Association for Behavior Analysis International

Senior leaders spend a tremendous amount of time planning and resourcing their strategic initiatives. Yet numerous studies have found that 70% of these strategies fall far short of their goals. Why? Employees have learned to wait out new initiatives to see if their leaders are serious about the change. They look for signs that go far beyond an exciting vision and the provision of ample resources; they want to see day-to-day leadership behaviors that indicate a sustained, personal commitment to the strategy. Through 30 years of consulting to senior leaders, the author has found a winning formula to quickly derive the top leadership behaviors that will accelerate strategy execution at any firm. The key is to find the unique behaviors that will signal a serious commitment to change for this strategy, this leadership team, at this point in time and to get them implemented in a highly visible, coordinated way. Three case studies will be shared: (1) a global airline that improved the customer service delivered by 29,000 flight attendants; (2) a global oil company that improved capital decision making across 12,000 employees, and; (3) a pharmaceutical company that transformed itself into a patient centric, customer focused organization.

Practitioners in Organizational Behavior Management (OBM), and those who have an interest in OBM, large-scale behavior change, systemic analyses, and sustainable behavior change.

Lloyd Morgan’s Canon advises that animal behavior should not be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development. Leaving aside how we might define ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, this is encouraging to the behaviorist, except that we might say that interpreting human behavior should be subject to the same strictures. But, whether an explanation appealing to the simplest possible processes works is an empirical matter. In this talk I’ll describe three experiments with New Caledonian crows, two published and one not at the time of writing, on putative behavioral innovation in metatool use, putative causal understanding in the Aesop’s Fable task, and putative flexibility of tool manufacture in response to environmental demands. I’ll explore the role of the behaviorist in contributing interpretations and devising control conditions when collaborating with behavioral ecologists, consider how the word fairly in Morgan’s Canon should be interpreted, and discuss how we should be guided by the principle of parsimony in understanding behavior.

Graduate Students and Researchers in Behavior Analysis

Increased availability of reimbursement options in autism intervention has led to increased scrutiny of the business practices of autism service providers. In particular, providers of Applied Behavior Analysis have been subject to increased scrutiny of their billing practices, which has on several occasions led to federal investigations. This session will equip providers with basic information about the federal government’s tools for investigating and prosecuting health care fraud.

Practitioners of applied behavior analysis, particularly business owners

The Supportive Education for Returning Veterans (SERV) curriculum has been able to retain and graduate ninety percent of the student veterans that complete the courses. The curriculum model includes credit-bearing resiliency orientation to full semester courses. Courses are cohort-based, learner-centered, and use a problem-based learning model that promotes a healthy support system as student veterans navigate their academic career.

Educators, practitioners, students

Since 2009, behavior analysts around the world have, at an increasing rate, applied our science to the problem of sustainability. This work includes the efforts of the Fresno State Sustainability Project, an interdisciplinary attempt to coordinate all such activity on campus. We have had a number of positive outcomes, including the newly-formed Institute of Water and Sustainability. The focus of this talk is student activity that has grown out of the Project. Over the past four years, more than 400 students have had experiences in academic, research, and applied activities related to sustainability. One of these endeavors is the Fresno State Sustainability Club which has hosted four Earth Days, set up multiple talks by experts at Green Bag Lunches, coordinated with other campus clubs, and planted a water-wise garden and hundreds of trees in collaboration with Plant Operations. The College of Science and Math has offered the First Year Experience the past two years, in which freshman in the College take multiple sustainability courses in both basic science and applications. Graduate students do everything from building tiny houses to collecting data on practices. The Psychology and the Environment course has just been reestablished and the development of a minor is underway. Students lives have been substantially changed. The future generation is on its way to making a major positive impact on the health and welfare of the planet.

Academic behavior analysts and graduate students

Every species possesses abilities for successfully interacting with its environment. These result from phylogeny. In the laboratory, one may arrange artificial conditions that thwart an organisms abilities. The result may be a phenomenon. With sufficient training, however, the phenomenon may prove to be ephemeral, as the organisms basic abilities reassert themselves. A common ability among animal species is the ability to respond to differences and non-differences in rate of obtaining food. This ability may be thwarted in a variety of ways, but the results tend to be ephemeral. A clear example appears in an experiment that pitted pigeons preference for unimpeded responding against their ability to respond to food rate. In a concurrent-chains procedure, the terminal links were identical variable-interval schedules, but in one terminal link, every response produced a timeout. The duration of the timeout varied, and preference varied with it, but the relation vanished with training, in keeping with the equality of food rate across the two terminal links. Some other examples of phenomena that tend to disappear with sufficient training are behavioral contrast, conditioned reinforcement, and resistance to extinction. These appear to be behavioral ephemera.

Graduate Students and Researchers in Behavior Analysis

Practice guidelines synthesize the published literature on a particular area of applied practice. Practice guidelines may also include specific recommendations for use of strategies and models to guide clinical decision-making. Agencies that provide applied behavior analytic (ABA) services can use practice guidelines to standardize their clinical services in pursuit of enhanced quality. This presentation presents a model for how to create recommended practice guidelines. The model includes a structured approach to literature synthesis, creation of tools and templates that facilitate implementation of best practices, and incorporation of feedback on utility to the practicing behavior analyst. This presentation focuses on the organizational systems that must be developed in order to develop and implement recommended practice guidelines at large scale. In addition, the presentation will include two examples of published practice guidelines that have been developed using the model. The first example focuses on recommended practices for selecting measures for problem behavior. The second example focuses on recommended practices for individual supervision for aspiring behavior analysts.

Practicing behavior analysts

Behavioral scientists have much to offer, and much to gain from being involved in federal research funding. The National Science Foundation funds basic and applied research in many areas of interest to behavior analysts. In general, funded research advances theory and has substantial broader impacts beyond the results of the research itself. This presentation reviews the proposal and review process including the criteria of intellectual merit and broader impact, highlights opportunities in Decision, Risk & Management Sciences, and describes three funding mechanisms that may be of special interest: dissertation improvement grants for doctoral students; CAREER grants for early-career behavioral scientists; and research in undergraduate institutions (RUI) grants for faculty at undergraduate colleges and universities.The presentation finishes with suggestions for raising the profile of Behavior Analytic Science in this realm.

Applied and basic researchers interested in securing NSF funding.

Skinner's Quests describes a fictional odyssey by a young B. F. Skinner to England in 1939. His two quests were prompted by philosopher Bertrand Russell and involved Russell's protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. The intellectual quest was to redirect Wittgenstein's changing analysis of language toward something Russell would find palatable. The political quest—undertaken for the White House —was to provide insights about the behavior of Adolf Hitler, who had been at high school with Wittgenstein. Skinner went chiefly to meet Sigmund Freud, near death in London after moving from Vienna in 1938. He had cited Freud often, with more admiration than agreement. Skinner met several other characters of historical importance, including Alan Turing. He also had numerous encounters with entirely fictional characters. Some were romantic. Some were merely social. Some had a sinister edge that reflected the time of his travels, one of modern history's most fraught periods. I'll describe the novel's provenance and possible achievements, and set out some of the behavioral issues examined in the novel. These mostly concern verbal behavior and are often presented within an evolutionary framework. I'll show how the backdrop of Europe's unsettling politics of the time was used to enrich the discussions of behavioral issues.

Behavior analysts interested in the history of behavior analysis, its conceptual foundations, and the B. F. Skinner biography.

Children with ASD and typically developing children were given a choice of responding to view social images or responding to view nonsocial images. Results showed that children with ASD responded significantly more to view the nonsocial images as compared to the typically developing children. This demonstrates that the nonsocial stimuli are more potent reinforcers for the behavior of children with ASD, as compared to typically developing children. The Nonsocial Reinforcement Hypothesis of ASD asserts that infants develop ASD because they have a strong affinity for nonsocial reinforcers. When nonsocial stimuli are more rereinforcing than social stimuli, the environment selects and shapes varies forms of stereotyped and repetitive behavior rather than verbal and social behaviors. Indeed, verbal operants such as tacts and intraverbals are shaped and maintained by social reinforcement, and are often missing or delayed in children with ASD. Echoic behavior, which is more often seen in children with autism, do not require the same type of social reinforcement since copying a stimulus may be reinforcing in itself. The affinity for nonsocial reinforcers may have negative effects on the establishment of a variety of social stimuli as conditioned reinforcers, which further hampers the development of communication, social skills and social interests.

Professional behavior analysts who are BCBA-certified, applied researchers

In his magnum opus, The Behavior of Organisms (Skinner, 1938) Skinner presented an experimental analysis of behavior that eschewed averaging data across subjects. Even at the time, this stance was unusual, and since then has become even more so. Since the 1950's more than 80% of published quantitative empirical research in Psychology has used group mean data analysed by null-hypothesis statistical tests (NHST). Recently in behavior analysis there have been recurrent calls for the more widespread use of averaging (and NHST) and claims that this would make behavior analysis more acceptable to mainstream psychology. So, was Skinner right, or should we resort to conventional data analytic practices? This paper will review the recent calls for change within behavior analysis about averaging. Then it will consider some developments in fields outside of behavior analysis that bear on the question. It will consider implications from biology and natural selection. It will also consider growing criticisms of group averaging from within mainstream psychology, especially from personality research. Finally it will consider the implications of fundamental measurement theory concerned with ergodicity. The conclusion - Skinner was right, and behavior analysis should keep faith with his rejection of group averaging.

Basic and applied researchers and methodologists in behavior analysis and those concerned with the behavior of scientists