Episode 339 - Public Posting

Summary

Podcast Summary: ABA Inside Track – Episode 339 – Public Posting (March 25, 2026)

Episode Overview

Theme:
This episode of ABA Inside Track delves into the practice of public posting as a performance management and behavior analytic intervention, focusing on its use in both organizational and applied settings. The hosts examine research findings past and present, discuss the nuances of implementation, the pros and cons, and share personal reflections on the social validity (acceptability, likeability, potential pitfalls) of public posting as a tool for behavior change—whether in workplaces, schools, or health-related programs.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining Public Posting and Its History

• What is public posting?
  Public posting refers to openly displaying behavioral performance data (as graphs, charts, written lists, etc.) in a public or group space—often as part of a feedback or performance package.
• Context in research:
  Historically part of broader “performance feedback” interventions, public posting has origins in workplace/organizational behavior management (OBM) and has been used in diverse settings: factories, schools, human service agencies, gyms, and sports.
• Personal connection:
  Jackie shares her motivation for the episode: seeing public posting at her gym and questioning its effectiveness and impact (02:13-02:57).

2. Review of Classic Research (Nordstrom et al., 1991)

• Scope of review:
  Spanned 1967–1987, evaluating public posting as part of performance feedback packages in various settings.
• Key findings:
  • Individual public posting often increases targeted staff behavior (e.g., sessions run, jobs completed, praise given).
  • Group posting finds mixed results; highly dependent on context (e.g., more effective for teachers giving praise, less so in factories).
  • Combination with reinforcement/praise is typically more effective.
  • Unintended effects: Need to ensure people understand the posted data; sometimes causes confusion or anxiety.
  • Low cost, but just posting alone doesn’t always guarantee behavior change.
• Notable Quote:
  "If you have the posting, you will probably see a change, even if it’s a group posting, it may not be as stable unless you also have some form of reinforcement paired with the public posting." – Rob (16:47)
• Potential drawbacks:
  Possible negative impacts (e.g., shaming, avoidance, confusion) if not carefully managed.

Important segment: Review of literature and historical context (08:22–17:00)

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3. Modern Applications & Research Studies

A. Physical Activity in Children (Miller et al., 2023)

Purpose: Can public posting, self-monitoring, goal setting, and rewards increase kids' daily steps?

• Design: ABA C D A D ("dad design"); pedometers + various intervention phases.
• Findings:
  • Public posting & self-monitoring: Transitional increase in steps.
  • Goal setting: Some further improvement.
  • Adding rewards: Most dramatic improvement.
  • Individual differences: Most kids responded well; some didn’t (possible automatic reinforcement, lack of motivation, or baseline issues).
• Quote:
  "Adding in some, you know, hard cold cash really made the biggest difference in the step counts." – Diana (34:25)
• Caveat: No long-term maintenance tested.

Important segment: Discussion of study design and results (24:44–37:25)

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B. Competitive Youth Cyclists (Avezo & Nave, 2024)

Purpose: Does public posting plus self-monitoring improve adherence to training plans among elite youth cyclists?

• Design: ABAB design with 3 elite youth cyclists (ages 14–16); public posting done via WhatsApp group for team.
• Findings:
  • Marked improvement in adherence and accuracy with public posting.
  • Self-monitoring alone was high (91%); public posting appeared to enhance attention and coach interaction, serving as additional reinforcement.
  • Technology (lap key, data tracking) was only used consistently during intervention phases, suggesting public posting improved fidelity.
• Quote:
  "They posited that... public posting may have increased the attention from the coach and given a further reinforcer for actually doing what you’re supposed to be doing." – Jackie (46:58)

Important segment: Study breakdown (37:33–47:17)

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C. Direct Support Professional Data Collection (Perrin et al., 2016)

Purpose: Can group public posting and goal setting improve data collection among residential staff in a human service agency?

• Design: Multiple-baseline, goal setting, group public posting (teams picked names, posted team data, set weekly goals).
• Findings:
  • Immediate, significant improvement in data collection for both sleep and skill acquisition programs after intervention.
  • Interdependent group contingency: Average group performance masked poor individual performance for some staff (the “coasters”).
  • Maintenance: Gains largely maintained when posting/goal-setting faded, but some individuals’ performance regressed.
• Quote:
  "Some of these shirkers were just kind of coasting on everyone else’s great work... A couple people just did exceptionally well to mask how poorly everyone else was doing." – Rob (53:15)
• Limitation: Didn’t measure data accuracy, only completion; unclear if goals were necessary, often set to unattainable (100%).

Important segment: Explanation of intervention and findings (47:35–55:06)

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4. Dissemination Station: Social Validity, Ethics, and Unintended Effects

• Host reflections:
  • Jackie & Diana: Express concern about negative social validity—many people dislike or feel anxious about public posting, especially when it resembles shaming or competitiveness.
  • Falsification risk: Data can be faked when public posting brings pressure (e.g., “...people were faking whether they did them.” – Jackie, 57:24).
  • Countercontrol: Risk of avoidance or refusal to participate, or even outright quitting, if public posting is aversive (e.g., “If you’re going to make me play your game, forget it. I quit.” – Diana, 57:05).
  • Ethical caution: Must ensure public posting is not used to shame, embarrass, or create counterproductive competition; should consider whether it can be justified ethically for a given token situation or population.
• Best practices:
  • Use group rather than individual posting when possible to minimize singling people out.
  • Pair with reinforcement/social praise, not punitive measures.
  • Make goals meaningful but attainable.
  • Regularly assess staff/social validity, not just effectiveness.
• Quote:
  "You have to be careful in its implementation... how it's presented. If you're like, 'Hey, team, let's make this an improvement,'... I would respond much better to that..." — Diana (57:50–58:10)

Important segment: Social validity and ethical concerns (56:14–59:19)

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “If you have the posting, you will probably see a change, even if it’s a group posting, it may not be as stable unless you also have some form of reinforcement paired with the public posting.” – Rob (16:47)
• “Adding in some, you know, hard cold cash really made the biggest difference in the step counts.” – Diana (34:25)
• "They posited that... public posting may have increased the attention from the coach and given a further reinforcer for actually doing what you’re supposed to be doing." – Jackie (46:58)
• “Some of these shirkers were just kind of coasting on everyone else’s great work... A couple people just did exceptionally well to mask how poorly everyone else was doing.” – Rob (53:15)
• “If you’re going to make me play your game, forget it. I quit.” – Diana (57:05)
• "You have to be careful in its implementation... how it's presented. If you're like, 'Hey, team, let's make this an improvement,'... I would respond much better to that..." – Diana (57:50–58:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Episode Introduction and Personal Connections (00:13–04:20)
• Review of Classic Research (Nordstrom et al., 1991) (08:22–17:00)
• Modern Studies – Children’s Physical Activity (24:44–37:25)
• Modern Studies – Youth Cyclists (37:33–47:17)
• Modern Studies – Residential Care Staff (47:35–55:06)
• Dissemination Station – Social Validity & Pitfalls (56:14–59:19)

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Tone & Language

Conversational, candid, at times humorous, with a blend of personal anecdotes, critical analysis, and references to research methodology and ethics within behavior analysis.

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Final Takeaways

Summary:
Public posting, when combined with reinforcement or praise, can be a low-cost, sometimes highly effective method for increasing desired behaviors in workplaces and educational/health contexts. However, its success is context-dependent, and without attention to social validity, individual differences, and ethical implementation, it can backfire—producing avoidance, countercontrol, or data falsification.

Recommendation:
Use with care; always pair with positive reinforcement, assess social validity, and avoid punitive or shaming approaches. Further research needed on long-term effects, individual variability, and ethical dimensions.

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Related Episodes & Further Listening

• Episode 41 – Sports and Fitness (Dr. Mallory Quinn)
• Episode 46 – Behavioral Fitness (Dr. Nick Green)
• Episode 97 – Staff Feedback (Dr. Amy Henley)
• Episode 115 – Self Monitoring
• Episode 132 – Component Analysis
• Episode 184 – Receiving Feedback (Drs. Sellers & Walker)
• Episode 215 – PDCHS and Supervision

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Fun Snack Pairing

• Late night potato chips (a nod to the public posting study about reducing snack theft)!

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For practitioners and researchers: Consider public posting as a tool, not a panacea. Always weigh the context, your team’s preferences, and the ethical implications before you post that next chart!

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to ABA Inside Track, the podcast that's like reading in your car but safer. I'm your host, Robert Perry Crews, and with me, as always, are my fabulous co hosts.

[A]

Oh, hey there, Rob. It's me, Jackie McDonald's.

[C]

And it's me, Diana Perry Cruz. Hello. Hello.

[B]

Wow. Boy, Rob. Howdy.

[C]

What do you think about my new microphone cover?

[B]

It's. I didn't know it's supposed to be a microphone cover, so I took it off and I got yelled at before we started recording.

[A]

It's so cute. If you guys can't see, it is like a whale.

[C]

Not. It's. It was an ice. It's an ice cream cone.

[A]

Oh, fair.

[C]

It looks like a little. Yeah, I can see that cone scoop. Or it also looks like a jellyfish and it has little eyeballs.

[B]

Mm.

[C]

And everyone's getting one.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I can't wait.

[C]

Your order. Color selection, green.

[B]

I was about. I was gonna buy everyone new microphones, but then I'm glad I didn't because they wouldn't fit.

[C]

Oh, yeah. This won't fit yours. I don't know. Well, I'll think of something else for you.

[B]

Maybe we'll get new. You know, it's been a long time.

[C]

You don't need a new one.

[B]

Well, I don't need a new one. Maybe you all need a new one.

[C]

I don't need a new one. We're doing great. Mine's great.

[A]

Let's keep moving.

[B]

Oh, well, this isn't a podcast about audio or our studio setups or crocheting. You know what? What?

[C]

It should be nice to have a crocheter's touch.

[B]

Behavior analysis and behavior analytic research, where every week we pick a topic and discuss it at length. And this week, we're diving into the world of organizational behavior management and related fields with a discussion on public posting.

[A]

Can I tell you why I wanted to do this? You guys all really didn't want to do it, but I really wanted to do it.

[B]

I don't remember having any opinion whatsoever on this topic.

[A]

No.

[C]

But just appeared on the list.

[A]

I did it because recently there was some public posting happening at my gym and.

[C]

Oh, yeah, I don't know how I feel about that.

[B]

Like a bunch of signs, like, you're all out of shape, losers.

[A]

No, it was. I. Well, I guess it was, but I. And I'm surprised that none of that really talked about the disadvantages of public posting. They're like, public posting is great, but no one ever talked about how you might not like that. But anyway, I just.

[B]

What were they posting? Were they like.

[A]

Oh, they were posting their averages. Like, what? Like how much they lifted that day. And like, they were trying to get to, like, who lifted the most on the specific machine.

[B]

Oh, but I don't know if that's a great idea though.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Changing criterion. It's like, oh, I want to be at the top of the lift. I'll lift 500 pounds. Oh, I broke in my spine. Oh, well.

[A]

But yeah, so we'll talk about that in dissemination station. But that is why I was like,

[B]

his lawsuit against her gym.

[A]

I didn't do it. I'd be like £10. Wow. You did not win. But that's why I want, though.

[B]

How many reps do you do at £10?

[A]

Oh, not many. I'm working up to it, but I. But that's why I wanted to look at the research and see, you know, what they've.

[C]

If it.

[A]

If it was effective for other things

[B]

they didn't put, like, you know, like, on a scale of one to ugly. Yuck. Oh, you guys are the yuck zone. You better work out more. Oh, boy. Well, let's see if there's any science behind shaming everyone with public posting. Now. Public posting does have a long, storied career, though I was a little shocked when. Because I feel like we talked about public posting as part of package interventions before.

[A]

Yes, we have.

[B]

When we talked with Dr. Mallory Quinn about tag teaching and, you know, dance. And it seemed very positive, but that seemed very like, bespoke public posting. Like, hey, how would you like to see how well you're doing on these moves? I think it was. Even with. It's like scorpion kick dances and stuff, you know, so how many steps did you do correctly? And it all seemed very kind of harmless little, you know, like a nice addition to the data that one would collect. Right. I'm sure we've all had clients where we've been like, let's look at our data. Let's look at your data together. We've talked about the, you know, graphs and like, oh, see, look, this is. This is. This graph tells you that you are doing more of X, Y, Z. Right. And usually when I've done that with clients, it's been a relatively positive discussion. It's not public posting in that it's the two of us looking at a computer screen or a printout together. So it could be public posting, but usually it's not.

[A]

One time I had the experience of a public posting where at a workplace I was at, they publicly posted how Many discrete trials you did within a session. And then if you weren't at criteria, then, like, you had to have a meeting with the team and talk about why you hadn't done it. And it was, like, super punishing.

[B]

I. You know, the only.

[A]

So that I didn't want to do anything or I wanted to lie.

[B]

The only time I remember actually having problems done on a job site was when I was in high school and I worked at Stop and Shop, which is our grocery store chain. And it was, I think, how many. I was a cashier. So it's like, how many things you scanned. And a bunch of the num. A bunch of names, including mine, was highlighted. And I was like, oh, I think this means that I'm very fast at scanning. But then someone said, I think that means you're very bad at scanning. And we couldn't read the public posting. So I don't know if it did what it was supposed to. All I know is I was like, well, I'll do better, I guess, but did I need to do better? I don't even know.

[C]

Oh, that's not very good.

[B]

No, that is a job I went home on a break once and never returned to. So check my resume. Stop Shop cashier from the late 90s is not on there. I don't know if they give me a letter of reference anymore.

[C]

There's a bunny outside the window. Cute.

[B]

That's not related to public posting. Dan, have you ever been publicly posted?

[C]

I don't know. I don't think so. But I also don't think I would respond well.

[A]

No, I can imagine you would not, Julie.

[C]

Not my vibe.

[A]

I'm gonna start doing it at work on Monday.

[B]

Just probably posting things.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

What will it be?

[A]

I don't know. I'll have to think of a really ridiculous dependent variable.

[C]

Yeah. Well, you know what? At work, I do have our research wreath. Oh, you're right.

[A]

But that's like.

[C]

It's a little bit.

[A]

It's a. I get it now.

[C]

Right?

[A]

I get the wreath.

[C]

Oh, what? What do you mean?

[A]

Because we just got our paper published.

[C]

Yeah. So if you've had the most recent paper, you get the wreath on your door.

[A]

I forgot that I get the wreath.

[C]

Yeah, you get.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Well, when it comes out, Diana just

[A]

wants to hold onto the wreath.

[B]

I guess the question is, has it increased your publication output because of this wreath?

[A]

No, but people.

[C]

I'm trying, man.

[A]

You are. But it's just hard. Publications is hard.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Just talking about the public posting has made Diana anxious.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So I guess it doesn't work.

[A]

She's sweating.

[B]

Well, we're done. That's it for this episode. Well, so personally, we're not sure how we feel about public posting, but what articles will we discuss to determine whether the research tells us that we are wrong in our opinions and our feelings are not validated?

[C]

We've somehow ended up with four different articles to discuss for today.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

They include a review of public posting of Performance Feedback in Work Settings by Nordstrom, Lorenzi and Hall. That was published in jobm, the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, in a year in the past. That was 1991. Also, we will be discussing effects of public posting and goal setting on team performance in a residential setting by Perrin, Frederick, and Klick. That was in Behavioral Interventions 2016 evaluating public posting, Goal Setting and Rewards to Increase Physical Activity in Children by Miller, Livingston, Zerger, Valbuena and Miltenberger. And that was also in Behavioral Interventions 2023. And finally, self Monitoring and Public Posting Improve Competitive Youth Cyclists Training Performance by Avezo and Nave. That was in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 2024.

[A]

So I wanted to pick the review so that we got a review of all the literature. And then what public policy is typically known for physical activity? And then I wanted a job related one because it's always in the job market too. So that's why we have four.

[B]

We'll wrap up with that one. All right, well, let's start with the review article. Unfortunately, the review was done in 1991, meaning it doesn't take into account the three articles, any of the articles.

[A]

It's. It's our seminal review.

[B]

Yeah, well, it's a little out of date. This article is so 90s. If you've been reading articles for a long, long time.

[C]

And so Raven, kind of a vibe

[B]

of like, when, what decade was this? So for example, if somebody is like, let me spend two pages describing my functional analysis. Your article is probably written in the 90s or early 2000s. This article we saw. Think about the word count. I don't know if ink was cheaper in the 90s because wow, did this article just go, oh man. And go. And go.

[C]

Got some Orbit's sports drink spilled on it.

[B]

It also didn't do what I love when they do kind of let's do a kind of a review. Let's have a quick summary of the. It was just like, I'm just gonna just kind of talk and talk about all the different articles and then at the end, you know, you'll have a paragraph. I wish I just Read that paragraph.

[C]

There's more of that now. Because things are just digitally produced or published, people don't have actual paper.

[B]

Back in the 90s, we just had time.

[C]

You know what, Rob?

[B]

We don't need journal articles.

[C]

We don't need time anymore because now Adobe offers to summarize the article for me.

[B]

Oh, great.

[C]

I'm like, no, Adobe, I'm reading it myself.

[B]

No, no, stupid. Just let me tell you five bullet points from this article. You don't need to read this. I do. I do wish I had Adobe AI to describe this article. No offense. It was very thorough in the articles that were there, but man, did it just kind of take me on a journey. Like I was I reading a Pulitzer Prize novel or was I reading a research article? So it was a little long.

[C]

Why not both?

[B]

I don't need it to be both. I just needed to be a research article. So a challenge that they find in this review of public posting is that most of the time when we talk about public posting, we're talking about a package referred to as performance feedback, just sort of the umbrella term of all the interventions that will modify an employee behavior or an athlete behavior in which there's some amount of written performance feedback. It could be letters, it could be memos, or a newsletter, and then performance posting. So there is kind of a tendency in some of the early research to talk about public posting as part of an intervention, which is going to come up a couple of times in terms of is public posting helpful or not helpful? It's like, it's kind of part of a bunch.

[C]

It's usually in a package.

[B]

So, you know, is public posting itself the best thing ever? I. You know, the also thing that you see a lot in organizational behavior management is the idea of man. Managers love whatever it is we're about to talk about. And it doesn't seem like there should be any reason for them to love it other than they decided they were managers who liked a thing. And then OBM Journal of Obama has come in and be like, let's actually see what research we have. And it's sometimes not as robust as you would think, given how many like, people in business are like, I use this all the time. This is my number one, you know, performance motivator. And the research is like, you know, meh, on. On some of the. Some of the managers favorites. So, so how much utility does public posting have? And then they kind of meander through all the literature about public posting that existed from 1967 to 1987. And what they used to define a public posting procedure would be that there was an open display of some factor of employee data. So it's. It's publicly available where everyone can see it. It could be a chart or a graph or a histogram. Chalkboards would also be included. A poster in big font would be public posting. Or it could be a small poster with employee performance record with little notes about what they want to change. I they describe those in a lot of detail. So all that would be considered public posting. And they only looked at procedures though that were actually going to be able to be replicated by a manager in a business that had some sort of a measure of an observable behavior as well as that there was credible cause and effect data presented and an ability to replicate the study if they so chose, but which they didn't because this was a review. It seems like public posting is sort of something that could be researched as part of performance feedback. Sort of dates back to the 70s, 1970, pan yen et al. Where they did a weekly public posting of the individual performance of staff to try to kind of increase behavior in a state institution. Staff, staff, staff behavior in a state institution for intellectually impaired clients. They looked at patient sessions conducted who ran each session and they noticed when they started posting, hey, is everyone doing their job? They saw an immediate improvement in all awards. Then they did a similar study. Some researcher didn't in 73 I did not write down the citation there. Doesn't matter where they posted visible graphs of daily percent of jobs completed. And they also saw behavior improvement. So that was good. But then they tried to look at hey, what if we did group performance? Because it's kind of embarrassing to look at public posting and see that you're the worst performer of a group. So what if we did it by groups? And the research there was a little more mixed in terms of sometimes group performance feedback resulted in very minimal improvement in behavior, at least if you work in a fiberglass factory, which is where they did this study. However, if they did group public posting for teachers giving praise, why that increased their praise by 200%. So that might be an artifact of working in a fiberglass factory. Who knows? They also were wondering, could we do public posting to look at changing employee rates of theft? And so they'd have a post where they'd say here is how many bags of potato chips have been stolen in the past from 11pm to 1am was 2021 bags of potatoes.

[C]

That is the time when you want

[B]

to eat chips in the last 10 days. And then they noticed that the amount of stealing potato chips went down. Weirdly though, they had to post this for all of the other items that were being stolen if they wanted to see a change. A little multip baseline. So we publicly post about how many chips are being stolen? Well, the amount of chips being stolen dropped, but you know, Twinkies stayed stable. So you publicly posted about them, it seems.

[C]

Oh wow. They're functionally independent responses.

[B]

Each object is a different class of behavior. We could do a stealing preference assessment. Stealing chocolate versus salty versus vegetables. I don't know. They also took a look at how often public posting was part of, like we said, a package intervention. So what if you did group posting and social reinforcement? Well, let's see, there was some. There were some studies pointing to an increase in ability to fill rosin bags. They also added some public posting with self recording and they saw the decrease in tardiness behavior of a guy, the business owner, which is important. The business owner is there on time. They also wanted to look at doing kind of scaling it up so looking at whole plants doing posted feedback. Again, it was a little mixed in terms of the behavior they were looking at in their furniture department did not change until they added contingent supervisor praise. They also saw this for safety behaviors in a paper mill. So there is a sense that sometimes just doing public posting alone isn't effective unless you have some sort of feedback, whether it's by the manager feedback or some other feedback. But you could also add self monitoring in the form of a checklist for cleaning. And again, self monitoring was very effective. But self monitoring plus public posting was actually much better for increasing bar cleanliness activities.

[A]

Wow, fascinating. Paper mills are so disgusting. They smell so bad.

[B]

That's different. They didn't talk about cleaning the paper mill.

[C]

Okay, that was the air we used to have smell. That's where my dad always has worked

[A]

and I and I grew up near a paper mill. We it was called Dom Tar Domar. It smelled like butt.

[B]

That does sound pretty terrible. So again, public posting overall, at least in their research, does seem to be a nice kind of lowcost easy way to improve employee performance or decrease some sort of inappropriate behavior. Whether you do it as a group or individual. Though again, your mileage may vary with group, but it seems like overall the results were pretty good. And then again, what other components do you need? Well, you certainly could add feedback because there is a concern when like with my stop and shop example, that the public posting did not actually tell me what I was or was not doing so perhaps we should always add in some, you know, specific feedback.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

There was another study in the late 70s by Storzinger where they used a display board of group weekly and daily performance in a salvage center. And they would see that as they kind of added in this kind of cumulative percentage of, you know, what their goals or how they were reaching their goals, they did see an increase, but that didn't stabilize over time. But they're not really sure why that was. Was it they weren't given enough feedback. They also are concerned that it got really hot in the plant. So maybe people just weren't working as hard because they were tired or people went on vacation so they couldn't get as much feedback. There's also a thought of, well, what if we added goals to the public posting? So here's where you want to be and can you improve? And you know that again, it's hard to say whether that really was additive to the public posting plus feedback kind of situation. It does appear that later studies decided whether or not it was a requirement to have some sort of a reinforcement. If you have a reinforcement paired with your public posting, that did tend to result in changes. You see that with, you know, an attendance, public posting plus getting reinforcement. In this case, it was in the form of actually getting like food credits. It was a. I believe it was a volunteer work at a. Like a kitchen. Or it could just be praise from a supervisor, which we've talked many times about how important it is to have supervisor praise that was very effective in the bobbin factory where they were looking. So again, if you have the posting, you will probably see a change. Even if it's a group posting, it may not be a stable unless you also have some form of reinforcement paired with the public posting. But again, if you add a number of things together, like the packages do tend to get slightly better results, if not completely better results, and they tend to be more stable over time. In terms of if you're going to use public posting, you probably want to at least add the praise component to it or some sort of reinforcement to the public posting as well. Goal setting may or may not be that great an additive, but you could put it on there. As we'll talk about in some of our studies, sometimes the goal setting is extraneous and nobody meets the goals, but they still see a change in behavior. So maybe that's good enough in terms of why you might use this. Well, in a business, because the savings were great. The numbers are all over the place in terms of how much savings, how they found the savings. Like one study says there was $105,000 in savings the first year we did this performance posting intervention. But it really didn't explain how did they come up with that number. Like what was the thing that they were. We were measuring. However, most of the time when they talk about how much it costs, we're talking about like almost nothing. You know, it's almost free to do the public posting. It takes some time. So the savings to cost is regardless of how they calculate that is always going to be pretty high. So it's pretty low cost intervention to do. Though, again, how much we don't know for sure. In terms of why the authors think public posting might be effective. They don't quite know. Is it the social competition that motivates employee behavior, which again might be a good thing, might be bad if you're mad that you're like the worst. I think there's a, there's a new movie from one of the kind of the preeminent Korean directors about someone who is murders other people who might get his job so that he can get the job. So again, could cause some problems in, in bad economic times. If you're publicly posting, who's the worst and the best? And it may also be that there's more social interaction, but they don't really describe exactly what kinds of social interaction are occurring with the public posting. Is it interactions with the employees? The employees in the graphs? And also there is a real concern that people who use public posting aren't checking to see if their employees know how to read the public posting. That is my stop and shop experience where I don't know if I was really bad or really good at my job. So man. And then there's still some kind of mixed bag as to how long does public posting lead to behavior change. Is it a long time? Is it only a couple of months? And you know, really it'd be great to study, you know, is there any different mechanism if you're talking about increasing or decreasing a behavior? So at Beast as of 1991, public posting, cheap, pretty effective. Not sure why and not exactly sure in what circumstances. It works better as a package, better alone, but probably use it as a package just to be on the safe side. So that's what we know. But let's take a little break and when we come back, let's actually talk about some studies from the modern era and see if we've been able to answer any of these questions in the past 20ish, 30 years or so. We'll be right back.

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[B]

And we are back talking about public posting. But before I continue with this topic, I want to remind our listeners that ABA insidetrack is ACE and KWABA approved. And by listening you can earn one learning credit. All you need to do is finish listening and then go to our website abainsidetrack.com or click the link that is in the podcast player. That's the fastest way to get there. From there you can put in all sorts of fun information, see all sorts of cool stuff on our new website like slides and transcripts and all that jazz. But if you just want to quickly get that C.E. well finish listening, go to that link and put in some key information from this episode that also will include two code words. I'll give you the first one. Now it's website W E B S I T e like Hooray. I think our website is working now.

[C]

It was a real website. Question mark.

[B]

We do. We definitely do.

[C]

We definitely do.

[B]

You can get there. Yeah, it was not fun to rush that one out because of reasons. Check the preview Check the February preview to hear more about.

[C]

Now if you go to ABA insidetrack.com you will go to the new website.

[B]

It's a functioning website web site.

[C]

That's right. And you can search in the right hand corner after you make an account for the episode that you want. If you are having trouble locating it.

[B]

Yay. Or click the link that is in your podcast player. I swear it takes you right there real easy. Anyway, we could publicly post how many people are using it, but you won't see it because we're posting it here in the studio where you are not. So it's probably not going to be an effective intervention. Anyhow, let's move on. So we talked about a general overview of public posting throughout history, but now let's talk about public posting in the modern era. Let's start with a discussion about public posting for physical activity increases in children, which, spoiler alert, they put the results in the title.

[C]

Oh, that's me. Okay, great. Yes. So this is the Miller et al. Article from 2023. So this is like relatively recent and it was pretty cool. So they wanted us to know that we should be thinking about children's health and physical activity.

[B]

I believe children are our future.

[C]

You, you're not alone.

[B]

If we teach them well and let us lead the way with physical activity.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So children should be getting 60 minutes of physical activity per day, but a lot of them do not do that. At least here in the United States, they could get that in a multitude of ways, but one way is just by running around and being kids. And they estimate that children need between 11,000 and 15,000 steps a day in order to meet this criteria. That's a lot of steps.

[B]

That is a lot of steps.

[C]

I don't think that it's untrue. And I think that our son easily gets that many steps a day because he never stops moving.

[A]

That's true.

[C]

Yeah. But that's a lot of steps. You know, like, I try to shoot for like 10k and I don't always make it there. And that's with a concerted effort. So if your kid is just going to school and then coming home and doing homework and sitting on the couch, they are not getting 10,000 steps a day.

[B]

No.

[C]

And that was the case for the kids in this study as well. So they wanted to find a way to increase that. And they looked at past research. They said, you know, we have some great technology that would allow us to count steps fairly easily via a pedometer. There's other mechanisms too, but the nice thing about any of these that are just counting the steps for you is that you don't have to do any self reporting on that. There's been some recent research that has utilized the pedometer to increase physical activity with great success. So there's zerger et al. 2017, and then Miller et al. 2018, both of whom are authors on the current study as well. In Those studies, they set things up as like a game with the kids. They had like different teams. One of them was just at recess, one of them was like across the school day. And they included self monitoring and feedback for the Zerger study, but not public posting. And then for Miller, they did include public posting along with feedback and self monitoring. And these were effective approaches for the mill. The previous Miller study, they also added in like a reward phase with a raffle and stuff like that. And then there was another group of researchers that did a slightly different approach that was cool et al 2015. They were looking at using a pedometer, but they didn't do public posting, they did goal setting and they did it across a 24 hour period. So I think our researchers here came across the Cool study. And I was like, they were like, oh, that's a cool. Get it approach. Why don't we kind of like fuse that with what we are currently doing? So the study that we're going to talk about here said, let's evaluate all the components of these treatment packages that we've been using in the past. So the public posting, the feedback, the self monitoring, the raffle, everything. But let's do it across the 24 hours like the cool at all study did. So in our study Today, there were 14 children ages 9 to 12 who were enrolled in a private school. Two of them dropped out over the course of the study. So we ended up with 12 data sets. One of them didn't want to do it anymore and one of them Fair was out of school because he had surgery. And so you got tired of the

[B]

public post and be like, you're not moving too much kid with surgery.

[C]

Yeah, I don't know. No, he was like, almost immediately he was like, actually, I can't do it. And they said, okay, that's fine.

[B]

So everybody, you always want to put in in your informed consent. Are you about to go on major surgery and not be here for months?

[C]

It was unexpected, yet voluntary. I, I actually don't want to dwell on this kid's whatever, whatever happened with him, but I don't know what meets those criteria. So the. Everybody got a pedometer to wear at all times when they were not sleeping or swimming, but also I would think bathing. So they probably just meant when dry. And there was a yamx digi walker cw2000.

[A]

I love it when they give us what it is because I just think that's amazing. Like, you're like, I read this article, I'm gonna go out and buy that.

[B]

I love the fact that most of the time, by the time the article is published, you're like, I'll purchase that or that. You can't buy that one.

[C]

That's obsolete. Yeah. And so then they, the experimenters took these digi walkers and fashioned a homemade lock that went on top of it so that you couldn't. You had to like, flip it open to see the steps. And so the homemade lock prevented you from being able to open it up to look at the steps. Because part of it, it was supposed to be like a blinded thing. Oh, I know.

[A]

Kind of like it.

[C]

I know. So they spent a while describing what that looked like. It doesn't really matter that much for our purposes. If you would like to know, it is listed in technological detail. If you would like to do the same thing to your digi walker. Yes. So the participants were asked to wear the pedometers at school and at home. And then they. When they came in in the morning on Tuesday through Friday, they measured how far they had gone in the preceding 24 hours. And. Yeah, yeah, okay. And then other things that you should know is that there were different public posting things up during various parts of the study. When it was time to do self monitoring, there were. Each participant had their own graph up on the wall, up on the door, right when they were getting ready to go outside. I think they could, like, I'll look at them when they were standing in line. And then during other parts of it, the. The final phase. What's that final phase called? The full package phase. There was a bigger one up there too, that was keeping track of, like, everyone's position and whether they met their individual goals. So I'll tell you more about that when I get there.

[A]

Hey, Diana.

[C]

That's what you are.

[A]

A full package.

[C]

Thanks, Jackie. Okay. And there were stickers that you could get. And then it was also noted in the graphs who were the top three participants of that pre. Previous day. So the experimental design was an A, B, A C, D, a dad. And they even say that somewhere in there they go, the dad design. It's like a dad joke. It's a dad design. In baseline, everybody had the pedometer on, but it was locked so they could not see. There was no visual feedback from either the pedometer or the experimenter on how many steps they went on the preceding day. That was the baseline. In phase two, this was self monitoring paired with public posting. So now they were unlocked. The participants could see how many steps they had taken per day.

[B]

Is that the lowest tech self monitoring Program of like, look, a number. That's your number, I think.

[C]

Yes, right. No, no, no. But they did include two other self monitoring activities they want us to note. The first is that they had a little journal where they wrote down how many steps they went the preceding day. Right. To make sure that it was a presumably salient component of the feedback for them. And then they also on the wall, they had their graph. And so the students themselves, the participants updated their line graph with their previous daily step total, which I think is nice. Right? Yeah. So that was again like a touch point for them in order to receive that feedback. So they did that and then remember, it was an A, B, a C, D, A, D. So then they went back to baseline and then they went to the C phase. Phase three, this was self monitoring with public posting and goal setting. So now everything previously was in place. They still could access the pedometer, they could do the self monitoring, the recording making of the graph. But now they had an individualized goal that the participants put in place for them to meet. Now, I hate to tell you this, but they used a percentile schedule of reinforcement in order to determine the goal.

[A]

That's hard.

[C]

You know what, we're not going to go into a lot of details regarding

[A]

that here because it's not about that. It's about public.

[C]

It's really not about that. So suffice it to say, and even in the article, they were like, we're going to tell you what it is, but then we're going to tell you how we actually calculated it. So the, if you are, you know, really into percentile schedules, the W value was 0.25 fair and the M value was 10. So what that means is they looked at the preceding 10 posts, like preceding 10 days for each participant, and if the current number was above the bottom 25%, then they met the criterion. So they said what they did was they took all those data, they arranged them highest to lowest, then they look to see what is the current date at. Is it number eight or above in the list? And if so, then they met the criterion. Yeah, well, you know, that's, that's enough of that. Okay. And so if they met, if they met their goal, the goal was in a dash line on their graph so they could give them assistance in seeing it. So if they met the goal, they got a little sticker added on.

[A]

I hope that it was a smelly one.

[C]

It was a star, I think. Or okay, maybe I fabricated that detail. They need to do a little better

[A]

than make it Smell you next time.

[C]

Okay, well, but just wait because then we go to the D phase, the full Monty phase, the Diana phase. They called it the full package. And so here we had self monitoring and public posting and goal setting and now a reward. With the reward, if you met your goal five times, so you got five stickers. They did not need to be consecutive. Then you got a five dollar gift card from a local merchant. The local merchants were selected based on participant recommendations. And I wrote, so does that mean McDonald's? Because I feel like that's what 9 to 12 year olds would choose. What else would they pick?

[B]

Fortnite bucks?

[A]

I wouldn't.

[C]

But that wasn't around local merchant. They were in Florida.

[B]

Local Roblox.

[C]

Because I was like, maybe it's like a Tim Hortons or something. No, that's Canada in Florida. I know. Well, I checked. I wanted to know if there was a regional specialty Disney World. Like it was in Massachusetts. Maybe it was a Dunkin Donuts gift card.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But it was, I don't know. What, what are you gonna get for $5 at Disney World, Rob?

[B]

Nothing.

[C]

I know one fry. So we don't know. They had a selection results. Baseline was the lowest condition. Full package was the highest condition. Both the self monitoring and the public posting and the self monitoring, public posting plus goal setting were in between baseline and full package. So what that tells us is these components were helpful at increasing steps overall. However, at the only additional thing in the full package was that reward piece. So adding in some, you know, hard cold cash really made the biggest difference in the step counts. So they gave us that as like an overall classroom average total. And then they also broke it down by participant to allow you to really sort of evaluate more easily. It was like a bar graph per participant average steps for each of the conditions. In those seven conditions I named abcdad. And it allowed you to kind of like see more easily differences in the varied conditions. So according to their count, participants 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9. Oh no. Oops, sorry. Let me try that again. Participants 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11, they felt met criteria for demonstrating experimental experimental control. And then a couple others, a couple of them had dropped out, remember? And then numbers one and 13, they didn't. What really happened for those two is that they didn't see a strong return to baseline levels in the dad in the A part of the dad condition.

[A]

You know, they've been working, they've been walking. Maybe there's other things I know happening.

[C]

Right, right, exactly. So maybe there had come to be some automatic reinforcement built in. Ultimately, I feel like it's a good problem unless you're trying to do research.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And then they were maybe, maybe number nine is the only participant I didn't talk about yet. Number nine, I think. And a number nine participant was not really into this at all. They never maxed out above like 6,000 steps. And none of the, none of the treatment options seemed to make a huge difference in their behavior. But everybody else responded pretty, pretty nice and clearly and so it was a really cool study. They did note that they didn't get a chance to do like long term maintenance. So we don't necessarily know if these gains were maintained after they discontinued all the varied components of the analysis. But it was a pretty cool study and also a great example if you were looking at the add in method of component analysis. This is a good one to take a look at.

[A]

Love it.

[C]

All right, there you go.

[B]

Let's keep going with the physical activity train and talk about youth cyclists.

[A]

So I wanted to do this one actually. So I'm glad you didn't do it because I don't know anything about cycling. And it was.

[B]

You will at home after describing.

[A]

You actually won't because I, I left out the cycling information.

[B]

What about, what about the lap button?

[A]

I mean we talk about the lap button, but I, I left out like the terminology because it doesn't matter for the purposes of what we're talking about.

[B]

I took from this is these elite youth cyclists were pretty, pretty lazy when it came to doing their daily exercises.

[A]

I don't think so. That's not true.

[B]

I mean, I'm sure it was like, oh, I don't really feel like going 30 miles.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Like I'm gonna go 25, 24.

[A]

So the reason I like this article is that there's been a ton of research. Well, not a ton, but there's been a lot of research looking at dance in public posting and swimming and public posting, but none on cycling. And cycling felt left out. So they were like, maybe public posting and self monitoring can help our elite cycling athletes. And we have this unique, you know, limitation and advantage that we can't stop mid cycle because we're on a bike running around. So we can't like self monitor there. But we have all this technology that's on our bikes already that can record our data.

[B]

They need to follow up to the pool study where they did self monitoring and they just were like making a mark on waterproof paper. I know it's a fancy buttons, so yeah.

[A]

So they wanted to see these, there's some there. These are, they're, they're, they're high end athletes.

[C]

Elite.

[A]

Right. They're elite athletes and they really wanted to increase their overall performance and output. And so they were like, maybe if we do some self monitoring, maybe if we do some public posting, we'll see some increase. And this might actually, the public posting might serve as an establishing operation for meeting the expectations that they weren't meeting. Which I love that they said, just

[B]

not working hard enough.

[A]

Right. So the purpose of the study was to evaluate intervention package that primarily consisted of self monitoring and public posting on the cycling performance of competitive youth cyclists. And they were specifically looking at performance volume, intensity, precision and performance duration, deviation from training deviation. So what they were supposed to do versus what they actually did, I'm not going to tell you why, how they calculated those because it doesn't matter.

[B]

Oh wow. But if you want to learn all about it, you can.

[A]

Yep. They also wanted to see whether these youth cyclists could accurately self monitor their endurance training. And then they wanted to see if they were using the existing technology of the lap key across or something.

[B]

Because they kept talking about they loved the lab key.

[A]

I didn't know it was that important. I thought that it was just like a tertiary variable. But man, did they talk about the lab key a lot.

[B]

Yeah, it did sort of feel like,

[A]

is this really about the lap?

[B]

I really want to have three objectives. So how about the lap key is the third one? Even though you couldn't have done much of the public posting and self monitoring

[A]

without the lab key. Right.

[B]

What else are you going to do?

[A]

We have three white Israeli competitive cyclists. They're on the same team and they met the cyclist criteria, meaning they were athletes, they had ascent and consent granted. And they were 14 to 16 years old with eight five years each of experience. So they started when they were like 11.

[C]

That's crazy. Like riding the bike, right?

[A]

Oh, I can't imagine trying to be an elite athlete at 11. But anyway, so the coach was 25 years old.

[B]

That's why they need to study. They just weren't that good yet.

[A]

Yes, I mean that, the data actually they were, they were doing.

[C]

They were.

[B]

I'd be a better cyclist if I had a lap key, but nobody ever bought me one, so.

[A]

So the study took place over cross country and road biking training sessions with various components. I completed in 90 to 120 minutes of them exercising daily. I mean, I guess they're ethics, but. And the nice thing that I liked is that Each of the individuals had their own individualized plan. So unlike other public posting studies that we've talked about, they're not pitting against one another.

[B]

No, they could, but it would.

[A]

They could, but it doesn't make sense because what they're looking at is how well they're doing against what they're supposed to be doing, which I like.

[C]

I like that too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So it was your pr. Yeah. So it was more of a public post with this, like, I think of that as like really self monitoring in the sense.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Look, this is how well you did. You either did or did not do

[A]

what you were supposed to do. Right. And whoever did the best at what they were supposed to do gets their name in the public posting. So that's what they public posted.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So they had all the regular cyclist materials and that's what I wrote. Because it doesn't matter. It's like you have your bike and all the things that are attached to the bike, including a lap key.

[C]

You have your spandex, your bike shorts

[A]

and all the technology. They had like a heart rate or

[C]

bike shorts, like as actual shorts. Yeah. I was unfortunate.

[A]

It was unfortunate. Yeah. And then they also had a WhatsApp. They were already using the WhatsApp account to have conversations with the coach, which I found was interesting because I've never had a coach that wanted to talk to my kid over WhatsApp.

[C]

But no, they, they do.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

And this is in Israel, so.

[A]

Oh, right. Okay.

[C]

That's more common.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And what's up as an. As an app.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

International.

[A]

That makes me feel better because I was like, is this creepy? I. I didn't know if I had the creepy vibes, but it wasn't five.

[B]

An intensive coach. I want them texting my kid, being like, are you doing your intensive things?

[A]

You're right. Your exercises, if it's an elite athlete, it's a little bit different than it's like my kid. That's like. Right. But it's fine. I love her. So they were already using the WhatsApp. So they used the what? A WhatsApp then for public posting. So they didn't have to do anything there. The one thing that the students, the participants had to do differently is they, at the end of their cycling session, they needed to go to a Google form and complete the Google form about how the ride went. Right. So did they do all of the components of the exercise intervention? And I'm not going to go into it because it doesn't matter, but there's a lot there's like warm up speeds interview, cool down. Like all of those things that they're supposed to be doing. And sometimes they were doing them or not. And then again, I told you they were taking data on the volume, the actual performance, the intensity and the duration. And they took that all from a software called Training Peaks that was on the bike.

[B]

Yeah, so.

[A]

Yeah. So they assess the accuracy of self monitoring by comparing the Google forms with the actual performance data. The fidelity was 100%, IOA was good. And then they also assess also validity on whether people thought this was a great thing. It was all good. Except for one kid. He didn't think that pressing the lap key made it better for him.

[C]

And that's fine.

[A]

It was neutral.

[B]

Was it that hard to do? Like I'm imagining it's like a button.

[C]

And you're right, me too.

[B]

Smacking it.

[A]

And it's on your hillbar, but I don't know so.

[B]

Or your lap. I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, it's a lap lap key.

[C]

But you're going around.

[A]

Yeah, but you hit it once you hit, so who knows, right.

[C]

I don't think it's in your lap.

[A]

They were, they were doing dual because

[B]

they were going, they were on these like big things.

[A]

Right. But anyway, so the coach was also assessed and he said that it was really good, but he might not do it after the study. So we'll see.

[B]

Some elite coach this is.

[A]

They used an AB. I mean he was 25. They used an ABAB design and in baseline it was just normal expectations. The coach handed out the trainings for the week on Saturday evenings, told the participant to hit the lap key, but no contingency in place if they didn't. And all the data were historically the same because they had all of the training peak stuff like the heart rate model and all that.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So they had no feedback or public posting on performance. But the last baseline session was used to make the ranking for the first public posting. So whatever happened in the baseline session, they looked at their actual performance and said, hey, this person did what they were supposed to do. Way to go them. And that's how the. Then they ranked them according to how they did. Okay, so then before the intervention, the co met, the coach, met with the researcher who was also a cyclist. I just love.

[C]

That's not surprising.

[A]

Right. When I add that in. And learned how to do the study. Then the athletes came and practiced hitting the lap key doing the Google forms. They had to get 100% before moving to intervention. And then they moved to intervention Right. It was the same intervention as baseline, except the coach sent a group announcement in WhatsApp detailing the cyclist actual performance intensity, precision and performance duration deviation scores, and then the adherence ranking from that previous training. So the athlete with the greatest adherence to his personal plan was ranked the highest. And it wasn't against each other again, it was against one of themselves. So at the end of each session, the researcher sent the ad information to the coach who publicly posted it. That's it. And the greatest result is all the participants improved in the intervention related to baseline. They also showed that they were highly accurate with self monitoring, which is 91%. So if, even if you don't have all of this other stuff, you could just use self monitoring. The technology use was inconsistent during baseline but very consistent during the intervention. And they posited that that is probably because public posting may have increased the attention from the coach and given a further reinforcer for actually doing what you're supposed to be doing. So that's what they said. Why public posting work is because of the increase in reinforcement from the coach and knowing actually what they were doing versus not being told what they were doing on a weekly basis.

[C]

That makes sense.

[A]

So that's it.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

That's what I was thinking when you said, we're talking about the form. It's like, I think I would want to fill the form out because then I would know, like, the coach was finding, like, hearing from me.

[A]

Right.

[C]

How I felt like things were going. Yeah, yeah. So it's like that interaction piece.

[A]

So I think that's why it was.

[C]

That's reinforcing. Yeah.

[B]

Well, enough sports. That's enough of that crap. Let's move on to. What we want to hear about is public posting in a human service agency. I don't care about your bobbin factory, I don't care about your fiberglass factory, and I don't care about your elite sportsman's work. All right.

[A]

That was fascinating.

[B]

We work in human services, so public posting can't help us. There's. Get out of town, take it back to your manager at Stop and Shop. We don't need it. It's been a while. I think we discussed in sort of the overall review. There were some articles on public posting in the 70s in Human Services. There was one in a school in 83. But let's look a little more modernly at using public posting to improve the behavior of direct care staff. We count on our direct care staff. They are very, very important for behavior change and treatment plans for individuals with either disabilities or additional needs. But could we use group public posting to improve their data collection behavior? Now we talked about group public posting as usually being pretty effective. It's tends to be more preferred because no one person gets singled out as the worst checker at Stop and Shop or the best checker at Stop and Shop. However, there are some studies, including one by Garcia in 2005, where individual posting was noted as being more effective than group posting posting. Although in that study both of them kind of lost their effects over time. And we saw that back in the review. So back in the 80s and the 70s looking at group postings. So let's see what happens when we use group posting for data collection of staff in a residential setting. Will it improve or not? So we had 16 adults who provided direct care services to children and adolescents with developmental disabilities and severe behavior problems. And the goal was really to improve their consistent the staff consistency of taking data on sleep and skill acquisition programs. Sleep was just sort of were they awake or asleep within these 15 minute intervals, skill acquisition would be what you'd think of as skill acquisition program. So did the program get run? Was the correct prompt level used? What was the performance for all of the trials? So kind of what you think of when you think of like discrete trial training type program data. They did a retraining to start. Even though everyone will tell you retraining is usually not very effective in terms of increasing a behavior, they did it anyway to make sure everyone could actually engage in the skill. Then they did their baseline. They said, here's your training and let's see how well you do the sleep data and the skill acquisition data or the program data.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And they give them kind of general feedback as the day was going on for engaging in work duties. All right. As you expect, baseline results did not improve that much. So they moved on to public posting and goal setting as part of the intervention. So they had different teams of the residents and they even let the teams pick their own names. Though sadly they never tell you what names they picked in this study.

[C]

Oh no.

[B]

It's very disappointing.

[A]

That is sad. That's what we want to know.

[B]

But it was based on their work schedule. So to put your a.m. shift, p.m. shift kind of stuff.

[C]

I hope it was. They could have been Flintstones versus.

[B]

Yeah, Jetsons.

[C]

Yeah, I let my, my students pick their team names in the class when we do team games. And it's very fun.

[B]

Yeah, it is fun. Including your research next time, you cowards. Come on, we want to hear this stuff. And at the start My favorite.

[C]

Just one last thing. My favorite team name that someone ever came up with was Ageless Elegance.

[A]

One of our team's names last night was Skinner has diarrhea, Period.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Whoa.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Throwing down.

[B]

Yikes.

[A]

Anywho, it was a radical behaviorism class, so.

[B]

Sounds radical. Start of the week, they'd post a line graph of the average performance for each of the target responses, and it would go on the staff office door. And then they'd say, hey, team, set yourself a goal for how much you're going to complete each target in the next week. And then they'd write it right on the graph. And then otherwise they got the feedback that they would typically get at their job for, you know, various things that they did there, but never about the targets. After this phase, they did a maintenance phase where they faded the frequency of the postings and the goal settings. So it'd be like, all right, we're going to do this goal for two weeks and kind of, you know, one week, then two weeks. Right. And they did this as a multiple baseline across the different targets. And then they added in a little reversal in there. So what happened? Well, we had two teams where in baseline, the sleep data completion was like only about 56, which is sad because we're talking sleep, not asleep. Seems like pretty easy data to collect. And skill acquisition goal documentation was around, you are sleeping. That's true. The skill acquisition was around 67% of opportunities. So they said, all right, let's add in our goals and our public posting for the sleep data. Immediate increase. One team was kind of variable, but around a 90% average.1 increasing trend up to 100%. So sleep data is going great. All right, let's add in skill acquisition. And they saw a pretty similar pattern. Again, a pretty immediate improvement. One of them, you know, the averages were lower because again, skill acquisition, as they talk about in the study, it's a lot harder to take all that data, all those data than it is to just say asleep or not asleep. So that was around 82 to 85% in terms of an improvement, but much more stable responding than they were getting in baseline. When a reversal was put in, you got a return to baseline levels for both responses, and you saw a RE improvement with the RE implementation and the maintenance. Actually, maintenance phase saw an average. Sleep data was like almost 100%. The goal taking data was around 80%, 83%, 85%. So again, even in maintenance, with less frequent public postings and changing in the goals, things are going pretty well. Now here's the problem. So group posting effective. But if you look at the individual data. Naughty, naughty. Two of the participants for sleep data and one of them for goal data actually didn't do much better than they did in baseline. So.

[C]

And then when public shaming did not work public.

[B]

Well, they didn't do public shaming. They just looked, they looked internally at the individual.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

And some of these shirkers were just kind of coasting on everyone else's great work. And when you looked at the data in maintenance, 12 of 13 participants continued to collect sleep data at or above their treatment levels, but 4 of 15 for skill acquisition. So even though those maintenance rates were really good, they weren't consistently good for everybody. A couple people just did exceptionally well to mask how poorly everyone else was doing.

[C]

Right. And that is the issue with an interdependent group contingency. Right. Is that you can get some coasters,

[B]

some jokers just don't even try very hard. Sad. Sad. So again, on average, it was a very effective treatment to do the goal setting and the public posting in terms of increasing the occurrence of the data that was being collected. But be careful because some of the individuals will take advantage.

[C]

You will get some hop ons, you

[B]

will get some hop ons. But even though some people didn't do that well, there was, there was an improvement for everybody somewhat. And if the increases were so good that some people could kind of still do a bad job and it'd still come out as like, look at these great results. Yeah, okay. I guess that it, it could be worse. And it's nice to know that public posting didn't have the same effect as in previous studies, where, at least for maintenance reasons, you did see these behaviors stay, you know, relatively high for an extended period of time. Why was it different? Again, we talked about, well, the different types of data. So it may have just been a natural. Like, one type of data was easy and one type of data was hard. Some limitations. They really don't know for sure that the staff actually got better at taking data, so their accuracy was better, or whether they just got better at remembering they had to write something down on their data sheets, which is always a question. Also, were the goals really necessary? They didn't actually look at whether the goals changed the amount the teams were engaging in these new behaviors, but most of them just started putting 100% was our goal and then never coming close to it.

[C]

Oh, no.

[B]

But it didn't seem to change the scores they were getting. So goals did kind of seem extraneous versus Just the public posting alone. But I guess if everyone had fun writing their goals for me, if I kept writing 100% and then seeing, you know, crappy results, I would have been like, who is not actually doing. I know it's you, you know Sean, I know you're doing a terrible job.

[C]

John's like what? I don't even care.

[B]

And again, I don't even want this job anyway. They didn't have any feedback, so would it have been better if they got actual feedback for staff not even supposed

[C]

to be here today.

[B]

And they also didn't ask anyone, hey, did you like this treatment or were they all sort of just like whatever. Public posting, who cares. But at the end of the day, public posting cheap and easy and tends to be effective.

[C]

Delicious.

[B]

Which is pretty much dissemination station.

[C]

That's right.

[B]

I'll say it again. It looks like public posting is an easy, cheap way to change behavior across lots of different environments. Maybe individual would be better if you can make it happen. But again, maybe not. And maybe there'll be maintenance, maybe not. So the way easy.

[A]

The one thing I want to talk about dissemination station is that I would. I think they really need to do a lot of social validity here.

[C]

I agree.

[A]

People that I know that have had public posting do not like it.

[C]

That's what I wanted to talk about. Right, right. I feel like you could get a lot of counter control issues with respect to public posting because I personally do not, I think respond well to this type of scenario. And then so if you are getting changes in behavior, it's most likely avoidant behavior to start with. Right? Avoidance. Avoidance of being the slowest or the lowest. Oh, right.

[B]

Maybe a gamification piece of I want to be the top of the leaderboard maybe.

[C]

Yeah. I want to play their game.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But you, but Diana's like, you and I are different that way.

[B]

That's you, Diana, you hate.

[C]

Yeah, but I represent a sub subset of people. Right. Presumably there are other people like me that I don't want to play your stupid game.

[B]

You and the Sean's of the world.

[C]

I really, you know, that was coming from the heart when I was playing Sean. Right then. So if you're going to make me play your game, forget it. I don't want to. I quit.

[A]

I also want to look at whether there is some unethical behavior happening or public sourcing. Right. Or if, you know, people are falsifying data. Which happened.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

In my public posting experience when people weren't meeting their criteria of the discrete trial, if you remember What I said in the beginning. So then people were faking whether they did them.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And so we'd have to also look at, you know, is there a reward tied to. I think there's no reward. You're like, I'm just going to post this and nothing will happen to you. If it's high, if it's low, I don't actually care. I just want you to see it. And then you do what you will with that.

[C]

Really.

[B]

With those data.

[C]

And I think it's all in how it's presented. Right. If you're like, hey, team, like, we really want to increase this and we're just going to.

[B]

Oh, that sounded so funny.

[C]

I'm looking at.

[B]

I also will fake it just to.

[C]

But like, I'm just gonna be looking at how everyone does together. Right. Let's make this an improvement in our community culture here at work.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Or what if I would respond much better to that than. I mean, I mean, watching each of you.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And seeing how you do compared to your peers. And I'm gonna post it on the wall and everyone's gonna see and I'm

[B]

gonna drop big arrows and make poo, poo, poo poo emojis next to you.

[A]

Easy. It might not be socially bad.

[C]

Yeah. I think you have to be careful in its implementation. But that's just coming from like, you know, my.

[B]

But we don't actually vibe on that

[C]

and we don't really know.

[B]

Don't know in the research whether any of that matters. It might always work. No matter what. You could be like, I'm going to shame everyone who gets a bad score. And it could still be effective.

[C]

It could be effective, but then you're going to lose, you know, buy in morale.

[B]

Oh, don't do that. I'm not saying you should do that. We don't actually have as far as, you know, summary research to say, you

[C]

know, there's like a lot of pushback in classroom settings against like the levels program where you're like putting kids on the chart and saying like, oh, Timmy, like you got moved down to red because you were bad. Right. Like no one likes that system where

[B]

everyone can see based system.

[C]

Exactly. See, we're, you know, how kids performances in comparison to one another. So this, I mean, that's public posting too. Right. So this could be viewed in the same way. So I really, I think you're right, Jackie. It has to be approached carefully.

[A]

Yeah. But that's all I have to say

[B]

is that I think that's the. That's it that's the podcast art. It's going to be Jack Black ripping down the the Big Star Board and School of Rock.

[C]

What's this? Factotum.

[B]

The Factotor. All right, we got a lot of stuff we got to do, so let's move on to the next section of the show. Pairings.

[C]

Oh, it's time for pairings. Pairings is the part of the show where I tell you about past episodes that you want to check out maybe over on our new website if you enjoyed this episode. We've talked about this and a variety of other OBM related topics in the past. Let me tell you what those were. Episode 41, we talked about sports fitness with Dr. Mallory Quinn. Episode 46, we talked about behavioral fitness with Dr. Nick Green. Episode 97, staff feedback. That's a supervision episode with Dr. Amy Henley. Episode 115, self monitoring one hundred and thirty two component analysis. Episode 184, receiving feedback with Drs. Tyra Sellers and Seth Walker. Episode 215, we talked about the PDCHS. That's also a supervision episode. And then we have two book clubs where we reviewed books by Aubrey Daniels which discuss performance management and many other things. Those are newly renumbered, everybody. They have new numbers on the new website. Book book club four, bringing out the best in people. And book club 16. Oops, that's all. Yeah, oops. All Book club. And I also like to recommend a snack to go with the episode. The snack today is all those late night potato chips that you stole from work. You can enjoy those between 11pm and

[B]

1am look at you all, you thieves. Look how terribly you. That reminds me of that public posting study they did for how much energy people were using compared to their neighbors.

[C]

Like, oh yeah, yeah.

[B]

Hey, you know this, you know, some of your neighbors are only using this much electricity. Some of you are terrible humans and you use this much. I'm not going to tell you who's who, but here's the number. Read my graph.

[C]

All right, that's an oldie as well.

[B]

That is an old one.

[C]

It's not easy being green. And now I can't remember the numbers. It's in the 30s or. Yeah, yeah, 29 maybe.

[B]

All right, well, thank you, Diana. Public posting. All right, well, as we wrap up the show, I want to say thank you to everyone. If you'd like to publicly post what you thought about our episodes, you can do so wherever you subscribe to the show, Apple Podcasts or where, you know, whatever, whatever you use to listen to our podcast or you can publicly post on Our Patreon page, patreon.com ABA Inside Track, where you can subscribe to get all the episodes a week ahead of time to get access to all of our polls, and if you subscribe at the $5 level, access to our listener choice episodes and a free CE at the $10 and up level, you're able to get all of our book clubs the moment they come out, as well as two free CES for subscribing and discounts at the CE store. That's patreon.com abainsidetrack and again, you can publicly post. Loved this episode. Didn't love this episode. You need to use your lap key more frequently. Whatever you want to write. Stop stealing my chips. Right? All these great things. And speaking of going to websites and ce, you want the second secret code word, don't you? It's quiz, Q, U, I, Z. As in, if you go to our new website, abinsidetrack.com, you will be able to start taking quizzes. So we're in line with the BACB's June updates. But if you act now, before we've uploaded all of our quizzes, then you only have to put in code words.

[C]

So that's a limited time offer.

[B]

Yeah. As of before June, there'll be quizzes. Quizzes. Quizzes.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And you'll need your code words plus actually remembering all the fun stuff we talked about.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So the other thing I want to say just about that is you, you go, you, you like, order the episode. Like, you, you enroll in the course and then the first thing it will do is show you, like, the learning objectives and then it will show you the podcast and you can listen to the podcast in the course. But most people, I believe, already listen to them across other platforms and that's completely fine. You do not have to listen to it again. There's a little button on the bottom that's pink and it says complete and continue. And so you just click that and you click through the podcast, the transcripts on there, and then you will get to the quiz questions and the code word questions after that. And then if you get them right, if you don't, I believe you can retake the quiz. But if you get them right, then it will make you a certificate and email it to you automatically. Yay.

[B]

So all that stuff's there, but at the end of the day, if you like using a podcast player or listening on YouTube, great, you just go to the website, click through everything and get to that last quiz and code word page. And then a certificate is yours and you can publicly post it. Show everyone how many podcasts episodes you've listened to.

[C]

Don't do that though, because it should have your BCBA number on it.

[B]

Oh, you can't publicly post something with

[C]

your business, just like your private info, so.

[B]

Oh, okay. All right. Don't do that, I guess. Just make a graph of how much, how many CES you get. All right, well, I guess that's the end of the show. We're going to do a couple final quick thanks. Thanks to Dr. Jim Carr for recording our intro outro music, Kyle Sturia for interstitial music, and Dan Thabit of the podcast Doctors for his amazing editing work. We'll be back next week with another fun filled episode, but until then, keep responding. Bye.

[C]

Bye.