best quantitative description of the change in preference. As with the previous study, I found strong positive correlations between each of the four social interactions.
The discounting of social interactions study provided several interesting results. First, social outcomes, like non-social commodities, lose reinforcing value as the time to their occurrence increases. Second, I failed to observe any significant differences in discount rates across different types of social interaction (face-to-face, on the phone, on-line chat). Several studies produced this same null finding. Third, males and females do not differ in their observed rates of discounting for any of the social interactions (though, males showed significantly greater variability). Fourth, increasing the duration of the social interaction produced lower discount rates, similar to the magnitude effect reported for non-social commodities. Finally, the results indicated that, as might be expected, participants were more willing to wait for an interaction with a close-friend than for an interaction with a casual acquaintance.
With the completion of these two studies I found myself with several answers and a lot of unanswered questions. Currently, my Behavioral and Social Decisions Laboratory at the University of Central Arkansas is actively trying to address many of these questions. One of the main questions we are exploring is the relationship between discount rates for social and non-social commodities. In a related study, we are investigating differences in discounting for social outcomes between alcohol abusers and control participants. Finally, we are investigating how discount rates for non-social and social commodities can be used to predict performance in social interactions.
As these two studies highlight, the support of the SABA EAB Fellowship jump-started a very active line of research. While I chose to highlight the first two studies directly tied to the EAB Fellowship, there are a handful of others that were also influenced by this support. As I work on these various projects, I thank SABA for providing the support needed to put in action advice given me by Carl Cheney. In response to my question of how to get started in research, Cheney's paraphrased response was, "go to the lab and start observing behavior. You'll soon find you have plenty of work to do." I thank SABA for providing the support needed to test this advice. As predicted, the time spent in the lab produced plenty of questions, and even a couple of answers.
References
Birchler, G.R., Weiss, R.L., Vincent, J.P. (1975). A multimethod analysis of social reinforcement exchange between martially distressed and nondistressed marital dyads, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, 349-376.