Please pay very careful attention to this section that starts on p. 92. I wasn't kidding when I said, in the About DMT part of this blog, that there are probably more dead man rule violations in this course than anything else. So when it happens to you, you need to know exactly how to fix it.
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Principles of Behavior: Ch. 05
I teach courses in the principles and applications of Behavior Analysis, the science and technology of behavior, which is different from other approaches in psychology in that it takes behavior as a subject matter in its own right, rather than as a tool for studying something else, such as the mind. The main purpose of this blog is to be a supplementary means of communication with students who are taking my courses.Each post is assigned to a particular topic (see the list of topics below). Most topics refer to a textbook chapter from Principles of Behavior (Richard Malott, 2014) or Applied Behavior Analysis (Cooper, Heron & Heward, 2007). You may notice that the dates of most comments are several years in the past. That's because the original posts were written back then. Many of them have been updated since they were originally written but, unfortunately, the original date still shows. As I write these words in November 2013, Malott's 7th edition has just come out, & I'm gradually working my way thru it chapter by chapter. Until I finish that process, some of my posts, & especially things like references to page numbers, might not align with the 7th edition. For the most part, tho, even the posts that aren't yet updated are substantively accurate. Click a topic's title to see all the posts under that topic. To comment on a post, click on the "comments" link at the bottom of the post.
The dead man test was devised by Ogden Lindsley in 1965 as a rule of thumb for deciding if something is a behavior. The need for such a test stems from the importance of focusing on what an organism actually does when we're attempting to understand or modify its behavior. My students and I probably remind each other of the dead man test more than any other concept we study. Malott and Suarez (2003, p. 9) characterized the dead man test as follows:
If a dead man can do it, it ain't behavior, and if a dead man can't do it, then it is behavior.
Patrick S. Williams, PhD
University of Houston-Downtown
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