(REBROADCAST) Book Club 3 - Coercion and Its Fallout

Summary

ABA Inside Track – (REBROADCAST) Book Club 3: Coercion and Its Fallout by Murray Sidman

Episode Date: February 6, 2026
Hosts: Robert ("Rob") Perry Crews, Diana Perry Crews, Jackie McDonald

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Episode Overview

The hosts return to their annual summer Book Club to discuss Murray Sidman’s influential work, Coercion and Its Fallout. Over two episodes, they examine the book’s core arguments, key concepts, laboratory research, and broader social applications. The episode blends behavioral science with personal reflections, humor, and robust debate—serving both as a primer on Sidman’s lasting impact, and an invitation to consider the pervasive effects of coercion in daily life, relationships, and society.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• Exploring Coercion in Human Behavior: The team examines how coercion—rooted in punishment and negative reinforcement—shapes actions at individual, institutional, and societal levels.
• Sidman’s Behavioral Analysis: Drawing from laboratory research, Sidman offers a nuanced critique of coercion’s prevalence, effectiveness, and side effects—contrasting coercive control with positive reinforcement.
• Broader Societal Relevance: The discussion links Sidman’s ideas to parenting, school, criminal justice, mental health, and government, with the aim of fostering less coercive, more humane practices.

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Key Sections & Discussion Points

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I. Introduction & Book Club Context (00:14–06:40)

• The hosts introduce their third annual Book Club and explain the format: rather than articles, they’ll focus on Coercion and Its Fallout, splitting it into two parts.
• Personal anecdotes underscore their connections to the book and Murray Sidman himself.

Notable Quote:

"It's an interesting book because I know when I read it, it felt very meaningful. I feel like I changed, similar to positive parenting after we read that. I feel like I read it and learned so much about myself...not just about my practice as a behavior analyst, but about myself as a human being in society."
— Rob, 07:51

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II. Sidman’s Intent, Preface, & Overall Approach (06:40–14:21)

• Sidman wrote the book out of concern for the world’s future and institutions, reflecting that our biggest problems stem from ourselves, not just systems.
• The preface dedication: "To Rita, the least coercive person that I know."
• The book targets colleagues, professionals, and anyone invested in humanity’s direction.
• Discussion of reading the book as adults vs. students; recognizing the book’s density and breadth.

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III. Foundational Concepts: Coercion, Control, and Their Ubiquity (14:21–32:25)

• Coercion is everywhere: Nature is inherently coercive, and humans have evolved responses to avoid natural punishers (e.g., cold, hunger, danger).
• The distinction between nature’s coercion (unavoidable) and social coercion (avoidable via deliberate reinforcement strategies).
• Sidman’s project: Can we, as analysts and practitioners, create alternatives to the coercion that pervades society?

Notable Quote:

“Coercion as defined by Sidman: any instance of negative reinforcement and punishment.”
— Jackie, 23:37

• Control vs. coercion: All behavior is controlled, but not all control is aversive; positive reinforcement can guide behavior without coercion.

Memorable Quote:

“...restraint is only one sort of control. And the absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels free, but the objectionable control of force.”
— Citing Skinner, 25:43

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IV. Lab Foundations: Rats, Punishment, & Negative Reinforcement (32:25–41:26)

• Many chapters employ rat experiments to illustrate behavioral responses to punishment and avoidance—laying a scientific foundation.
• Hosts debate the accessibility of basic research; some find it illuminating, others find it dry but appreciate the rigor and relevance for human parallels.

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V. Does Punishment “Work”? Side Effects and Critique (41:26–55:10)

• Sidman’s stance: Punishment quickly suppresses behavior but produces serious side effects—aggression, suppression of all responding, emotional reactions, conditioned punishers (whereby people become “the shock”).
• These effects make punishment unreliable and counterproductive long-term; behavior analysts should be wary.

Notable Dialogue:

“Punishment…is effective in the short term, but not necessarily effective in a long term and not effective if you don't have the specific stimuli present… so we know that it won't maintain behavior long term.”
— Jackie, 22:02

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VI. Coercion’s Spread: Conditioned Punishers & Social Ramifications (55:10–59:39)

• Through pairing, neutral stimuli (e.g., bosses, parents) become aversive.
• Discussion of road rage, internet trolling, and the different “rules” of behavior in public vs. anonymous settings—contingencies for non-coercion (e.g., social disapproval) are missing online.
• The hosts reflect on the temptation for more punishment vs. the challenge of building reinforcing societies.

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VII. Negative Reinforcement, Escape, Avoidance, & Social Withdrawals (59:39–83:13)

• Negative reinforcement and punishment are “flip sides”; both are aversive controls and can have intertwined effects.
• Detailed exploration of how negative reinforcement drives escape routes: tuning out, burnout, “dropping out” from work, school, or relationships, and even suicide (noted as a problematic and oversimplified portrayal in Sidman).
• Personal anecdotes illustrate “tuning out” with trash TV, disengaging with politics, and the avoidance paradox: effective avoidance can eventually extinguish itself, requiring intermittent punishment to re-establish the contingency.

Memorable Quote:

“Avoidant behavior can be so effective that it actually diminishes itself… the punisher itself has to appear in order to then reinforce the avoidant response and have the cycle continue...”
— Diana, 83:03 (avoiding the appearance of the aversive stimulus altogether)

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VIII. Applying Coercion Analysis to Society (83:13–90:19; 94:46–140:55)

• Mental Health:

  • Sidman ties anxiety, neuroses, and “abnormal” behavior to avoidance and coercion histories.
  • The hosts find these arguments less nuanced than current behavioral therapies but appreciate the behavioral “de-mystification” of mental illness.

• Conscience & Moral Behavior:

  • The moral “conscience” is described as an internalization of coercion; children’s sense of right/wrong stems from histories of punishment—not some innate moral force.
  • Powerful analogy:

    "If this rat were a person and it was a churchgoer, it would confess that it had been a sinner, but now is reborn." — Jackie, 112:15

• “Rock and a Hard Place”:

  • When avoidance or escape is impossible, freezing or “shutting down” occurs; loss of reinforcers (e.g., in elderly moved from familiar homes) can be as punishing as a tangible shock.

• Punishment-Induced Aggression & Counter-Control:

  • Coercion breeds aggression and counter-aggression; punishment’s reinforcing properties for aggression are discussed, including in music and pop culture.
  • Counter-control—a vital behavioral concept where attempts to control behavior evoke opposition (e.g., students, families, governments).
  • The hosts note that society often gives away control to large entities (government, law enforcement), emphasizing the need for “active counter-control” to prevent one-sided domination.

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IX. Why Does Coercion Persist? (141:06–154:55)

• Coercion is easy and immediate, while reinforcement is effortful and delayed.
• Bain of fluency: society is “fluent” in punishing; shifting to reinforcement would require deliberate, widespread effort.
• Nature is unavoidably coercive, but social life need not be—competition and limited resources don’t make coercion inevitable.

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X. Sidman’s Solutions: Positive Reinforcement at Home, School, and Beyond (154:55–172:58)

• Positive Reinforcement (PR) as guiding principle:

  “Positive reinforcement works and coercion is dangerous.” — Sidman, quoted by Jackie, 153:26

• Recognizing behavioral control is always present—the ethical question is which type of control to use.

• Reframing “discipline” as training, not punishment (157:07).

• Home & Parenting:

  • Children’s irritating behavior is natural; caregivers should use PR, set limits, and avoid letting children become conditioned punishers.
  • Stories about car rides, annoying songs, and the struggle to praise instead of punish.

• School:

  • Praising academic skills, using PSI (Personalized Systems of Instruction), leveraging reinforcers tied to learning (e.g., using math to go shopping).
  • Sidman: “teach something and then tie the reinforcer into what was just taught.”

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XI. Institutions, Prisons, and Social Reform (172:58–171:06)

• Prisons are punitive by design; rehabilitative rhetoric masks the reality.
• Rehabilitation requires more than token economies; it needs the gradual establishment of meaningful, naturally occurring reinforcers aligned with gained skills and competencies.
• Societal change requires not just improving the prison environment but also reintegrating ex-offenders through jobs and removing lasting social punishers (like voting bans).

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XII. Law Enforcement, Diplomacy, and Final Challenges (171:06–172:58)

• Sidman floats ideas (e.g., rewarding good driving), acknowledging that large-scale change would require both cultural and systematic rethinking.
• The hosts note this as an area needing more thoughtful, nuanced debate.

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XIII. Final Reflections & Takeaways (172:58–179:52)

• The book is best read reflectively, possibly more than once.
• Even decades after publication, Sidman’s analysis of coercion remains urgent, insightful, and applicable.
• The hosts urge listeners to recognize coercion in daily life, reflect on their own practices, push for less aversive control, and appreciate Sidman’s legacy as a call to action.
• The show ends with gratitude to Sidman and a wish that, “maybe in another generation or two...people could read this book and say, ‘wow, I can’t believe people ever behaved this way.’”

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Notable Quotes & Moments by Timestamp

• On Sidman’s Preface:

  “It has become clear that the primary problems lie not in our institutions, but in us…We have to change ourselves if we’re going to build systems that will support cooperation, sharing, justice, and [rational] approaches to solving problems.” [Sidman, quoted by Jackie, 13:13]

• Defining Coercion:

  “Sidman really makes it simple for us and he defines coercion as any instance of negative reinforcement and punishment.” [Jackie, 23:37]

• On Control:

  “Control is not necessarily aversive by its nature...It’s just making manipulations to the environment.” [Diana, 25:43]

• Punishment’s Effectiveness and Side Effects:

  “Punishment is used to get others to act differently in society. We all hate talking about punishment, but we all do it.” [Jackie, 40:46]
  “Punishment...can become a conditioned punisher as well.” [Diana, 55:10]

• On Avoidance:

  “Avoidant behavior can be so effective it actually diminishes itself...the punisher itself has to appear in order to reinforce the avoidant response and continue the cycle.” [Diana, 83:03]

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• Defining coercion/control: 23:37–27:05
• Lab-based rat studies discussion: 32:25–36:52
• Does punishment work & side effects: 41:26–55:10
• Avoidance, escape, and their paradoxes: 59:39–83:13
• Mental health, conscience, and abnormality: 94:46–106:54
• Counter-control & government: 133:33–138:51
• Why coercion persists: 141:06–154:55
• Positive reinforcement in action: 154:55–164:18
• Prisons, institutions, reintegration: 164:18–171:06
• Final reflections: 172:58–End

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Conclusion: Sidman’s Enduring Legacy

This two-episode book club delivers a comprehensive, witty, and sometimes personal journey through Coercion and Its Fallout. The hosts combine behavioral science, pop culture, and daily experience to illuminate why Sidman’s message—“Positive reinforcement works, coercion is dangerous”—resonates as much now as ever. Listeners are challenged to recognize and resist coercion, to lead by modeling positive alternatives, and to continue Sidman’s work in seeking a more just and humane world.

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For more reading, further discussion, and a richer understanding, the hosts encourage picking up Sidman’s original book and engaging with its ideas—again and again.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, Everybody. Welcome to ABA InsideTrack, 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.

[B]

Hello, Rob. It's Diana.

[C]

And it's Jackie McDonald.

[A]

Hi, Jackie McDonald.

[C]

Hello there, everyone.

[A]

Hi, Diana. No last name.

[B]

I'm Diana Perry Crews.

[A]

Oh, okay. We didn't really need to do your last name if you don't want to.

[B]

It's not a secret.

[A]

No, I know it's not a secret. I just feel like it's been part of your thing. It's like you guys just say your first name.

[C]

I know. I ruined it.

[A]

It's okay if you go back, way back in time. That was something that you just decided to do in, like, our first episode and have continued on with.

[C]

Well, it's because I'm trying to live a double life with my same last name.

[A]

But this isn't a podcast about nomenclature. This is a podcast about behavior analysis and behavior analytic research. Except this week, we're going a little bit off the behavior analytic theming. We're going to do our. Was this third time we've done this now?

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Our third annual behavior analysis book club. Hooray. It's the summer. Unless you're listening to this.

[B]

What was the first one?

[A]

What was the first one?

[C]

Parenting.

[A]

The joy of parenting. Positive, Positive parenting.

[B]

Did we do one before that?

[A]

Yeah, we did. Supervisors, book club.

[C]

Yeah, Supervise the guidebook.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah. This is our third one. We moved into the summer.

[B]

That was in September. And the book club were one in the same.

[A]

They were the same.

[B]

We spun them out, and now they're two separate things.

[A]

Yes, we spun them out into two things. So for those of you who are new listeners, we usually talk about articles around a theme, Research articles. But for these book club episodes, we will just be talking about a book. We won't be talking about the whole book. We won't be going into quite the detail that we do with our research articles. But we'll be talking about the general topic of the book, some key points that we take from the book, and then hopefully get you interested in, you know, taking our starting points and then maybe reading the book yourself.

[C]

Summer reading.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

So the summer's almost coming to an end, guys, so now it's time to pick up a book and read it.

[B]

You don't want to miss out.

[A]

No, I don't want to talk about end of summer because it makes me think of the Tiny Toons Adventures, original home movie, how I spent my summer vacation in which at the end, the summer was over. And I would watch that as a kid. And no matter when I watched it, I would be sad that summer was over. I could watch it in December and I'd be sad that summer was over. It was very good. It's on Hulu if you'd like to watch it. We don't have a sponsorship or anything, but Tiny Toons Adventures, which is not what we're going to be talking about for any length of time tonight. We're actually.

[B]

We're too neat. We're all a little.

[A]

Maybe we are going to talk about that. No, we are going to be talking about a book, a book club. We are way off topic here. We're going to be talking about coercion and its fallout by Murray Sidman. The recently passed Murray Sidman. As much as we would have loved to say that this was just in honor of his life and his work, we decided that we wanted to do this book a while back before he unfortunately passed away. But again, I think what better time to review an individual's work than now, especially with this work. This was a gift from you, Diana. You gave me this book two years ago.

[B]

It was more than that. It was many years, three years ago. I don't really know.

[A]

It was. It was not.

[B]

It was not more than like not inscribe it.

[A]

You did not want you to inscribe. Pro tip, if you buy someone a book, you should inscribe it so then later when someone sells it at a yard sale, someone else can find it and then say, wow, I wonder why Aunt Ruthie gave this. Gave this book to her nephew because he clearly didn't care enough about. About it. And now I own it. That's always a fun game you can play.

[C]

I bought. I bought this book at an ABAI and went a long, long, long time ago. Oh, yeah. And when I.

[B]

You were feeling very sophisticated.

[C]

Yep. And when I opened it up this time around, there was a ticket for when I went to see Josh ritter on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

[B]

Is he a musician or a comedian?

[C]

He's a musician.

[B]

Is John Ritter's son.

[A]

No, no, that's somebody else.

[C]

I don't.

[B]

You sure?

[A]

That's Jason Ritter. Who? He was on tv.

[C]

He's like, does he look like John? No, I don't. I actually don't know how to. He's just really good.

[B]

Real short shorts.

[C]

No. And the opening act was a band named Dawes, which were not popular at that point and I didn't like them. And now they're on the radio and it makes me sad.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

I didn't like them then, and I still, still don't like them.

[A]

That's fine. You're allowed to have.

[B]

What year was that?

[C]

2010.

[B]

All right.

[A]

So you read this book around 2010?

[C]

Yep. When I was in Seattle and I was seeing Josh Ritter at the Showbox.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

That's cool.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

No, and I got this, like I said, I got as a gift from Diana. I. I think there was a subtext. Okay. She was like, I thought you liked this book because it's interesting. I think it was because she felt I was very coercive in my practice.

[C]

As you're reading this, you're like, oh, that's me. Oh, that's me.

[A]

So I read this a number of years ago and I've reread it again for this one in Zen Sudinah. This is your first reading a book?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What are you thinking so far?

[B]

I like it.

[A]

We're only going to be talking about the first half of the book because it's a long book and usually our book club episodes go about two or three. This is probably going to be about a two parter. So we're going to talk about the first half of the book. So we're going to talk about from about chapters one to ten tonight on tonight's episode. And then we'll talk about the second half of the book on our next episode.

[C]

There are 287 pages in this book, so.

[A]

So we'll be talking specifically about pages 1 to 100. I don't know what number.

[B]

143.5. I just want to point out as we get started here that Jackie and I had the, I would say honor, really, of getting to attend a rather impromptu memorial service at ABAI for Murray Sidman, and that was thrown by the Northeastern Alumni Association. And I may have talked about this in our preview episode. Maybe at one point. It was really moving and touching. And everyone who had been his students got up and talked and just talked about how much he meant to them and how he had really gone out of his way to be really supportive of them. And one person brought up coercion in its fallout. And throughout the discussions, it was not just Marie they were talking about, but Rita, his wife as well, and how sweet and wonderful she was to them, too. And one person brought up Korzhen in its fallout, said the inscription in coercion. And his fallout is to Rita, the least coercive person that I know. I know. And it was Just really sweet. And the whole thing was really, really sweet. And I didn't have the chance, really, to study under Murray or take his class, which I feel was a really big missed opportunity. But everyone who knew him spoke so highly of him, not just with this work, but across the type of work that he did. So I feel lucky that we get to talk about this book.

[C]

Yeah, I had lunch with him a few times randomly.

[A]

Yeah, he, like, sat at his table, or.

[C]

No, I was.

[A]

There wasn't a lot of room in the restaurant. Like, we gotta sit, you guys together. Hope you have something to talk about.

[C]

Excuse me. Can I sit with that old man right there?

[B]

Thanks.

[C]

No, I don't remember exactly how it happened.

[B]

I think it was like a classic Jackie story.

[C]

I don't know. We were at a restaurant, and I think I might have seen my advisor, Dr. Bill Ahern, and he might have been with Murray or our friend Paul Bregacanion, who was a student of Murray's. And I think they may have been together. And I randomly just popped up and then popped in, which is what I do.

[A]

Must be nice to have that. I don't invite myself show up in places like, I'm here now. And everyone's like, oh, well, I guess you are. Hooray, I'm here.

[C]

I'm staying for dinner. I do that a lot. I'm excited to. I'm excited to talk about this book. It was nice to come back to it after so many years. It's like an old friend.

[A]

It's an interesting book because I know when I read it, it felt very meaningful. I feel like I changed similar to positive parenting after we read that. I feel like I read it and learned so much about myself, you know, not just about my practice as a behavior analyst, but about myself as a human being in society.

[B]

Episode 67 and 68.

[A]

Oh, positive parenting.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And coming back to it again, I'm happy to say that reading it again, a lot of the points are ones that I feel I am practicing more often. I'm not perfect, certainly, but that I practice a lot of the recommendations, and I'm much more careful about my own interactions with other people. And so it was nice to not be reading this book. Like, oh, that's right. I remember telling myself, don't do that anymore, Rob. It's really coercive and will lead to nuclear fallout. You know, which is. Which is a theme in the book. You know, it was nice to feel like, oh, no, I have done some of these, and there's room for improvement. But I didn't backslide all the way into. Man, this coercion stuff sure is easy. I forgot why I stopped doing it. You know, I try not to practice coercion in my life, which was nice.

[C]

I am not gonna lie. When I read this the first time, I don't think I actually grasped what I was supposed to be grasping in the book. I mean, it's fairly dense.

[A]

You thought it was pro nuclear war.

[C]

No, I didn't even get that part. So I. I was reading it. Right. So I got like the main points, but I didn' understand the nuances of where he was going because I was trying to read it for fun, which is great. Right. As a graduate student reading things for fun.

[B]

But I think that it's ambitious.

[C]

Yeah. But I think I had too much other things going on in my life at that point. But now I'm reading back and I was like, oh, like each chapter I'm like, that's what he means. That's how I can tie it in. And so. Well, it's like in ninth grade we.

[B]

Read like Death Be Not Proud, Hiroshima and Coordinates Fallout and that they were all just way over my head. Like, you're just like mentally not ready. I wasn't just maturity wise, you're not ready. I think for that. And I think it's the same, no offense to grad students. It just takes a while to sit with these topics and have an understanding of them as they might fit into the larger world. And this does tie into positive parenting book as well. Right. Because a lot of the recommendations that Glenn Latham makes in that books are how to avoid coercion. Right. And to establish yourself as a condition reinforcer and thereby make behavioral change. The great thing about this book is it's not just applied to your one on one personal relationships, but he's looking at it with regard to our society at large and our culture at large and how coercion operates in those realms. So it does get big and heady and might take a couple read throughs to get some of that right.

[C]

And so when I read it, I think I was like really focused in the treatment of, you know, an autism spectrum disorder symptoms. And I was trying to relate everything that I read about the book to that specifically. And it's not really how you should read it. He suggests that he's written this book for professional colleagues and to people that are concerned with where we are going as a species. So that's what he says in the preface. So basically like broad that, yeah, he's Written it for everyone that cares.

[A]

Although.

[B]

To be a Homo sapien.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Although I would not recommend this book for everyone because if you don't have at least a passing knowledge of even, you know, maybe like, basic psychology, this is going to be a very. Not all of it, but there are going to be sections of it that are very challenging to read. I think this is definitely a book, though. If you had, say, a behavior analytic friend who wanted to give this book to a colleague who, say, was in a totally different field, there are chapters I would recommend. I would. I would not say, read this whole book because I'll be honest, if I were not a behavior analyst, I don't know if I could have made it through the first couple chapters because they do get very much into early rat experiments. And I understand. And we all understand where rat experiments are going when we talk about behavior analysis and early basic research. But I don't know if the average person is going to get like, I thought I was supposed to learn about how to be a better human being. Why is my rats. I'm done with this book now.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Whereas I think if you go into later, some of what we'll talk about tonight, but more we'll talk about the next episode. It does talk more about. Here's an actual example of what humans are doing. And I think it will be hard to understand, like you were saying, Jackie, all of the nuance if you don't go through. What are the lab experiments telling us? Because I do think it is important for folks to remember that we are animals just like rats are. And while our behavior is more complex, we still follow the same principles of behavior. The same rules still apply. I think you could tell someone that most people don't want to hear that and would sort of zone out like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I don't want to hear about your rat book.

[C]

They won't skip chapter.

[A]

They won't understand it.

[B]

Chapter three, guys.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So unfortunately, you know, I think this book is mostly for practitioners and those I think, you know, with a background in sciences related to behavior analysis or.

[B]

Philosophy or philosophy come at this from a philosophical standpoint.

[A]

Yeah, I agree. You're right, Dan. I think you're right there. Otherwise, I think there are definitely components or you might want to give them the Cliffs Notes or, hey, you might want to read it yourself and then sum up a couple of the chapters as examples for other individuals.

[B]

Listen to a podcast maybe.

[A]

Oh, yeah, I didn't buy you questions, fault. But I'm going to make you listen to this behavior analytic podcast with these three people. They're gonna talk about what concert they went to and positive parenting, the joy of parenting for a while first. Yeah. All right, so let's get into the. Let's get into the book. So this book was, as we said, written by Murray Sidman originally in 89. 1989, and then revised in 01.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

Right. And I love how he starts the book off as saying, you know, he's written this because as a teenager, he felt like he didn't really understand where people were coming from. So he was like, I am very concerned about our world. I'm very concerned about the institutions, and I don't know what I can do. And I love his quote that he says in the preface, page vii, whatever that is. He says, it has become clear that the primary problems lie not in our institutions, but in us. I love that somehow we have to change ourselves if we're going to build systems that will support cooperation, sharing, justice, and generally. Right. Rational approaches to solving problems. I love that. So he's not, you know, like, we'll always say, like, oh, blame the government. It's the government's fault that all this stuff is happening, and, you know, the education system's fault. But I love that he's like, no, just like, we as behavior analysts don't blame the clients. Right. For if something goes wrong, he's like, you guys have to take the onus on yourselves. Like, it's us that we need to change our behavior in order to enact change in those bigger systems.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So I love that.

[A]

So in some ways, this book is kind of like the TV show and comic book the Walking Dead and that we are the coercion and it's fallout.

[B]

Right. Well, it's not as though the government or society is some other oppositional entity in and of itself that is like a overarching, maniacal plan that they're putting into place. Everything is a product of the consequences that are producing it. Yeah. Right.

[C]

And I wonder if Murray and Skinner had had, like, a sit down at one point, because they did know each other. They had a sit down and they were talking about this over, like, a glass of wine or some beer, some whiskey, because a lot of the prefaces and introduction really align really well with Skinner's essay called the Compassion and Ethics and the Care of the Retardate. I don't love that word, but that's what it's called. Called.

[A]

What's the name of it?

[C]

Yeah, it was written in, like, the 60s.

[B]

You can find it most certainly use different language now.

[C]

Yep. You can find it in the cumulative record essays.

[B]

I love the cumulative record.

[C]

I do too.

[B]

It's maybe my favorite.

[C]

You can also find it in, like. It's called, like, Introduction to Skinner's Essays book. So you can find it in multiple different places. But here it ties in how we as a society need to change systems in order to better care for those people that we serve. And how a lot of the times in those systems there's a lack of counter control which leads to abuse and neglect. And so that's, I think, where Murray kind of starts this book off is talking about coercion and control and what that all means.

[B]

A quote from Skinner. It may be from that article, but I didn't write down the source. The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion, to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

[C]

Yeah, I love that.

[B]

Yeah, they were of a like mind.

[C]

They sure were probably besties, if they could be.

[B]

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if they were. But on this topic, there are a lot of Skinner quotes that overlap with some of the things that Sidman's gonna bring up.

[A]

So moving into the first chapter, and while we're not gonna do sort of the same in depth dive for each chapter that we say would do for an article in our normal episodes, I do think this chapter brings up an important component of the overall thesis of the book. The idea that coercion is everywhere. Now, the difference is we're talking about coercion in nature or the natural world versus coercion in human society. One of them is not. Well, I guess plants and stuff are living things, but one of them is not a living organism. Meaning that we will always be dealing with coercion in our world. We have to deal with nature. We have to deal with the aging process. These are.

[C]

I don't.

[A]

No, not you. Jackie. Jackie's eternally a vampire.

[C]

I found the. The sun.

[A]

The sun would be very coercive to poor Jackie.

[C]

Right.

[A]

As a vampire.

[C]

So true.

[A]

So much of human behavior really developed from our response to this coercive world, which is just the name of chapter one. I didn't coin that phrase or anything. And most of what we as organisms used to have to do would be, I need to build shelter. You know, I'm going to learn to build fire as a means to avoid the cold. I need to hunt animals so I can eat them so that they don't Eat me.

[B]

So much of our behaviors killed Uncle Mike.

[A]

Yep. Don't eat the red berries. They'll kill you. So much of what we did in the past, thousands of years ago, and, you know, to this day, I don't want to act like we don't have that coercive nature anymore had to do with our avoiding the coercion that comes from nature in terms of if you don't engage in certain behaviors, you will lose your reinforcers of. It's not freezing, it's not too hot, I'm not too thirsty. And dying.

[C]

Dying is the ultimate punisher.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Or is it actually, you don't know.

[A]

And then the problem, though, is when we talk about how we have to respond to coercion in dealing with nature, that is a very different relationship than how we need to respond to coercion in our interactions with each other, in our interactions as a society, our society overall. When you think about it, you might think about, oh, but there's so many good people in the world. There's so many great things, things humans have done doesn't take away the fact that the majority of interactions with each other are of a coercive nature. And we'll sort of talk about Sidman's definition of what coercive is. But, you know, think about how many times in your life you have been punished. And you know what? Take a moment, think back. Could you instead have been positively reinforced for engaging in inappropriate behavior rather than just punished for whatever you ended up doing?

[B]

Now, are you talking about, like, through the natural consequences of the environment?

[A]

No, in our society.

[B]

Disciplined?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Punished?

[A]

No. I mean, society. Society is always going to be. I mean, sorry, nature is always going to be coercive. There's always going to be that coercive.

[B]

Factor, like, don't touch the hot stove.

[A]

Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, don't touch hot things. They will burn you. That's not. Like, how can we make the laws of thermodynamics less coercive? Nope, That's. That's the way they are. But as a parent, think about how you would teach a child to not touch something hot. Does it need to be coercive? Would you allow the child to touch something hot and then yell at them about like, look, you idiot, you touched something hot, now you're burned. I'm not giving you any water to put on that.

[B]

Well, that's rude.

[A]

No, of course you wouldn't. But how many interactions have you had that, when you think about them, were. When you, when you hear the word coercive, Even without hearing Sidman's definition. You think? Yeah. So many things in my life have been terrible, and I hated them. And now I act differently because I never want to feel that way again. I never want to be in that situation again. You know, honestly, just think about that. I'm sure we could all come up with five really good examples of ways that people were horrible to us and it changed our behavior and we don't like it. I bet it would take us a lot longer to think of five ways that people did something really reinforcing for us and it also changed our behavior in a positive way. Eventually we get there. But I'm sure we could do the one where someone said something terrible to us or yelled at us or something bad happened to us.

[B]

Well, I think punishers are more salient as well. Right.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

I was a very sensitive child.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I remember everything. And it wasn't bad stuff. It was just like, don't make me go talk to that waitress.

[A]

Oh, well, that's your own problem again. The book starts out sort of following up with the idea of the preface to talk about, well, these interactions exist. Why do they exist? And as behavior analysts who understand how to do these functional analyses of these interactions, can we think of better ways to teach that don't involve coercion? Are we this. Do we need to be the same as nature just because nature is such a terrible punisher in many ways? Do we humans need to be such punishers to each other? And the answer is yes. And that's the end of the book. No. The answer is no. And then there's a lot more book to go. So that that kind of gets through the idea of chapter one or that's what I took from chapter one. Is there anything that either of you had that I missed?

[B]

I think that's pretty summative. You know, society, without adding additional constraints or limitations, I think will naturally fall into coercive model. Right. Which maybe we're going to get into that I guess, a little bit more by its nature, it most often mimics nature because punishment and coercion are extremely effective. That means that's the only method.

[A]

I love how your eyes just got really bright. They're so effective for the audience at home. Diana got really excited.

[B]

That's me. That's the only method of control. However, it is one that's been shown to be highly effective throughout the millennia.

[C]

Yeah. And one thing I think about when he talks about how we as behavior analysts or therapists, as he calls Us should know better. Right. We should know better than using coercion because we know that it is effective in the short term, but not necessarily effective in a long term and not effective if you don't have the specific stimuli present. Right. That make it effective. And so we know that it won't maintain behavior long term. So if we're not thinking about that, then we should probably seek alternatives if we're looking for maintenance and generalization. And he's like, basically, I got like a shame on you, behavior analyst for using coercion because you know that it's not the most effective. So I think that's what he's trying to like. He urges us to think about. And thinking about it then may also make us understand why it's so present and how it relates to the rest of, like, society and how infrastructure is affecting, you know, our. How we think about our jobs and interactions with other people.

[A]

Let's move into kind of the next couple chapters, and let's start with some definitions, because I think we've used the term coercion a lot. We've used the term control a few times. And Zimmerman does take a nice chunk of time in the book to define what these terms mean, because he's going to use them a lot. The name of the book is coercion. So he uses the word coercion a lot. And while I think we all have a sense of generally, you know, if we had to define coercion, we could come up with something. Let's just go to the definition that is in the book itself. So let's do those definitions. So, Jackie, why don't you take the general definition that Sidman has for coercion.

[C]

So Sidmon really makes it very simple for us. And he defines coercion as any instance of negative reinforcement and punishment. He really just lays it down pretty simple. Yeah.

[B]

And by its nature, often negative reinforcement and punishment have an aversive component. Right? Right. So either you're adding in a stimulus if it's positive punishment, that is aversive, therefore decreasing behavior in the future, or you're removing a stimulus if it's negative reinforcement. Right. That's aversive.

[C]

But again, the aversive stimulus is present even with negative reinforcement.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So that's why I think he has to lump those two together, because the aversiveness of the stimuli has to be present before it's removed in order for behavior to be more likely to increase in the future. Yep.

[A]

I thought that was surprising that he added negative reinforcement, because again, I Don't understand negative reinforcement. It's got reinforcement in it. How can that be bad? We're improve, you know, we're increasing the probability of a behavior's occurring. But as we go through the book and as we talk about all the side effects of avoidance and escape that will come with negative reinforcement and the discussions of how punishment and negative reinforcement are really linked together in terms of behavioral processes, it does make sense as to. Even though the term reinforcement is in negative reinforcement, it would be lumped into the idea of coercive practice.

[B]

Sure. And he talks later on, too, about the addition of something that's going to function as a negative reinforcer through its removal will also function as a punisher for whatever behavior preceded the initial implementation of that upcoming aversive stimulus. So it works both ways.

[A]

Yeah, we have an idea of coercion that's pretty easy. But a lot of this book talks about the idea of control. And while we as behavior analysts don't find the idea of control to be anything that surprising, I think the average individual does. They hear control, and they assume you are also talking about coercive practices. But of course, Diana, we know that's not necessarily true, so let's talk a little bit more about that.

[B]

Definitely not always the case. So when we talk about behavior control, we're saying that the actions of some organisms are going to produce a change on the behavior of some other organisms. So whatever one person does is going to make another person's behavior more or less likely to occur. That can be confused with coercion. However, control is not necessarily aversive by its nature. It's just making manipulations to the environment. And this falls in line with what Skinner says, too. So Skinner says, but restraint is only one sort of control. And the absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels free, but the objectionable control of force. So he's introducing this idea of what we mean when we talk about freedom and when one is never really free. Right. So there's always environmental variables and discriminative stimuli and mos that are going to be making changes to the likelihood of our behavior occurring related to the reinforcers that follow. And we can never be away from those. Right. And you don't have to understand what those contingencies are or be able to identify them or label them in your environment to have them have influence over you. But the difference between having freedom is. Is not something that we really can talk about. It's just the difference between feeling Free. Not feeling free. And what Skinner is saying is not feeling free is really related more to this coercive component versus the aspect of behavioral control.

[C]

Well said. Thanks, man.

[A]

That's a great quote, Diana. I know it's not your quote, but thank you for finding the quote.

[B]

I mean. Yeah, sure.

[A]

And while I think the average behavior analyst doesn't need to have this reminded to them for a book like this to have more import. So if you're going to be talking with your colleagues that aren't necessarily behavior analysis, you're going to need to get to the idea of control at some point. And most people, when they hear the thesis of the book, will say, yes, it all sounds terrible. I don't like any of it. Which misses the point of the book. If we just say, oh, everything we do to control other people is bad, you've completely missed the point. And you won't be able to change your behavior in a meaningful way that will benefit society at large. If you just say, I don't like control. That's the same as saying, I don't want to be involved in anything. Therefore, my choice is to let things continue going exactly as they've been going. And when we talk about control, I do think we have to bring up the subject of, just because you don't like the idea that people are controlling you doesn't change the fact that it exists. You know, I thought of the book Nudge by Cass and Sunstein, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics. The idea of economic nudges. We are always controlled. And I think that it might actually be a better way to describe it to some extent. I think Sidman does a great job here. But if you wanted to describe it to the average person today, the idea of the economic nudge, like, isn't it nice when people say, hey, instead of saying you have to opt into a 401k, you have to opt out to the 401k. Isn't that nice? Because then everyone starts saving for their 401k, and we can all agree 401ks are good, right? Everyone goes, oh yeah, I have 401k. So wouldn't it be great if we just made it easier for people to get into the 401k rather than make it one more step? And they say, yes, that makes perfect sense. I think that's a great idea. There's an example of control that's being used for the benefit of other people. Wouldn't it be possible that there's more than just one example of this Control. It's not just about 401ks. Everything we do will exert some level of control over individuals. The question is, what kind of control do you want to exert? There's no avoiding control. You're going to talk to somebody and the way you talk to them and is going to change their behavior in some fashion. You can choose. Well, I don't want to say choose as a threat. You can. You can engage in behavior that serves as positive reinforcement or as negative reinforcement or punishment. And depending on which one you do, their behavior will change. Their behavior is going to change from this interaction. It's more a matter of will it change in a way that is beneficial, that doesn't make you aversive, that doesn't lead to sort of the entropy of our society.

[C]

You could, I mean, also be just a neutral stimulus, although it's highly unlikely, but you still could a human being.

[A]

Neutral stimulus.

[C]

Yeah. And just move along in their day as if you didn't happen just like the boring forget. I mean, it could happen.

[B]

Yeah. There's never a time in which you're operating behaviorally in a vacuum. Right? Right. There's always contingencies in place. There's always varying schedules and competing schedules of reinforcement, like swirling around you at all times. So the illusion of control is just that. Yeah.

[A]

I think the other piece that comes up in this chapter that's important to remember is that, you know, most people understand the idea of positive reinforcement. I'm going to positively reinforce someone's behavior rather than actually thinking about it as I'm going to deliver positive reinforcement for this behavior. It's more a matter of, I'm so glad that this positive reinforcement exists because I'm going to take it away when you don't do what I want. And as we all know, that's not quite the same as delivering positive reinforcement. We have two problems there. One, that most people will engage in coercive practices, either punishment or negative reinforcement. And two, a lot of times when people want to use positive reinforcement, they tend to think of positive reinforcement just as negative reinforcement or punishment. The kind of the other side of the coin of I'm so glad these things service reinforcers, because now I know it's takeaway.

[C]

Right. Or they call it bribery. Which makes sense because if you hear like, oh, you're just bribing them. And I was like, no, I'm not. Because I'm delivering a contingent on a response. Right.

[A]

I feel like when. When people bring up the positive reinforcement is bribery, they're sort of the people who would tell you. And control doesn't exist. I refuse to do anything to change my behavior. And I will just allow everything to continue on in this terrible fashion. Like the characters in the movie, they're not like the main bad guy, but they're like the assistant to the bad guy.

[C]

Like the secondary characters. Like, why are you here?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But they also. Technically, the per. Usually the bad guy has a bad ending, but the assistant to the bad guy, they have the worst ending in the movie. Don't be the assistant to the bad guy, people. You're gonna get like, Jurassic World. And that lady got eaten by the dinosaur.

[C]

She always gets eaten by the dinosaur.

[A]

She wasn't even that bad. But you know what? She was the assistant to the bad guy, so she's eaten by a dinosaur. Don't be eaten by a dinosaur, says Murray Sidman. He didn't. I just said that. Brought it up to speed.

[C]

That was his last. That was his, like, last sentence.

[A]

Spoilers. A lot of dinosaur talk in the second half of this book. No, no. Let's keep moving on in coercion and its fallout. So the next few chapters really get into the science of behavior related to punishment and negative reinforcement. So there are therefore a lot of descriptors of rat behavior.

[C]

Yeah. Which I actually love now when I'm reading it. I did not love it before. I actually remember eye glossy. You know, when you're reading and then your eyes gloss over and you're like, this is what I'm gonna read before I go to bed if I can't fall asleep. Because then I'll fall asleep immediately.

[B]

But I actually, you know, I don't know that it fully lost that soporific quality for me.

[A]

I was fun because it made me.

[B]

Just talk about these chapters in a montage.

[A]

Just various rat pictures.

[C]

No, I'm not. I'm not gonna talk about that. I'm not gonna talk about.

[A]

The rat presses a lever and then the little. Did you guys get to use these in college? In school?

[B]

Yeah, I did.

[C]

I did, too.

[B]

I only got same with Steinbeck.

[A]

Oh, I did it once. They're cute.

[C]

I was the entire. I was the rat lab manager.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

I did rat research. And I used to cut into their brains and attach.

[B]

I didn't have to do that.

[C]

Little tubes to their brains and give them medicine.

[A]

We just did.

[C]

To make them addicted.

[A]

We just did a basic lever press experiment. It was much more exciting than the do zebrafish prefer color Experiment? Where we literally had to watch a fish swim back and forth in a fish tank.

[B]

We had some beta fish. We did that too.

[C]

But one thing I like now that I appreciate is that after reading so much, I've read a lot of books in my day and so learned. I know, but I mean like a lot of like crap books, right? Because I read young adult novels, the.

[A]

Hallmark novelization of the movie.

[C]

I read a lot of crap young adult novels. I read, read a lot of adult novels. But when I think about, when I try to delve into like the psychological literature, I. One thing I really appreciate about this book that I don't always get to see when I'm reading like those self help books or like the psychology books that are not necessarily behavior analytic, is that what he's talking about derives from actual research.

[B]

That's true.

[C]

Right. So that I really appreciate that he has a chapter about rats, chapter about what they found in the basic laboratory. And then he doesn't waste a ton of time there, even though I know that's one of his passions. And then he applies it.

[B]

Right, that's true.

[C]

So that I really appreciate more now as an adult, if you would call me that, I would. Thanks. Because I appreciate that there is a tie to something bigger. Right. So he's just not just writing to write. Because this is what he's thought about, you know, as someone bumped him in.

[A]

Line at the grocery store and he said, I'm writing a book about this.

[C]

No, like as he falls asleep, but it's based on like a lot of hours of like really sifting through the various stimuli and variables that could account for behavior and then using what he found in the laboratory for so many years to apply to society as a whole. So I appreciate that. I didn't appreciate it before, I'm not going to lie.

[A]

And I think if you were a reader of this book who either was not a behavior analyst or who really just cared about the application and were just so turned off by the idea of the basic research even then, I think in some of the later chapters, especially when Sidman is bringing up specific examples of ways that coercive practices can lead to maladaptive behavior, when he comes back to some of the examples of the RAD experiments, it does sort of break down the interactions in a way that when you just talk about the human interactions, it can be very hard to figure out where are the important variables. And again, that's one of the themes that does come up in some of the chapters that we'll talk about today on escape and avoidance on it's really hard to pick out when escape and avoidance is happening because so many times you're talking about a learned behavior in which some of the stimuli aren't always present.

[C]

Right.

[A]

It's the same reason that the average person isn't a very good behavior analyst, because they don't understand how behavior is learned. They don't understand what processes they should be looking for. And it's not always as simple as, well, I, you know, told the kid to brush their teeth and then they had a big tantrum, therefore they are avoiding brushing their teeth. Like, well, there could be other variables that you're totally missing. You know, how much attention do they get for not brushing their teeth? You know, all these other pieces.

[C]

Yeah. So chapter three is all about descriptions of operant conditioning and, you know, what happens in the laboratory. And I think that really leads us into talking about more succinctly, does punishment work? And you know, why punishment is effective and why do people use it more often?

[A]

So before we get into the second half of part one of our deep dive into coercion and its fallout, let's take a little break and then come right back in. We'll be right back.

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[A]

And we are back talking about Murray Sidman's coercion and its fallout. Now, one of the things that we do here on this podcast, in case you've never listened before, is secret code words. Why do we do secret code words? Because we're ACE approved by listening to our shows. You too can apply for continuing education credits. Just go to our [e-mail], get hyphen CEUs, and put in some key information, including two secret code words that we sprinkle throughout the episode. I'M going to give you the first one right now, and it is pizza. P I Z Z A pizza. What do the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles love to eat?

[B]

Pizza.

[A]

Pizza. It's an introvert for you. What did Diana eat before we started recording this episode?

[B]

Pizza.

[A]

Pizza. What do I wish I had to eat right now?

[C]

Nuts. Pizza.

[A]

No, the correct answer was pizza. Pizza. All right, everyone, let's get back into the book. So when we left off, we were talking about the chapters related to the definitions of coercion, the definitions of control, and then sort of the underpinnings of everything that is going to come next in this book in terms of rat studies. But I think as much as they were, they were a little divisive. Some of us loved the rat studies. Some of us did not want to talk anymore about the rat studies. We're going to sort of leave those to the side because I think, again, anyone listening to this show will have at least read about most of these rat studies if not engaged in some of these rat studies in their graduate or undergraduate careers. So let's move on to some of the other pieces. And the question that we left with before the break was, does punishment work? Which, of course, the answer is, hell, yes. Yeah, it totally works. But of course, if that were all there was to say to the chapter, then it would be a very short chapter and there's a lot more nuance. And Sidman gets into the idea of is punishment something that works? Yes. However, we also need to talk about the idea of is punishment an effective treatment? So let's talk more about that.

[C]

Well, one thing he talks about is that punishment is used to get others to act differently in society. We all hate punishment. We all hate talking about punishment, but we all do it.

[A]

We all love using punishment. I don't think any of us like receiving.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Our behavior. Our behavior receiving punishment.

[C]

Right. Yeah. So. But it happens, Right? It's part of our. It's like ingrained in. In what we do on a daily basis. Right. Behaviors punished. And then it. It decreases in strength and it may decrease to zero levels for some time in one situation, but then reemerge with high intensity in other situations. Right. So, but it's there. It's happening.

[B]

Yeah, but there are side effects to punishment, which is what you're hinting at there. So you can get emotional responding. There could be aggression associated with punishment. Stimuli that are associated with the punisher can become discriminative stimuli for an upcoming punishment and in and of themselves become conditioned punishers as well. You can have an overall suppression of responding. All of these can be problematic.

[C]

And that's one thing I think that Sidman didn't really do a good job of. He talked about them all indirectly in. In different ways, but didn't lead us to those side effects initially. Right. We knew those side effects because we've read the punishment literature, but it's not something that he like, specifically outlined. He's like, yeah, there's side effects and we should be mindful of them. Right.

[A]

Well, I think that's more an issue of how would we as different authors, so we're not Maurice Sidman. How would we have written the book? Would we have written it differently? And I think given that this book was Originally written in 1989 and Murray Sidman's coming from a very different background, we would write this book very differently because we would be writing it for the generation coming up next.

[C]

Yeah, I guess you're right.

[A]

So in this regard, I think it's important, you know, from my perspective, I think it's very important to talk about the idea of punishment being something that. That is effective and then go into why one might not want to focus on the use of punishment solely or even ever. I think you're right though, Jackie. Nowadays, if I were going to publish a brand new book and call it Smomersion and it's Fallout, it's a totally different book. So don't.

[C]

And it's callout.

[A]

And it's callout. I may have done sort of the listicle and been like, punishment, Is it good? Here's some problems. And then I would have just. Number one, here's the first problem because I think, you know, again, who is our audience here? I think, unfortunately, Murray Sidman. Not unfortunately. Well, unfortunately for society at large, Murray Sidman is writing this book for behavior analysts and for relevant practitioners.

[C]

Right.

[A]

I think if one wanted to write this book to be the pop psychology phenomenon book, it would have to be dumbed down quite a lot. And honestly, I don't know if Murray Sidman would love that. But I also think he would appreciate that his message was continuing on in a form that is going to be passed on. I kind of worry that he wrote this book. Thinking and behavior analysis, of course, it's the best science. Of course, you know, in 2010, it's gonna be so hot, everyone's gonna be listening to their local behavior analyst. I kind of think we're sort of in the same holding pattern behavior analyst probably were in. In 2001, which is, hey, could you come Here and help me with the autism. Thanks. Please leave.

[B]

Even though it's 2001 that he wrote these updates, I think that you can kind of tell the parts that were added in.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

But he's right on the nose as far as the issues that we're still facing today. So I feel like he quite effectively foreshadowed many of the economic and environmental problems that we're currently facing.

[A]

He didn't call it climate change because that word didn't exist in 2001, but it's the same idea. Let's talk about the idea of becoming a shock, which is sort of where we get into the. Into the idea of what the side effects are. And really, the next couple chapters are, I think, that listicle that our short attention spans scream for in that every chapter talks about the idea of punishment. How does one become a punisher? What's the difference between avoidance and escape versus punishment? What are the side effects of avoidance and escape versus the side effects of punishment? And it's really laid out over the span of those 50, 60 pages.

[C]

By the way, though, this is where I really got into it. This is where I was, like, in to it. Same exclamation point, bolded, underline. This is where it was a page turner. I felt like the first couple chapters were like, yeah, I get it, I get it. I appreciate, appreciate. And then chapter five, I was like, thank God we're here.

[A]

All right.

[C]

Thank you, God, we're here.

[A]

You take the discussion, Jackie. I don't. I don't need to delete every momentary. Go for it.

[C]

Well, one thing I love is they started the. This chapter on talking about revenge, right? And we all talk about revenge, right? Like, this is like talking about your eyes lighting. I know, right? Revenge. Right. But I love the how he brings us into this chapter talking about revenge, because there's, like, 1 million songs written about, like, oh, my lover cheated on me, and now I'm gonna, like, rip his car apart and, like, burn his house down or be prepared.

[B]

I've been listening to a lot of Lion King lately.

[C]

Oh, there you go.

[B]

Is that about revenge?

[A]

No, it's about regicide.

[B]

Fine. Fratricide.

[C]

Right. But I love. But I love that he brings us in, though, because this. The revenge concept, you know, it's. It's not about. It's really about punishment, right?

[B]

Really.

[C]

They're talking about punishing the other person and making sure that maladaptive behavior that occurred will never happen again. Right. And he all. He. So he brings that in, and you're like, yeah, right. I've done that.

[B]

So delicious.

[C]

I've heard of that. And then he talks about, like, disciplining children. Right? So really you're teach. You're trying to teach children what the correct thing to do is, but really what you're doing is just decreasing those inappropriate behaviors that you don't want, constantly.

[A]

Getting revenge on your children.

[B]

But that doesn't really hold up.

[C]

But if you think about it, like, if you think about even in 2001, not so much now, though, but like, spanking and, like, timeouts and yelling. Those types of things were common parenting practices. Right. I got spanked two times as a child.

[B]

Two.

[C]

Two times. I remember both times. And now when I think back about. I actually didn't learn anything from those two times. Right. So they were disciplining me so I would never go into the water because I lived on the river and I was, like, hanging out in the water. Out in the water. My dad spanked me. And also when I poured gasoline on my bike, oh, my God. Pretending it was a car. I was pretending it was a car. I poured gasoline all over my bike, all over my garage. I think I remember my mom coming into the garage, like, going, like. And then spanking me and putting my room because she didn't know what else to do. Yeah, right. But I didn't actually learn anything.

[B]

You didn't learn to avoid those scenarios.

[A]

You still put gasoline in plenty of things.

[C]

I do, yeah. I mean, every week I put gasoline in things, but, I mean, I learned not to do those things, but I didn't learn what I could do alternatively.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Right.

[B]

That's true. That's another disadvantage of punishment. It doesn't teach an alternative response and.

[A]

Would have, hey, Jackie, by the way, that's gonna melt your bike and you won't have a bike anymore. You don't need that.

[C]

Or burn our house down.

[A]

Like, you could die. Yeah. Would that have been the more effective.

[C]

I don't know, honestly.

[A]

Pro tip. Don't put gasoline in there.

[C]

Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure how. How even I would react as a parent to those two things, to be honest.

[B]

But she's like Marty McFly when he said, part of the living room rug, go easy on him.

[C]

But I think, you know, at that point, they were like, oh, this is the one thing we can do. It's going to be immediate. It may be effective, but you sometimes tend to forget the side effects that we talked about. Right.

[A]

And Sidon is. Is no dummy when it comes to parenting. He understands that every parent and every human will screw up and engage in coercive response at some point.

[C]

Right.

[A]

The challenge is not never ever use a punishment procedure. It's know why you're using a punishment procedure and understand what you should be doing 90% of the time. So that 10% of the time when you do engage in some sort of punishment procedure, it probably won't have any of these bad side effects that we're. We're going to be talking about in the book.

[B]

Right.

[C]

You know, he talks about a lot of examples, and when he talks about does punishment work and should we use it? I kind of feel like they're fairly far removed from where we're at now.

[B]

The code of Hammurabi, like 3,000 years removed.

[A]

So I understand the code of Hammurabi is not something that you refer to in most common conversation. There aren't a lot of listicles about your favorite code of Hammurabi.

[C]

Check out number five.

[A]

But the idea of having these incredibly punitive codes I don't think is too far from what we deal with nowadays. So the example.

[C]

Bring it to us, Rob. Bring it to us.

[A]

The example in coercion and fallout is the idea of, under Hammurabi's code, there was a rule for physicians in which, if you are a physician and you are practicing your craft, if something bad happens to your patient, that same bad thing will happen to you.

[C]

Like eye for an eye.

[A]

So what's it. I mean, Hammurabi's code is the eye for an eye code.

[C]

Okay. I don't know.

[A]

So the idea of if you give them some sort of a tincture or an elixir that causes them to go blind, well, you're going to be blinded as the physician.

[C]

And for real, or for metaphorically.

[A]

That was in the ham. No, that was in the code. You would have. Whatever happened.

[B]

Maybe you know what Gandhi says.

[C]

Okay, maybe that is not where I was. Like, I don't understand at all what's going on. So maybe that's why.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Oh, I thought it might have been a metaphor.

[A]

You need to practice your Mesopotamian law a little better.

[B]

Jagged.

[C]

I guess so.

[B]

Right. But Gandhi's response to that was an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

[A]

Yes. So again, what are the side effects when that's the rule? Well, you would think. Well, of course, the side effect will be as physicians. Physicians will do their very best all the time. However, what was the real side effect?

[C]

No one.

[B]

Who's going to be a physician.

[A]

Exactly. Or I'll refuse to treat anyone. When I don't think I can 100% cure their ailments.

[C]

You know, I've actually been thinking about this when it relates to behavior analysis in terms of, like, costs and attending conferences. It may not be similar, but you. Our code requires us to stay up to date with research and go to attend conferences and, you know, like, have reading groups. But all that costs money and nobody pays for it except for yourself. And one thing that I've come across with my students in my ethics class this semester is that, like, that is their biggest concern. Like, how are they going to stay abreast with the literature and go to conferences when ABI is, like, astronomically expensive and, you know, like, conferences sell out in five seconds.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So it may deter people from becoming behavior analysts because of the cost.

[A]

Yeah. Or it might lead them to other. Other behavior, such as lying about their ces. Yeah, because. And that's such a low, low intensity thing when you think about. Well, our board tells us we have to have this many ethics CEs every year. We have to go to get this many CES per year to recertify or every two years to recertify. And yeah, of course, that makes perfect sense. And if you don't, you won't be allowed to practice anymore. Right, that makes perfect sense.

[C]

It does.

[A]

However, could there be side effects to that? And like you said, Jackie. Well, yeah, people could decide, I don't want to be in this field. They could lie and continue practicing without the appropriate amount of training.

[B]

Don't do that.

[A]

Don't do that, don't do that. This is one of the reasons we made the podcast. We want to make it easy to conceive. Still meaningful ces, but we make it a little simpler. Lower that response effort barrier. But anytime you use treatment or use a plan that is somewhat coercive, you run the risk of hitting these side effects.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And sometimes you have to do it anyway. You know, we do have to hold people who practice behavior analysis to some sort of a standard.

[C]

And it has to be a high standard.

[A]

It has to be a high standard.

[C]

We're working with a marginal population, but.

[A]

Understand what it is you're doing, what the side effects could be. You know, I think of every time the government passes a law with, like, you know what? I heard this, and this is bad, and we don't want this in America. So we're gonna pass a law saying, this doesn't. This isn't allowed. And everyone cheers because it doesn't sound nice to pass a law saying, don't do this horrible thing. But it's like nobody stopped to think, you know, what if the law is do this, and if you don't do this, you get punished. That doesn't necessarily teach anybody what they should do. Instead, all it does is teach them what they shouldn't do, which means they either won't do it, which is a problem in its own. When you don't have anyone engaging in behavior, that's a real problem. Or they'll just lie and cheat and sneak their way around, in which case it's even worse than it was before when people were probably doing something 80% of the way. But maybe that's not good enough. Right now they're doing 20% of the way. And, hey, guess what? It's easy to lie. It's easy to cheat and steal. A lot of times it's easy to get away with it. I'm not saying you should, folks. I'm just saying you can think about the average corruption story. Yeah.

[B]

Just saying.

[A]

Yeah. Again, not to make this political, but it's very easy to make a law or to make a rule that's punishing. It's very hard to make a law that is actually both effective and doesn't just lead to a bunch of unwanted side effects. And when all you do is coercive practices, guess what? You're gonna get a ton of side effects.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Do you wanna know what Skinner says?

[C]

Tell me.

[B]

A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.

[C]

Yeah, he does.

[A]

And he says that because he wants control to go to other sources. Because he hates the government.

[C]

No, he wants to have. He wants to have active counter control. So he wants to have every entity acting as a counter control to the other entity. So no entity becomes more powerful than any other entity. Right. So there's good counter control. So there's usually less coercion in that instance.

[A]

And that's why the American government is the best.

[C]

Then Sidman started talking about condition punishers.

[A]

How does that happen?

[C]

I was surprised. I wasn't really.

[B]

Well, that's like the. The name of this chapter is Chapter five is I'm Becoming a Shock. Which is kind of a weird name for a chapter, but that's actually what he's talking about.

[A]

I like one who delivers the shocks.

[B]

Comes to function in the same way as a shock because they become a conditioned punisher.

[C]

Yeah. So components in the natural environment will then serve as punishers because they've been paired with stimuli that have had the consequence of being aversive. So I was thinking about it in the terms of you got fired, you met with your boss, they like fired you. You have like, whoa, whoa. Well that happens sometimes.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And then you like have your last day of work. How productive are you going to be on that last day?

[B]

So you say, take this job.

[C]

Right.

[A]

I will steal all the office supplies. And you know.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So I was just thinking, I was just thinking about that, that boss now becoming like an aversive stimulus. Like they're like, I'm gonna throw you a goodbye party. And you're like, fingers up what a.

[A]

Great job you worked in if your boss wasn't already in aversive.

[C]

Yeah, that is true. Right.

[A]

Most people I think would say, oh, my boss is already a conditioned punisher. Before they fired me, they were a conditioned punisher. And that's sad. That's so sad to think about. I mean, I think we talked about it with a positive parenting. We talked about it with supervision. One of the key things you need to do when you are trying to lead other people or teach other people behavior is to avoid becoming a conditioned punisher.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And there are ways to do that and there are the more common ways in which all you use is coercion. And if all you use is coercion, you are definitely a conditioned punisher.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because what comes every time punishment is delivered, why you're there?

[C]

Aversive stimulus.

[B]

Oh hey, it's you again.

[C]

Another thing I thought about when I was thinking about this chapter is the difference between when people are out of their cars going places versus when people are in their cars. Right. So when you're out of your car and you're interacting with people face to face, you see the social niceties. You're like, oh my God, hey, how are you? Right. Because there's some sort of aversive nature.

[B]

Happening where you're constrained by the social rules.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

And so probably at some point your behavior had been punished by in that situation. Right.

[A]

But there's some coercive reason that you're not being a dick Right. In public.

[C]

But like I'm thinking about when you like drop a kid off, you're like, oh my God, hey. Or movies, because I've never dropped my child off like with that when I'm like driving around the parking lot.

[A]

But then there are coercive practices for people who drop their under three year old children.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But then if you think about when you're in the car, it's like a completely different situation. Right. That previously nice place person now turns into like a maniac. And is like beeping and like, swearing. Right.

[B]

Isn't that the worst when you're driving next to someone and they're, like, aggressively driving and then you realize that you know them?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But it's because. Right. So it's because the discriminative stimuli are not present.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Right. In those situations. And so I love to think about that distinction because we've all had that, where we're like, oh, man.

[B]

I think this also is true on the Internet.

[C]

It is, yes. Yes.

[A]

I think that is more to do with the fact that we have a different audience on the Internet than we do in real life.

[C]

I don't think so.

[B]

I mean, I think ulcers are off.

[C]

Right.

[B]

There's just no social contingencies. Almost zero social contingency.

[C]

No immediate social contingencies. Right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So in. In public with people, you say something, you're gonna get those immediate reactions of like, oh, too far. You've gone too far. You're being too mean. You're doing something. Something. Right. But in the Internet, you post it and then you walk away. And so there's no.

[B]

You feel good. You're like, I won. I won the Internet.

[C]

Right.

[A]

I think we're missing the point, though. I think we're starting to get into a discussion of how. No, no, no, no. I don't think it's a bad conversation. But I think the idea of we change our behavior in these different settings because the contingencies are different. But I think it still comes down to the idea of. Because the punishment contingency isn't there on the Internet as much as it is elsewhere. While I think, sadly, our first reaction is, yeah, there should be more punishment for jerks on the Internet. Is that really going.

[C]

No, that's not. I don't think that's all we're saying. I think. I think that.

[A]

Then that's what's. No, I don't think we're saying that. However, you know, that's the first thing you thought when you think of the last time someone was a jerk to you on the Internet, you think of, I wish this bad thing happened to that person. That would stop people from being jerks on the Internet. We know we didn't go to, like, what if there were a system in which you were rewarded for, like, good, positive post. No, we immediately thought, what if there were a system? The computer blew up in their face when they were rude to me specifically.

[C]

Yeah, No, I think that's what he's talking about too.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We are conditioned to Go to coercion as fast as possible, because, hey, isn't coercion great and effective really fast? And doesn't it make us all feel so much better? Let's move into moving away from punishment, moving into the idea of the negative reinforcement and our behaviors that we engage in to escape negative reinforcement, which, as I kind of talked about at the beginning of the episode, negative reinforcement. That's a good thing, right? Because the rear reinforcement is used. Okay. Would we all prefer to use negative reinforcement rather than punishment in, say, a treatment plan?

[B]

No.

[A]

If we had to choose between. You have to choose between.

[B]

Yes. No. Sorry.

[C]

I'd say yes.

[B]

Your only option, use aversive control.

[A]

Yes. But if I said you're going to use a negative reinforcement or you're going to use punishment in this treatment, which one would you pick? You have to use one, because that's the law.

[C]

I still say yes.

[B]

No. Well, the benefit of negative reinforcement is that you may be able to arrange that to increase an appropriate response.

[A]

So you would probably pick that over punishment. However, if you had the choice between negative reinforcement and something other than negative reinforcement, there are reasons I would choose something else. We would pick that something else. And what are those? What are those reasons, Diana? Why would we not use dro, Rob?

[B]

Is that what you're trying to get me to say?

[C]

If she says that, I might punch her?

[A]

No, that's.

[C]

Everyone knows that I hate DROs for most situations by themselves.

[A]

So negative reinforcement. You'd always pick something else, though, Diana. Why, though? It's reinforcement. It's in the title.

[B]

We. We always have an ethical responsibility to move from the least restrictive treatment that's effective to the most restrictive treatment that's effective. Right. So anything that's going to involve aversive control is inherently more restrictive than something that only involves reinforcement. So initially, we would want to start with the treatment that only works on the positive reinforcement side. And as needed, we may need to add an additional components based on the function of behavior.

[A]

I understand, Dinah, that the perfect reason as to why you would use that. But what are the reasons? So let's say we're talking to someone who's not a behavior analyst. What are the reasons that the average person, if they were going to use negative reinforcement, we would warn them. There are some problems here. Same way, I mean, same way with punishment. We're always talking about those side effects. And while you're right, I think it would be better to just say, hey, use positive reinforcement all the time. Might be the easier sell to, you know, the Average person who's going to engage in a behavior change procedure. There are reasons to explain why sliding back into some of the punishment or negative. The coercive practices aren't going to work in the long run.

[B]

You know, Sidman talks about the idea of punishment and negative reinforcement really as a flip side of one another. Right. So if we're reinforcing a particular behavior by producing escape or avoidance from an aversive stimulus, then the introduction of that stimulus is itself a punisher. We can't escape in and of itself, the idea of this aversive control, whether we're using negative reinforcement or punishment to produce behavioral change.

[A]

Jaggy, how about you? Negative reinforcement. We're talking about side effects. What are the side effects you're always most worried about when you're talking about any coercive practice.

[C]

When I'm thinking about steal Sidman's if.

[A]

You want, don't steal them. But we're talking about his book, so if they jumped out at you, that's okay.

[C]

Again, I know we've talked before, but on page 98, he makes my favorite quote that before a negative reinforcer can strengthen whatever we do to turn it off, it will automatically punish whatever we were doing just before it came on. So Dinah had brought that up earlier, but literally, that's page 98. And I love that thought because I actually don't think I've thought of that in that way before. Right. So I don't think when I read that, I was like. Like, head exploded a little bit, like.

[B]

I was showing down from the heavens.

[A]

I mean, yeah. I'll be honest. For me, it was more the idea of trying to remember the definition of negative reinforcement, the definition of punishment. It took me a long time.

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

So once I did it, I was like, these are different things. They don't relate well. But they do.

[B]

I do. I did. It did take me a little time to get my head around the. The fact that he calls the aversive stimuli the negative reinforcer. Right. Because I have always thought of it as the termination of that aversive stimulus as a negative reinforcer. So, like, that was a difference in terminology that took me a few times through to get Right.

[C]

And another thing that I think is important to notice when he talks about negative reinforcement and punishment is we think about them differently. Right. But society thinks about them similarly. Right. Because there's a potentially aversive stimulus present, and society doesn't make a distinction whether to be behavior increases or decreases. Right. In the future. So that's us alone. So I think that's something that I really took from this chapter, is that they're very intertwined, like punishment and negative reinforcement and aversive stimuli are very stuck together, like Legos.

[A]

Cyclical process.

[C]

Yeah. So it's just something that I've not thought about in that way before. So I thought that was fairly mind blowing.

[A]

I think we run into the risk, too. And this is what, you know, one of the side effects Sidman brings up of if, even if we are teaching new behavior, if the only behavior we're teaching is, hey, kids, here's how to avoid the delivery of this crappy, stupid list in your environment. We're really teaching a very narrow band of behavior. It's. I don't think it's in this section. It'll come up more in some of next week, next episode's chapters. But the idea of when we talk about superstitious behavior and we talk about superstitious behavior developed due to positive reinforcement, we're still talking about how the individual is engaging in so many different responses and over time is engaging in the most, you know, parsimonious response, the one that still results in the positive reinforcement, whereas with negative reinforcement. That's not what we're doing with our superstitions because we are so oriented towards avoiding the shock that it's. This works. So I will continue to engage in these responses as long as the shock goes away. I won't think about how this, you know, might be superstitious or I don't need to engage in all of these responses. I just want to avoid the shock. So we're really teaching these narrow bands of behavior through negative reinforcement.

[C]

Unfortunately, that's how society works. Right. So unfortunately, that's. We have to think about that as at least a caveat of how the educational system works. Right. Like, nobody really, unfortunately wants in the short term to read like, 14 articles for class, let's say, right? Because it's time consuming, it's maybe a little bit boring. Long term, it's going to be very beneficial, but short term it's not. But they do that, right? To avoid the potentially aversive stimuli of the teacher looking down at them and being like, you know, like, I'm disappointed in you, or like, why don't you get the answer right? Or a bad grade. So I think, again, all of it's so closely knit that I don't think we can just have one without the other.

[A]

I hear. I hear what you're saying, Jackie, and that sounds like quitter talk.

[C]

And we are getting In a fight.

[A]

I think we then get into what Sidman refers to as the escape routes.

[C]

I think so, too.

[A]

Why do most individuals choose, rather than engaging in meaningful behavior, to escape? And when we use coercive practices, escape.

[C]

To Hallmark movies per se.

[A]

That's one of them. We. We. We tend to engage in whatever response will cause that adversity to terminate. If we're not able to consistently make that stimulus terminate, can we do something else that will get us as far away as possible from that stimulus? And unfortunately, when everything is paired with coercive practices, we want to get the hell away from everything.

[B]

I like it. Speaking my language.

[A]

I kind of thought chapter seven, Escape Routes. He was going to do the Tune on. Turn. Turn on. Tune in. Dropout from Tim Leary.

[B]

I think it's Tune in, Turn on Dropout.

[A]

No, that's what I thought it was too done. And then I looked it up on Wikipedia, so it told me it was two non tune.

[B]

Oh, well, there's no further source required.

[A]

Drop out.

[B]

Fine. Timothy Leary Electric Koolaid Acetus.

[C]

I actually didn't know who Timothy Leary was.

[A]

Like an old kind of counterculture hippie dude.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Are you surprised? I don't know.

[B]

No.

[C]

Okay, good.

[A]

No, honey, I really thought that was the theme of the chapter, and then it was not, because it was tune out. One of the ways that we escape when we live in this coercive world is we tune out or we drop out. And I think we can all think of a million ways that in a given day we have tuned out of our environment. It is very frustrating to have coercive practices at your job. So you check Facebook. It is very frustrating to have coercive paradigms in place when you're at home. I wasn't gonna. I wasn't gonna single out the children. But you're at home and it's noisy and everyone's mean to you. So I'm going to just probably check Facebook too, because you can do that on your phone nowadays. But I'm going to watch Jet like you said, Jackie. I'm going to watch trash tv.

[C]

I watch so much trash tv. I'm so good at Bachelorette, Bachelor, Hallmark.

[B]

Rob recognizes now, and he's like, kids, look, your mother has shut down. She's not saying anything. She's staring at the table. You are being too loud.

[A]

You have suppressed all of your mother's behavior with your. With your. The punishment of your volume of noise. But again, think about. Think about working. You know, Think about your job site. Do you have a boss I hope you do that. When something challenging comes up, says, hey, everybody, don't worry. It'll be okay. Here's how we're gonna solve this problem. And they come up with a proactive solution. Or do you have a boss who's like, I don't know, let's all come up with a solution? And then they just say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no to everything you say? And then you just stop coming up with solutions to your boss. And when a problem comes up, you just shrug your shoulders and say, yeah, that's a problem. And then you kind of turn and walk away as fast as possible. Because, again, why would you bother trying to engage? Because you'll probably be punished for it. So you just avoid it. You get away from it. It makes the aversive of the problem, quote, unquote, go away. And honestly, most of the problems we face in our lives we can ignore forever.

[C]

True.

[A]

Now, Sidney will come back to nuclear war because I. I mean, he. He was of an era where he.

[B]

Wrote this in 89.

[A]

He would have been very, very.

[C]

Well.

[A]

I mean, it would have been real.

[B]

Published in 89. So it was written before that. Because I very well remember the fall of the rolling wall in 89. And you guys probably do, too.

[A]

Yes. But he. But Sidney would have grown up in a time when you were really worried about nuclear war. That was a reality.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Whereas I think nowadays we think of nuclear war as like the thing in the movies before Mad Max. It's. Of course it is, but we've avoided it so long.

[B]

Again, remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, David Hasselhoff. I remember exactly where I was. I was in fourth grade Sunday school class, and we were in this little trailer behind the church, and the teacher said, remember this day. This is an important day.

[C]

No, I actually don't remember, but I was gonna feel sad that I don't remember.

[A]

I don't remember the details of that.

[B]

She made, like, a flashbulb memory for us by saying, remember this day.

[C]

Yeah, no, I have no idea.

[B]

Tune out.

[A]

So that you have tuned out. You can avoid. And honestly, it works most of the time. I mean, I. I think there was definitely a period where I was very upset with the political climate. It was actually pre Trump. So, man, where am I now?

[B]

And very tuned out.

[A]

I feel like when I would talk about politics, the response from someone in my house, it might have been my children. I don't know who it could have been. Probably the children. Was it probably the children who were just really, really nasty to me about my, like, crazy political tirades every day. So I just said, you know what? I'm not gonna do this. And all I listen to now are podcasts about cartoons and video games and, wow, man. Everything's great, right? Political problems have gone away.

[C]

That's my life.

[B]

That's hilarious.

[A]

And, of course, they have not.

[C]

No.

[B]

I have aged about 10 years in the past two years, but I've escaped.

[A]

I've escaped. I've escaped these. These coercive press.

[C]

By doing nothing.

[A]

By doing nothing.

[C]

Mm.

[A]

And at some point, I should probably do something. I should probably take a more active role in politics. But you know what? It's coercive, and I don't want to. I don't wanna. I got out of it.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

And, hey, why wouldn't everybody that move.

[B]

You into the dropout phase?

[A]

Well, now then, we get to dropout. I haven't dropped out because I still, like, vote, you know, in major elections. But at some point, you're right. I might drop out. I really thought about, do I want to vote anymore? Do I even care? The government's going, you know, the country's going downhill fast. I'll just totally ignore it, and I'll drop out.

[C]

It.

[A]

I'll drop out. I'll just drop out. And this was the next example that Sidman brings up. When it comes to a society that practices nothing but coercion is eventually folks drop out. And the problem here is when we talk about dropping out, you know, I'm talking about that. The extreme example of I'm gonna go, you know, join a cult in the countryside. Because, of course, where do we go where I get my reinforcers. The cult leader will be very nice.

[B]

You don't like being outdoors at all?

[A]

No, I just. That's more aversive than anything to me. But let's talk about, you know, the actual most times when you mention dropout.

[B]

Video game cult.

[A]

What do we think about when we talk. When we say dropping out, what do.

[C]

We think about dropping out of school?

[A]

Dropping out of school.

[C]

Yep. Dropping out of our job. That's called quitting.

[B]

Right.

[C]

They don't call it dropping out.

[B]

Dropping out of your marriage.

[C]

Yep. Dropping out of your friends.

[A]

Mm.

[B]

Dropping out of regular society.

[A]

And the problem is when people drop out of these relationships, our first thought is what a crazy person they happen to be.

[C]

Mm.

[B]

It's always blame on the person language.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

As opposed to what are the variables that have caused this relationship to be so aversive to this individual that they have done something so clearly Damaging to, you know, the majority of people that they're getting more reinforcement from whatever environment they're currently in.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And it's easy for some of us to think, well, you know, especially if you drop out of school, well, what are they gonna do in 10 years? They're not gonna be able to get a job or if they drop out of their marriage, well, that's gonna be really hard because now they have to pay child support or alimony. And that seems very stressful and tough. But you know what? When you are escaping from a coercive environment, you're not thinking about any sort of a long term, maybe this aversive will happen. And you're thinking, I have avoided something that is immediately aversive.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Sometimes you'll see on, as a meme on Facebook the phrase never underestimate what you don't know about someone. Right. Like, you don't know what their history is or what their experience has been like. And I think that this ties into that. Right. Like, if someone is behaving in a way that to you seems unpredictable or unexpected, then very likely they're not behaving erratically. It's that their behaviors are under control of a different set of contingencies than what we personally have experienced. Right. So you have to wonder and question what's happened to them, honestly, in their past that has produced this behavioral change. And that can give you a pretty intense change in perspective regarding their behavior.

[A]

And I think when we get to dropping out, and there are so many details, we could go into the. The exact detail details. And Sidman lays out so many different examples of dropping out, how blaming the person, dropping out doesn't help, how it really comes back down to what are the contingencies in place. And sadly, they're almost always coercive. But it gets to the ultimate dropout is you could commit suicide. Which, you know, he understands that it's not a behavior that gets necessarily reinforced because you can only kill yourself one time. But the idea that there are so many aversive components in an individual's life that it seems like that's where all the reinforcement might be. But it's not even a reinforcement contingency in that, in that regard. But it's just everything is so bad that that is the thought that I will avoid and I will get away from all of these stimuli. And that's where we can get when we go to the extreme of a coercive society, when all of our reinforcement paradigms are of negative reinforcement or God forbid, Everything's about punishment. You could get to that.

[B]

Yeah. And I, I, I do think that his view on suicide is a little bit reductive and simplistic, to be honest with you. And he, he's saying that there's almost always some type of suicide attempt or attention seeking behavior preceding a successful suicide.

[A]

Well, he mentioned suicide is coercive itself.

[B]

Right. But I don't know that that's always the case, so. Right. I think there's more conversation to be had regarding this than just that. But, but one of the other points I thought that he made here that to me rang pretty true was that people may give up economic stability in order to seek out emotional stability. Right, right. So sometimes you'll see trust fund kids who no longer participate in that lifestyle, but have joined some type of alternative cult or fringe society, let's say. And if you were to have the opportunity to parse out their life and what's going on there, then they likely or possibly had some emotional abuse in their past that's led them to move into this fringe society. So to me that rang pretty true and I thought that was interesting point.

[A]

I did also like the idea that moving into that fringe society while temporarily leading to more reinforcers is often also going to lead to similar coercive relationships that just may or may not be a parent to start, you know.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean you think about, you think about when you hear about cults, you understand why someone who is on that fringe might join a cult. However, many of the relationships that they were hoping to avoid just become re established in a new environment.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yep. We're all a product of our history and our behavioral patterns are likely to persist even in a new environment.

[C]

Right. And the final thing, the final example that they give that I want to like kind of pull back to is about, you know, in school and being in like teachers and having like previous generations. I think this will hit home for a lot of people. You know, like our parents and our grandparents were like, oh, I had it so, so hard in school and I had nuns and they hit me, hit me on the hands and that's why I did really well in school and that's why my kids are not doing so well. Right. They just need like some tough love. But it's so funny that then, you know, they, they learn to like view the society, the educational system as something that's should be avoided at all costs. Right. And so they're probably, you know, sending that viewpoint to their children in a way, you know, like, oh, your teacher's probably crap. You don't need to listen to her. And so I think that's something to think about too, is that, you know, even though they say they had a better because it was harder, it's not necessarily the viewpoint that is actually happening.

[A]

I hear that, Jackie. And that comes through in the, in the book, the idea it's really hard come through.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How many individuals have had these really terrible learning histories and how much our future behavior is colored by these learning histories and how it sort of changes our, I'm gonna say perception just because it's getting long in a recording session. I know that's not the record the appropriate term, but how, how much of what we see is we, we assume that these situations are aversive and therefore we respond the same way. You know, if you have a child having a hard time in school, I could see why a parent who had a similarly hard time in school would immediately try to avoid being in the situation. They don't want to go to the parent teacher conference, not because the teacher has actually done anything bad or is being aversive to the child, but because they have this history and they would prefer to avoid being in school. And while that works for them in the moment, that's not necessarily going to help solve whatever problem is happening. You can only tune out or drop out for so long before, hey, guess what? You know, when we couldn't meet about talking about a, you know, cohesive plan for Billy, well, he's continued to have a big problem in school and it's not like things got better. And now you're not going to come into school with like a positive attitude. You're right. You still have that learning history. We're not going to be able to work together. He's not going to be able to stay in this school potentially and then talk about dropout and then we're really talking about. You now have lost access to all of these potential disputed of reinforcers.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Although sadly, some of them would say, well, who cares that you dropped out because school sucks anyway? You aren't going to get any reinforcers there.

[B]

Yeah, smoke up, Johnny.

[A]

Thanks, Judd Nelson, for showing up for the podcast recording. We're running, we're running long and of course it's really hard not to when we're talking about it, you know, a lengthy book now.

[C]

It's not your fault.

[A]

I'm the host is my fault. I take blame. Don't be coercive.

[B]

Blame you.

[A]

Actually, I do want to talk to the last few chapters again, similar to how we talked about punishment, we talked about escape, the idea of avoidance. And while I'll be honest, didn't talk.

[B]

About it.

[A]

I think Sidman could have put these chapters together, sort of condensed them into a tight 30 pages, rather than breaking them out into three chapters. I do like when he talks about the idea of avoidance as anxiety. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Not. Not anything Sidman wrote. I totally agree with what Sidman wrote, but how much are modern society looks at anxiety as some sort of a mental state. And if only we could change the mental state of anxiety, we would solve all the problems that all the fallout, all of the side effects.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Rather than tackling anxiety as we live in a coercive society, you are engaging in this escape maintained behavior, which we have decided to call anxiety. And Sidmouth is totally fine with us calling it anxiety. However, we need to be sure that we are talking about a topography of behavior when we talk about anxiety, not some sort of a mental process which we then as humans give some sort of a magical power over us of, oh, it's your anxiety acting up like that's something in your brain. Maybe it's in your mind file, Jackie. And if only we could just take that file out and put it in the mind shredder, we'd all be fine. But of course, that's not really what, you know, anxiety thrives on.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We engage in what we call anxiety because, again, we're facing aversive stimuli. We're trying to avoid those stimuli. We're engaging in behavior that allows us to avoid the stimuli, which is, I'm going to stay away from whatever those stimuli are.

[B]

Yeah. He does a really good job of describing sort of how one's entire environs can begin to function as a conditioned punisher and produce all sorts of emotional and biological responses as though they were actual threats to us, which then just produce more and more escape and avoidance behavior related to everything in our surroundings.

[A]

The other point that I think is important when we talk about avoidance versus escape. So maybe I have to take back my statement about let's put escape and avoidance into one longer chapter is the idea that when we avoid, we learn successfully. It inevitably becomes a failure of learning. I love this in that the longer we avoid.

[C]

It was another, like, huge mind blow. Me too. Yeah.

[A]

Why don't you guys talk about it?

[B]

I mean, I am an avoidant creature by habit.

[C]

You sure are.

[B]

Absolutely.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

My wife's Diana Perry Cruz.

[B]

Shut up, you guys. I'm so avoidant. I love It. I do love that about myself. I won't lie. I'm not changing.

[C]

No, you never let that. That aversive stimuli appear.

[A]

I mean, lucky for you, you married someone who's like a go getter.

[B]

Yeah, I know. That's why we're going.

[A]

Does all the work.

[B]

But I hadn't heard that term before, the avoidance paradox, and I thought that it was really astute and helpful. So the difference between talking about positively reinforced behavior, which just continues to occur through the principle of positive reinforcement, and talking about avoidance based responding is that avoidant behavior can be so effective that it actually diminishes itself. Right. Over time. So one becomes more and more lax in producing the avoidant response, which is going to delay the punisher to the point that eventually the punisher itself has to appear in order to then reinforce the avoidant response and have the cycle continue, which is absolutely fascinating. And one of the ways in which we can distinguish behavior that is maintained by positive reinforcement from negative reinforcement.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Boom.

[C]

Just take it on home.

[B]

Love it. Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So good.

[A]

Whoo. So I think one of the things that I always find frustrating about these book clubs, and I hope you do too, is that we're talking about a whole book rather than an article. So it can be very hard to sort of do it in a concise manner.

[C]

Sure. It's a big book.

[A]

And at this point, looking at where we are, even though, even with a part two, I do want to make sure that for the listeners, I know we've gone a bit long, but there's just so much to talk about here. And I guess one of the positives is that I hope that these conversations have got you thinking. I'd like to be a part of this conversation, but I need more because again, we're only so long a podcast. You can come back next week for another episode where we'll talk not only about how many of these paradigms we've discussed will lead into serious problems for society, but also. I wish it was more of the book. But how we as behavior analysts and as individuals, as members of these societies, can change behavior to avoid. To avoid. Oh, no.

[B]

Avoid avoidance.

[A]

To switch some of these reinforcement contingencies. But for now, we do have to bring it to a close, and there's just so much more to talk about. I'm, like, looking at our notes and I'm like, we didn't get to some of these. I had a great example. I wrote down where I really.

[C]

Diana.

[A]

I totally dissed Diana. Maybe I'll bring it up Next week.

[B]

There's always next week voting.

[A]

I had jury duty when I was taking some of these notes. I mentioned Tetris at one point that I can mention really quick. It was more the idea of a society that only functions on coercive contingencies is not a society that we typically think of as. Remember that great coercive society and all the great art they made. So you think about, you know, China during the Cultural Revolution or the Soviet Union during, you know, the real height of the Cold War. And we don't think of those as. They put out a lot of great literature and art, didn't they? Because. No, they didn't. Because the government suppressed almost everything that the individual members were doing that weren't related to a very narrow set of responses.

[B]

There's a lot of great Russian literature, but it precedes. Yes, time period.

[A]

And then I mentioned. Well, I mentioned in terms of what came out in the Cold War, that was really amazing. We all still think of as Tetris. That was pre. I know, Bolshevik Revolution.

[B]

Really good book. I love saying that word. Karenina.

[A]

Again, so many points to go over in these first ten chapters.

[C]

So little time.

[A]

I hope we covered them enough to at least wet your appetite or give you a sense of the key pieces that Sidman worries about in our society and the key contingencies and how that will affect human behavior. So next time when we get together, we're going to talk a little bit more about that and we're going to talk about more about some solutions that Sidman lays out.

[C]

I can't even wait. Oh my gosh. I'm like, let's keep going.

[A]

It's gonna be a five hour episode.

[C]

Woo.

[A]

No, you know what? You know what I think we should do? Let's give a second secret code word and then we'll do our little end spiel. All right. Would you like to. What is our second secret code word, Jackie?

[C]

It's my favorite flower. Just kidding. It is a flower, but it's not my favorite rose.

[A]

How do you spell that?

[C]

R O, S E. Rose.

[A]

I found roses to be aversive as they have thorns. So I engage in behavior that avoids them.

[C]

Oh, I like to look at them, period.

[A]

Rose.

[B]

Rose.

[A]

Well, I hope you enjoyed our summer book club or whenever you're listening to this, whatever season it is, book club on coercion and it's Fallout Part one. We get pretty spirited in these conversations. A little different than our normal episodes.

[C]

Me and Rob got into a fight.

[A]

Did we?

[C]

I don't think we got, but we kind of did.

[A]

The fact that we record every single week means that we must not hate each other that much. Jaggy.

[C]

That's true. I am part of the family now. We can have arguments and still get over it.

[B]

For reals.

[A]

Well, we really hope you enjoyed part one of our discussion. This is ABA InsideTrack. Hey, if you like the show, why not subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts? You certainly can also listen to these episodes where they post on our website, abainsidetrack.com or on YouTube where they have the YouTube subtitling feature. We really would love it if you joined us out on social media where you can find us everywhere as Aba InsideTrack, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or you can always email [e-mail] with your thoughts on the episodes or on ideas for future episodes.

[C]

Hang out with us.

[A]

We hope you join us next week for part two of a discussion of coercion and its fallout. But until then, keep responding. Bye.

[B]

Hey, everyone, it's Diana here. I was just gonna let you guys know that as we enter into the part two of this discussion, that we do get some sticky topics that are potentially sensitive in nature. So we run the gamut on things that are fairly complex and people can have multiple opinions regarding. So what I want everyone to think about as we enter into this conversation is that we recognize that we're pulling from this particular book, but there are larger conversations surrounding each of these sensitive topics that are presented here. We're going to talk about mental illness. We're going to talk about incarceration and police presence as well. And I recognize that all of those are pretty sensitive topics and we dive into them pretty quickly in some cases. So I want to make sure that we also preface this conversation here at the beginning by saying that we recognize that some populations are more targeted for incarceration and very often that can happen in an unfair manner. There's more to say on these and you can listen to hear about it, but we recognize that there's a lot that we're attempting to cover in this episode. So bear with us as we muddy our way through these waters.

[A]

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.

[C]

Hey, Rob, it's Dana. Hi, it's Jackie.

[A]

I, I, I'm really sorry if I'm sounding kind of sound kind of hoarse. I Feel like I'm. I got like a random summer cold. You know, like one of those things where you're sick but you're not that.

[C]

Sick and you're like, what is happening? It's summer.

[A]

Yeah. And like my nose ran a little bit and then it sort of just lose my voice. That seems to be how I get sick in my older age is it's sort of like you don't feel sick enough to, you know, stay home or rest or have anyone feel bad for you. You're just going to lose your voice and then everyone will just pity you but still expect you to do everything you normally would do. Which sadly, when part of it is talking for like an hour and a half or so, kind of makes you less fun to listen to, but.

[C]

Oh well, I think it makes you more fun to listen.

[A]

Oh, thank you. I highly disagree.

[B]

Why couldn't the pony go to school?

[A]

Because it was a horse.

[B]

He was a little horse.

[C]

Did you find that on the box of a popsicle?

[B]

No, I wrote it myself. Or maybe not.

[C]

That's good.

[A]

Oh, I. What was the. I. I had a bunch when we were driving. We were driving the other day.

[B]

I was funny. That's so funny.

[A]

No, I was doing like a bunch of like ancient Egyptian jokes. I don't. You don't remember them? They were that good. Oh no. Okay.

[B]

The Egyptians plow the field. So it was pharaoh.

[A]

Haha. No, no, it's was the one I had. Oh. How come the pharaoh couldn't find a date? He didn't know anyone he had anything tootin common with.

[C]

Wow. But this is a podcast about dad jokes.

[A]

No, this isn't a podcast. Dad jokes or summer colds. It's a podcast about behavior analysis and behavior analytic research. Every week we bring you a new episode where we pick a topic in behavior analysis and find some research articles to discuss. Like an old fashioned journal club. Except this weekend, last week, if you listened to last week's episode, which you know, this one has part two in the title, so probably listen to the first one is not a journal club, but more like a book club.

[C]

We're all hanging out.

[A]

Picked one of Oprah's favorite behavior analytic books. No, we chose a book on the topic of behavior analysis. We read that book and in the span of two podcasts we are doing kind of an in depth dive and discussion into a book.

[B]

And who would like in depth skim?

[A]

An in depth skim.

[B]

That's what I like to call it.

[A]

Okay, skim.

[C]

It's like skim milk with Water added.

[A]

Okay, so you read every other page and just the first paragraph. And what do you mean there's not.

[B]

A time for, I think for an in depth dive more than a couple hours. It's an in depth skim.

[C]

It's like diving into a four foot pool.

[A]

If you're in a book club though, with like other people, don't you just read a book and then meet one time for like an hour? Yeah, and we didn't talk about the.

[C]

Whole book and knit while you do that and drink tea.

[B]

Just an excuse to gossip.

[A]

Okay. Or watch the book club. Maybe. I don't. Depends on your book club. Well, in any case, in this book club we do a decent, decent dive. How about that? Into the book we read in the interest of time. And last year we did our book club on parent positive parenting. And before then we did supervisors guide. And this year we chose a book by the late, great Murray, Coercion and its Fallout. So if you would like to hear anyone discuss the first, say, 10 chapters of coercion and its fallout, then you should totally listen to last week's episode in which that is exactly what we did. Because this week we'll be discussing the second half of the book, chapters 11 through 19. But let's do a really quick summary, sort of of what the first half of the book was about. Diana, Go. What was the first half of the book about?

[B]

First half the book, Rob, was about coercion and control, introducing those topics to us. And the main takeaway of about the first maybe six chapters was that coercive behavior is really maintained by avoidance from punishment and or negative reinforcement. Right. So there's going to be something, some aversive quality to the control that's occurring with the behavior. Either that the behavior is escaping from something aversive or having something aversive terminated and thereby increasing their behavior. And whichever way it goes, it should be thought of as coercion and that there are actually better ways to control behavior than through coercion.

[C]

Although he doesn't tell us what those are yet.

[B]

Nope. No, it's like spoilers.

[C]

He's like, but there are better ways. I'll get back to that in the later chapters. Yeah.

[A]

So Jackie, how would you sum up the second half of this book versus the first half of this book?

[C]

So the first half of this book was a primer, one might say. I found it a little more difficult to read than the second part of the book. So if you feel that, keep going. Yeah, it gets so much better. It's not that it's bad, but it's just. It's primary.

[B]

I'm familiar with the topic already, so it.

[C]

It didn't read as fast or as like, ooh, what's gonna happen on the next page?

[A]

What's sort of the equivalent of when you've been reading, you know, 10 articles about a given topic and, oh, my God, are they gonna tell me that, you know, oh, autism is, you know, spectrum of different needs. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Cause you've read a bunch of them, right? It's sort of that, except it then expanded about over, you know, 90 pages.

[C]

Of text rather than. I felt like the part one of was necessary, but could have been condensed a little bit. But part two is, I think, fairly interesting because that's where he starts talking about how coercion affects everyday life. Right. So all of the main, like, facets of human existence, he tries to tackle in a tie the. These main theoretical issues of. Of societal importance to the laboratory animal, which I think is fascinating.

[B]

You get the feeling that part two is why he wrote the book, right? Yeah, but he had to get through part one. But did he get to part two?

[A]

Yeah, well, yeah, let's say that. For final thoughts.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So the first chapter we're going to be discussing is Chapter 11, Neuroses and Mental Illness. And I don't know if it's going to be worth going into too deep detail on this chapter, because I think a lot of the concepts that Sidman is discussing in this chapter relate to a lot of kind of psychological terminology that I don't want to. I don't want to say it's fallen out of favor, but is not.

[B]

Well, it's not the circles that we or other behavior analysts usually travel in. So it may be that those terms seem foreign to us.

[A]

It makes me think of that scene in the Addams Family movie when the con lady is trying to pretend to discuss with Gomez why the guy impersonating Uncle Fester is really Uncle Fester. And she describes displacement. And for years, I thought that was a fake term that she had made up for this comedy movie. And then I realized, as an undergrad, oh, no, that's actually a real thing in terms of a real thing in the field of psychology. But when you describe something and it sounds like something a con man would make up, sort of makes you a little less interested in talking about it at length. It basically, I think the portions of this chapter that are relevant refer more to the ideas of, say, when he taught. When Simmons talks about anxiety and the Idea of anxiety as, you know, the way I think we'd all want to speak about anxiety is it's sort of, you know, private events. Most of the things that we feel, quote, unquote, anxious about relate to things that are coercive in nature that we therefore try to avoid, that we tend to develop more and more elaborate avoidance behaviors to avoid. So when you think about anxiety, sort of a component of the general coercion that we encounter in our day, I think that makes a much more meaningful definition of why we have anxiety problems.

[C]

Yeah. And one thing I really like that he brings up that I think we've been talking about more in the behavior analytic community is that these bigger terms like anxiety or depression have traditionally been referred to as something that's untouchable to us. Right. Because they're very complex, they're internal. And he. He talks about them too, like writer's block or writer's cramp, as he says. You know, that it's something we say like, oh, I have anxiety or I have depression without actually talking about the behaviors that include that. So.

[B]

Or the functions that maintain.

[C]

Right. So I love that he brings that up because that's how traditionally we think about anxiety. And he was even starting, you know, this is book was written in the 90s that. Starting to think about how we as behavior analysts could be a part of that treatment, maybe not be the sole provider of that treatment, but be a part of the treatment when dealing with anxiety or depression or even writer's block. Right. So that could be a real thing and a real problem if you are an author and you need to write for a living. So I love that, how he sets that up for us and then goes about talking about why and how anxiety comes about.

[A]

I think he has a longer section or paragraph on the idea of the obsession of obsessions and of compulsions, which, on the one hand, I understood what he was talking about in the sense of we engage in these various behaviors, the compulsions that probably have something to do with a coercive event that we're trying to avoid. You know, his example, this elaborate example of, you know, the man who. Oh, I gotta go to a job interview. Oh, but I forgot to, you know, check my tie. Oh, now I forgot to lock my door. Oh, I forgot to turn off my stove. Oh, now I'm late to the interview. I might as well not bother going. And while I understood how he was describing that idea of sort of what we think of as obsessions and compulsions in terms of the behavior of obsessions and compulsions relating to coercive events and learned behavior. I'm not sure if it's taking into account, I think a lot of what current wave, you know, behavior therapies or even, you know, I know, like, we go back and forth with, you know, relational frame theory and what that means in terms of talking about mental illness, but the idea of a lot of mental illnesses, private events, and how our private verbal behavior can impact our somatic response. And so in that regard, a lot of this chapter felt like. I get you, but I feel like you're oversimplifying.

[C]

I agree.

[A]

The situations. And maybe you're not, because again, maybe we as behavior analysts have just decided to over complicate the behavior of mental illness so that we can kind of get a piece of the pie in terms of people seem to want these complicated descriptions of thoughts that are. The circular logic, which Sidman also talks about how that's. That's silly. You know, we don't have anxiety. You engage in behavior related to the stimuli in your environment.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But it did feel a little. Not quite simplified, but it didn't sell the point. I think that the overall book was trying to make as much as, say, later chapters.

[C]

Yeah, I'm gonna agree with you. And I think that if he was gonna write this chapter, I think he should include others as well, because he wasn't a master of other professionals. Yeah, he should have included others in this chapter, I think, specifically because this wasn't his, like, wheelhouse. Right. So we all know that he doesn't. He didn't, like, treat mental illness. And so I think it might have been interesting to have perspective of people that do and how that in the behavioral realm, how that works. Although I agree with him, the principles are probably there. Right. But I think that there might be more going on or less. But I think he might not know.

[B]

Right. Well, a whole book could be written, could be written about this one chapter. So it had to be simplified in that way. And I think, you know, one of the main points he's trying to take away from this is what's the origin of this? And we don't have to always just chase something back into the mind and say, well, this person's just like this, and that's why they're engaging this behavior. So I think he was attempting to sort of set up a scenario where one could see how behavior could be reinforced and then continue to manifest in ways that were overall non functional.

[C]

Right. Another part of this chapter that I actually really loved is when in the chapter where he talks about what is abnormal and I love that he brings about that behavior isn't necessarily like quote unquote, normal. Right. Because what's normal for one community or verbal community is going to be quite different from what another verbal community is. So he talks about like, what behavior would be richly rewarded in Los Angeles would send Bostonians into psychotherapy.

[B]

Yeah, I loved that.

[C]

Yeah. So it's something to think about too, right? That there isn't like a static rule of like, this behavior is normal, this behavior is abnormal. So it's, I think it's more moving depending on the verbal community that you're in. And I like that point that he, that he brings up there.

[B]

Yeah. And what I should have said previously really was a behavior that's not socially functional. Right. In an effort to steer away from saying abnormal. But when one is engaging in behavior that's socially non functional, we should remember that it's functional at that point in time for that person. So there's a function to it and it's somehow adaptive based on their current situation and their history, I think to.

[A]

The point of looking at abnormality. And we have a whole statistical manual discussing what is abnormal and how so much of it has been colored by what we as society overall find to be aversive to us and therefore should, you know, can we look at the DSM as almost like a manual of coercive things that drive us nuts? And please make these go away, because most of us don't like this stuff. You know, thinking about how homosexuality used to be in the dsm, and this certainly isn't a knock against the team that develops the DSM every, every few years or anything, but that idea of so many of the areas that we as society found coercive at various points in human history could be defined as abnormal. Like, we took this great thing, we took the science, the science of the mind and science of learning, and we found another way to sort of tack on like, how can we use this to be coercive to other people? You know, almost as like, if we can find these things and we can get rid of them because they're really annoying and most of us don't like them very much. So if you could have that go away.

[B]

Right. But again, that's, that's just truth by agreement for a majority. And that's not to say that if someone is within the minority that they are automatically wrong. If the majority can label them as abnormal, then likely they're going to. But that doesn't mean that there's necessarily anything non functional about how they're operating. Now, there may be other people that legitimately need assistance. Right. And that should be viewed as something where society can come together and hopefully help that individual if they and other parties agree that assistance is needed. But those are two separate things.

[A]

Yes. Let's move on from this chapter. So I think we had some problems with this chapter. So let's get into it. Why did we start with that one? Because I guess it came next in the order. The next chapter I really enjoyed. I don't. I kind of go back and forth as to whether it's sort of a chapter that I think is as salient and important as some of the other chapters. But I do like the idea of describing how our conscience, our little Jiminy Crickets, are all a product of coercion and how so much of what we as, as a society or as individuals have developed a sort of like good moral thinking really is a product of. Because we've been punished for anything else. And that only works for so long when you don't meet the contingencies of avoidance or. Or you're over. Or you're punished even though you're engaging in mostly, you know, conscientious behavior.

[B]

Right. So the title of this chapter is Coercion and the Conscience. And I was actually going to ask you, Rob, before you said about Jiminy Cricket, did you visualize the conscience as the Donald Duck angel and devil?

[A]

No, no, I. Jiminy Cricket.

[C]

Me too.

[A]

I know what you're talking about. Are you talking about the one where Donald skipped school?

[C]

Yeah, well, Donald. There's a lot of Donald with his.

[B]

Whenever he has the angel and the devil.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I didn't think that.

[B]

Just love Donald Duck so much.

[A]

I do love Donald. No, I know. It's the one that he.

[B]

He was your conscience.

[A]

He doesn't want. No, he doesn't want to go to school. And the devil's like, come on. He doesn't have a Donald Duck voice. He's like, you should come out and go fishing. And he's got his little books with a strap. And then they go to school at.

[C]

The end and they sing Lala lala lalala. So Rob has seen that one. Oh, I got.

[A]

I think I have it somewhere. You want to watch those old Disney cartoons, man, they are hard. They are hard to come by. So when we talk about the conscience, what we're talking about is that internal voice that tells us right from wrong. And again, the conscience is a metaphor. It's not A real thing.

[C]

Give a little whistle.

[A]

That's something that's in you. It is not literally some sort of a bug that travels around. P.S. did you know in the original Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket is murdered by Pinocchio when.

[B]

He'S on Station Island?

[A]

No. He dies, like, really early on, and this ghost comes back to haunt him. Like, I. I don't know how they made that book into a cartoon, because it is. Sounds terrifying. I never read the book.

[B]

It's quite terrifying.

[A]

Pretty terrifying.

[C]

One thing I love about this part is that he. This is where I kind of see where he pulls in the laboratory animal with humans.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Because we don't usually think of animals as having a conscience, per se. Right. But he tells us exactly what an animal would do in the presence of punishment, in the presence of a shock, in the presence of something. You know, I'm using my quotes, something bad. And it's very similar to what you would see when someone's faced with the dilemma of doing something that society feels is not great and there's like, some temptation.

[A]

This was the best rat description in the entire.

[C]

I totally agree.

[A]

I could see it. I feel like it made all the other ones that were like, yeah, yeah, I understand how rats, you know, work with some sort of a punishment contingency. It made all of those that we kind of were a little not dismissive of last time, but we kind of, you know, we started rolling our eyes a little bit as they kept coming back to the rat experiments, made it all worth it for this one, because this is one I never would have thought of. Like you were saying, Jackie, I never would have thought of. This is a behavior that we can see in rats. That behavior that you see in young children of understanding that something that they once in one. A behavior that they once engaged in that didn't seem to matter very much is now something that they will be punished for. And so the description. I'll do the kid one, Jackie. And then if you want to, you.

[C]

Know, I'll do the rat one.

[A]

So, you know, you think about little kids. You think about how little kids, when they're little babies and they start grabbing at things and they start pointing at things and babbling. Everything's the best thing they've ever done. Because again, you know, what do we want our babies to do? We want them to start walking. We want them to start using the bathroom. We want them to start talking.

[C]

We're literally taking pictures of everything.

[A]

Everything's a behavioral cusp. We want. We want to meet all Those cusps. So doesn't matter what they do. It's adorable. Like, when you think about young children, they're starting to walk, and they're, like, yanking things off the counter, and they're going, oh. We're like, it's adorable. Isn't this great? But at some point, we decide we've had enough of this.

[C]

They're like, there's too many brothers plates.

[A]

And all of a sudden, the kid does something that they've done before. They start yanking something off a counter. They're grabbing something they shouldn't have. And rather than being like, oh, you, baby, you're learning. We go, no, we yell at them, or we smack them on the hand or we grab them away. And, you know, hopefully if we're, you know, good parents, we take them away and we, you know, give them something else to do. But we could just yell at them and say, no, don't touch that. No, that's not for you. No, bad baby. You know, we might say something like that.

[B]

And the example in the book is a vase. Yeah, a vase. Yeah, that might. That they're trying to grab, that might fall on them. So it's a safety thing.

[A]

Yep. And how, again, since they're little kids, they don't necessarily learn, oh, vases are not to be touched. They sort of just get confused. And then later on, they come back to the vase, and they come back to the vase, and they're like, I'm gonna grab this again. And then, of course, the mom or the dad yells, now don't touch that again. And then over time, horrible parents. You can kind of see the kid doing that whole, like, they'll go near the vase, and then rather than going over and touching it, they'll sort of do that like, I'm walking to it. I better walk away. Or they'll start repeating back the statements their parents made, like, no, no, don't touch it, or no, bad baby. They'll start repeating that back. And then, you know, the outside observer, especially if they love mentalistic metaphor language, will be like, it looks like little Susie has developed a conscience, and that's why she's not touching the face. And of course, we as behavior analysts know what's really. Yeah, they know right from wrong. We know what's really happened. And then that brings us to what happened, because we could do this with a rat.

[C]

The one thing I love about it is he. He puts, like, a subjective, like, humanistic point of view when he talks about the rats. He's like, yeah, the rats has A history of reinforcement for pressing the lever. Pressing lever, everything's lovely. We all know this happens. And then when he presses the letter, the lever one time, he gets punished. The rat's like, what the. He's like, well, that probably was just a doozy. Presses it again, gets another shock, runs away to the other end of the chamber. And then the thing I love, and he's like, but still the rat love. Yeah, he's like. Like the lever still tempts the rat. So he comes closer, turns away, comes closer, turns away. And I'm like imagining a little rat with, like, little love eyes being like, lever, lever, I'm coming for you. Right. So there's still that back and forth that you see. And then, you know, after a long period of time, they're like, maybe it works again because of that history of reinforcement. So again he presses the lever and punishment is delivered in the form of a shock. And then you see responding suppression altogether.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

You see that with humans as well, which I thought was fascinating. And I love just the, like, coming and going, coming and going. You see that in real world.

[A]

And since we're talking about most, most likely pretty much the exact same behavioral mechanisms in play, we don't talk about the rat as having a really strong developed conscience, though we talk about the human having a developed conscience. But again, is that just. And Sidman would say, yes, just a metaphorical construct that our society has created to try to explain in very poor terms why some people do good things and some people do bad things. Why? It's because they have a good conscience or they have a bad conscience. Like it's some sort of an internal thing that, like, oh, it sounds like Billy killed his Jiminy Cricket. That's why he does bad things. But Pinocchio didn't kill his Jiminy Cricket, so that's why he does good things.

[C]

I do. I do love the metaphor. He's like, if this rat were of the a part person and it was a churchgoer, it would confess that it had been a sinner, but now is reborn. I like that.

[A]

And this brings us to the problem, I think, of how our society rewards people who do the right thing and have a good conscience. Because if almost all of the things that we do, quote, unquote, that are good are based on some sort of a history of cohort of coercion, a history of shock, a history of punishment, how long will we continue to do, quote, unquote, the right thing? And I think we see this. I think the nice thing about our you know, we sort of talked about how Sidman wrote this book at a different time. I think one of the things he'd be really excited to see in terms of his discussion of conscience in this chapter is how all his discussion of how many people get away with crimes and how we don't necessarily think that's the same bad thing that we used to. You know, we have so many businesses doing all these horrible things, and I think we've all realized society, oh, they kind of get away with it. Why do they get away with it? It's not because they have bad consciences. It's because they're continuing to get rich and because we are continuing to benefit from their bad behavior. So, of course we don't care that they're doing things that are quote, unquote bad, because we're all.

[B]

Who says we don't?

[C]

The.

[A]

The grand society. I'm not. I'm not pigeonholing you. Not us three.

[C]

The big we.

[B]

Okay, yeah, don't care. The big we.

[A]

And again, the idea that the conscience works as it has been described here, because when children are young, we are watching them all the time, so it's really easy for us to punish them when they do things that we don't like and to hopefully reward them when they do things that we like. But more often than not, we probably just punish them for doing the things we don't like. But as we become adults, we realize kind of the fallacy of the conscience in that no one is punishing me for doing bad things. I am only choosing not to do these bad things because I don't know why. You know, we don't know why, but hey, guess what? It's because you were punished for doing bad things at one point. But we engage in so much behavior to avoid a punishment that's probably not going to come. And we all realize this at some point because we see so many people doing quote, unquote bad things and never contacting that punishment contingency anymore. And we all go, what the hell? And some of us just sort of like, you know, that cult behavior. Well, I'm gonna double down on my conscience. I'll never do anything bad because, I mean, I think humans don't like to lose and we don't like that whatever private event is going on. It sucks to feel like I've been a sucker for the past 20 years of my life. I could have been getting ahead. I could have been cutting corners.

[B]

I think it depends on the company that you keep, too, right? So if everyone within your social circle is maintaining those same rules, quote, unquote, conscience, then they're going to see behavior of people outside of that circle as, as other and more evidence of their waywardness by engaging in that behavior, Even if they're contacting reinforcers in the here and now.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So you can maintain that for a long. Your lifetime.

[A]

You could, yeah. But I think again, one of the nice things about living in art modern society where everything is so much smaller than it was, is that it's very hard to live in a society where you are with the exact same audience for your entire life. Because we're constantly seeing things from around the world that we did not have access to. I know.

[B]

Are we all living in an echo chamber?

[C]

Yeah, I know.

[A]

I guess that's true.

[C]

I also, because I come from a very small town that most people never leave and so they don't actually contact the contingencies that other communities will contact. Right. So I just went to my hometown. Hey, hometown. If you're listening, what up? And it's pretty much the same, right? Like I have been. I haven't been there in what, 20, 20 years because it was my 20 year high school reunion and it was pretty much the same. So I mean, it depends on your verbal community, right. And like what you're accessing and who you come in contact with. But it could very, you could very well be with the people. You graduated from high school and then you all go and work at the same place because it's the only place that you can work and you see them. That's it. That's all you see. Depending on where you live.

[A]

I still think that overall our ability to contact the other is much more likely nowadays.

[C]

I agree with, you know, they just.

[A]

Cast, they just cast an African American actress to play Ariel. You know, that's a well known story. A bunch of people are gonna go see that movie and they're gonna say, whoa, it's Ariel and she's not gonna be the white redhead that she was in the cartoon. And you can say, well, they might refuse. Yeah, yeah. Yes. I'm not making any sort of statement about the casting, but the idea that people might have seen that movie and they will probably go see the next big budget live action Disney movie because that's what a lot of people go do. And they might not think too much about like, she looks different than the cartoon. They might not even care that it's different. According to the Internet, it's a big deal.

[B]

Yeah, well, the Internet is the Internet's the Internet.

[A]

They don't. They're the worst audience ever because they don't have any of the. Yeah, they need some coercion on that Internet, if you ask me.

[B]

We tried to talk about that the other day and you said. You told us no. No.

[A]

What?

[B]

We tried to say that there should be more coercion on the Internet, and you told us no.

[A]

Oh, oh. In the sense of. I mean, if that's our go to is we should just get some more coercion. I said it in a funny.

[B]

More coercion.

[A]

We never want to say more coercion.

[B]

No. I think that one of the takeaways from this chapter here is if you are continuing to engage in behavior underneath a strict code of conduct and not accessing freely available reinforcers for engaging in behavior that would be quote, unquote bad, then chances are that that code of conduct was set up through some level of coercion itself.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And again, the idea that Sidney really does not come back to for another, like, four or five chapters that what if we used reinforcement for doing the right thing rather than coercive practices? And then he kind of stops and then he moves on.

[C]

One of my. I think my favorite sentence in the entire book is at the end of this chapter where he's just like, we need a replacement for the conscience. And then he's like, mic drop. I'm out of this shack.

[B]

Moving on.

[C]

I, like, love that. When I read that, I was like.

[A]

But then you gotta go to dinner. And then chapter 13 is not. What's the replacement for the conscience?

[B]

Nope.

[A]

It just sort of continues to double down on how awful it is that we live in this coercive society. So chapter 13 is entitled between a Rock and a Hard Place. Again, that metaphor illusion that we are constantly in a situation, no matter what we choose or no matter what a behavior we engage in, we will meet some sort of a horrible aversive consequence. One of the issues that he talked. We talked about it last week too, but really that idea of when you are likely to meet a punishment contingency or a coercive contingency, you are going to engage in a couple of the same behaviors. You're going to either just continue to engage in the same behavior, maybe if the punisher is not so. So bad, so strong, or you're going to escape. However, a lot of the time when we use coercion, we can't really predict the outcome of our coercive practice because there are a lot of other variables that we're not Paying attention to. So he has the great example of, you know, when someone is in a terrible job, they may or may not quit. Why? Why might they quit? Well, they hate their job, they were going to find another job. They're in a highly profitable field where they can get another job easily versus the person who has, you know, they're trying to pay off a second mortgage, they have a sick wife or husband, they have kids, they're trying to put through college, they'll put up with the coercive contingencies because they sort of have to.

[B]

Life is coercive. Yes, Everything's right.

[A]

And how this leads to a lot of what we see when we talk about the idea of. I think everyone talks about flight or fight. Like it's the first time anyone's ever said that, like, oh, it's like flight or fight. And the idea of so much of what we do in our society really leads to that fight or flight response. You know, so many threats that we know we can't escape. Therefore, how do we respond? Well, of course, by being really productive, right? No, by doing nothing, by freezing up, by sort of just allowing the contingency to come into play and not changing our behavior. And how most of the time the others in the society who usually are the ones engaged in the coercion, see this as some sort of a willful response, like, oh, well, you're not doing your best work. How dare you. I'll double down on my coercion. Whereas what's probably happening is this is an individual who has so many coercive contingencies in play right now, they just have nothing. They can't engage in any behavior whatsoever.

[B]

Yeah, and that was based in animal experiments as well, where they establish a tone as a signaled conditioned punisher for an upcoming shock and found that even though food was continually available during the tone, which lasted for like a minute, the animal would not engage in lever pressing to access food while the tone was on, sort of waiting for this impending shock and just engaged in behavior that we might consider to be panic or anxiety related behavior instead. So if you have an unavoidable impending aversive upcoming in your life, then you're unlikely to engage in functional behavior that would allow you to access other reinforcers. You're just going to engage in these types of anxiety based behavior instead.

[C]

One of the saddest, most like brain exploding examples in here for me was the one of the elderly lady. Oh yeah, oh my gosh, I never even thought of that. So I'm going to give you like a little rundown. So this lady was married. You like I'm talking about, like, I know her lady was married and they. She lived in a mansion. Right. And so her duties, she was like a stay at home lady. So she, she ordered the household around. Right. So she had guests and she had staff working with her.

[A]

And you know, she like landed gentry kind of.

[C]

Yeah, it sounded like it, didn't it? A little bit. So she had lots of household duties that she liked. And so she found these, these duties reinforcing. So she, you know, increased them. It wasn't that she had to do them. But then her husband died and in order to make life easier, they thought for everyone because the house was too big, there was too many things. Her family moved her into an apartment, which was smaller. Right. Didn't bring the wait staff with them in the city.

[B]

She could access things.

[C]

So she could access things. It was. But because all of her reinforcers were tied in with the behavior she was engaging in previously, now in this new city environment, which supposedly should have been better and easier for her, led to a loss of reinforcers. So that everything about her new surroundings signaled punishment. So signaled the lack of reinforcers. And he makes this really good point that even if you're putting someone in a place that there's love and care, right. And they're being treated nicely may not be sufficient to evoke those reinforcers to increase, you know, appropriate behavior. Which I was like, oh, I wrote something to think about.

[B]

Right.

[C]

As all of our parents are getting older, just being well taken care of may not be enough.

[B]

He brings this point up a few times and it ties in perfectly to our previous conversations about people and animals preferring contingencies over non contingently available reinforcers. And that is true for all people, including our older individuals as well. So having purposeful behavior and ways to access meaningful reinforcement through behavior is equally important, no matter what stage of life you're in. That was a sad anecdote.

[C]

Oh my gosh. It was. I was like, oh my gosh. I never thought of it that way though.

[B]

It makes sense. Even. Even providing a plant.

[C]

Right. To take care of.

[B]

To take care of. They have shown increases like health and life expectancy for nursing home individuals and that all they are doing is just watering a plant. Yeah, but that's meaningful behavior.

[C]

Right. I just didn't think of it that way.

[B]

It makes me want to like, go do a lot of work.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So for them.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Not myself.

[C]

But reminds me, Diana's going to work right now.

[A]

Reminds me this Old judge show we, I used to watch on like summer vacations. You know, you just like whatever's on tv. And it was like a dramatization. I don't remember. It was called some Old Judge, one of those old judge shows. It wasn't like People's Court, it was like more dramatic. No, Murphy Brown's not a judge yet. No, it's about Murphy Brown who is a network anchor on FYI. Murphy Brown. No, she was a reporter.

[B]

Oh that. She was a lawyer too.

[A]

What? No, Murphy Brown was one of the like lead reporters on the, the news program FYI with Frank Fontaine and Corky didn't watch that show and Jim. And you know she was like a hard hitting reporter in Washington D.C. anyway, that has nothing to do with anything. I was talking about a fake judge show which also has nothing to do with anything, I suppose. But no, the case was about a, it was about like a, like a, like an elderly mother who was going through kind of early dementia and she was like starting to break things and the family was not sure what to do with her. And in the end the result was your mother is not able to take care of herself anymore. You can't care for her. She needs to go to a home. And as a child I thought this is so awful that they would put someone who is like a grandmother who is a mother, that they would put them in this home that they clearly don't want to be in. And the actress was, as far as I remember was amazing Emmy caliber, daytime Emmy caliber performance of how like confused and upset she was about the whole thing. Then as I got older, I started thinking about, well, at some point I think that's, you know, when you have elderly parents, you have to put them in a home at some point because you can't take care of them. And then in the past couple years I've sort of come back around on that really thinking about it as the reality of our aging parents has come to be of, of I don't want that to be what happens. And you know, this really sends home that point of even if you put your parents in like a super great, you know, maximum, not maximum security, but like maximum security in the sense of they're so nice and it makes you feel secure and how safe you are, you're still losing so much reinforcement. And as Sidman would say, if you remove reinforcers, that is the same as delivering a shot, right?

[C]

Oh, it's amazing.

[A]

And that is very sad. I kind of wonder if he'd written this chapter 10 years later or 15 years later, whether we would have called it first world problems, because I think he does end it with the idea of so much of our behavior and so much of our sort of freezing up in life comes from just we have so many shocks. They're not signaled or they're signal or they're signaled, they're signaled all over the place. And that leads to so much of kind of the general malaise that we feel in our society where like, oh, all of these things are the worst shock ever because we don't actually then have the reality of, well, yes, the shocks of your boss being a jerk and your friends being mean and society being mean or crummy, but at the same time you're gonna have to go out and do farming or you'll die of starvation.

[B]

Right. That was the other part of the rat analogy was sparsely delivered shocks are preceded by the tone produces anxiety freezing behavior. But fairly commonly delivered shocks preceded by the tone produced a rat that worked through the tone.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And access reinforcers through the tone.

[A]

But it would explain, I think, why so much of our behavior does result in the freezing up and how, you know, while kind of like we talked about last week, the idea of your nature is coercive. And if you're still living in an area of the world where the worst coercion you face is from mother Nature herself, you will deal with all the other coercion that your society places upon you. But when you're, you know, fortunate enough to live in a first world country, then, oh, aren't these all the worst things that could possibly happen? But it is a reality that it does result in many people in our society not engaging in the behavior that would improve their, their life because they spend so much of their time freezing up because so much of what they're facing is coercion. Even people you, you know, know and see regularly, that might be a lot of how they spend their day. And it's not quite as tragic as the, you know, the senior citizen placed in the home and all their reinforces are removed. But it's the same idea of it's really easy to remove people's reinforcers and to just leave them in this, this state. I think we see that in our school, in our schools, I mean, what's, what's the biggest problem facing our youth today? Oh, it's anxiety. Everyone's got an anxiety disorder. And it does feel like, rather than acknowledging like what are behaviors that but exacerbate anxiety or exacerbate the behaviors around anxiety I think we're looking at what are the internal states of anxiety, because we need to deal with the anxiety in ourselves. That's how we'll deal with our anxiety. Like, we just get in this circular logic, and there's no great answer. There are great answers. No one's looking at those great answers. Sort of just going in the same roundabout verbal behavior about anxiety that I feel like we've seen for the past five, ten years. And it's. It's unfortunate. This would be one. One effective way to change some of that.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And of course, that leads us to the next chapter, which is the idea that coercion breeds coercion. The more one engages in coercion, the more you'll see coercion. And again, we go back to the rats. And this. Actually, when I read. I read this chapter, and then soon after that, was driving somewhere with my mother, who I have not put in a. In a retirement home yet that she knows of. No, I have not.

[C]

We're coming for you.

[A]

But we were driving, and someone honked at her. And her immediate reaction was, you know what my mother does when. When things are upsetting to her is she just starts kind of on a tirade. She. She gets upset, and it's sort of this, like, sad, like, oh, you're not doing anything about this. You're just clearly upset and you're angry and you're not lashing out. Like, she wasn't yelling at me, but clearly the only person who was hearing how mad she was was me, someone who had done nothing. I was just sitting in the car, unable to control anything. And this takes us back to Jackie. You want to do or who wants to do? Who wants to be a rat? Our rat descriptor for this chapter, too, the punishment induced aggression of the rat.

[C]

Well, that actually. I can talk about the original. There was original research by Azrin where he looked at aggression actually served as a reinforcer. So they had this monkey. It was like a little chimpanzee monkey in a chamber. Right. And he would be delivered a shock on his tail.

[B]

They don't let you do this anymore.

[C]

No, they don't. This is very old. Yeah, they give a shock on his tail. And when he got a shock at his tail, they showed that attacking a ball, like pulling down the ball and biting it, actually increased. So was reinforcing following that shock, which would show us in the laboratory that this punishment induced aggression may actually reinforce behavior.

[B]

Like, I don't like getting a shock on my tail.

[C]

No, me neither.

[A]

The corollary there being, you know, my mother, someone honked at her.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

We all know what a honk is. A honk is supposed to be like, hey, watch out, you might crash into me. It's a signal. We want it to be a signal of, oh, you know, it's an SD for change, what you're doing.

[B]

It should really be more than one honk.

[A]

Well, we also gotten that discussion in the car. But the first response my mother had was to get really angry and to start kind of getting upset. And she got upset at the person who's closest to her, which was me, because I was sitting right next to her.

[C]

Well, I love this. They always talk about this too. When you're talking about mainstream psychology about like, if you have a bad day at work, work, then you go home and you may be not as nice to your, like, spouse. Is that the first person you see even though your spouse didn't do anything. And then your spouse then may not be as nice to the kids.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Because they can't be nice to you because of a power struggle.

[B]

Right. Yeah.

[A]

And then your kids like to fill your bucket book.

[C]

Yeah. No, Right. But then they're like that book. Yeah. And then the kids maybe mean to kids at school or maybe mean to the dog. They talked about that as an example here too, about like the. You can't be mean to the baby. The kids.

[A]

Now, it's a fun metaphor for children. It's not a description of the behavioral principles in play.

[B]

But I think, you know, we could make it work.

[C]

I think we could make it work because this is punishment induced aggression in different forms. Even if it's verbal aggression.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Which I wouldn't agree because the first time I read that, like a side effect of punishment is punishment is a reinforcer.

[B]

And I was like, oh, right. Yeah.

[C]

And then I'm always like, what? Cooper? Look that in the book. Because you might be like, what? Cooper? Let's just go past that because it doesn't make sense, but it actually does. And these are all the examples. Examples that would work with that.

[A]

Yeah. And I think that goes into, you know, last week we talked about the idea of punishment. Can it change behavior? Of course, yes. Is it an effective treatment for changing behavior? And one of the concerns is, well, define effective. And I think when we look at all of these other side effects of punishment, it's really hard to say that it is effective except for certain situations. Knowing that any coercive practice is going to lead to some amount of either counter control or possibly even, you know, Actual aggression. I mean, think about the last time someone said something to you that made you upset or gave you, like, bad, like just negative, nasty feedback. Not like supportive feedback, like, you know, behavior skills training feedback, but like, was just obnoxious to you. Depending on your audience, depending on the other reinforcement contingencies, you either chewed out whoever that was or you saved it. Like you were saying Jackie. Or you sort of, you saved that and then you ran the scenario over and over in your mind until you got to a situation in which you could engage in your own coercion with a different outcome.

[C]

One thing I love about this article, I mean this book, in this chapter specifically, when he talks about moving forward, he talks about counter control. So if you do see coercion, there may be some counter control, but it may not be advantageous. And he says on page 217, a spouse counters sexual blackmail with, with infidelity. A teenager's blaring hi Fi. And I was like, I circled in. I'm like, what's that? I'm sure it's a stereo.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

A teenage hi Fi keeps parents from, from kind of confining him or her to the house. They're like, we want to make sure, we want to ground him, but we also don't want to listen to his music.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And I love that by vomiting at the table, a child avoids being forced to eat non preferred foods. Like, yeah, that issue of counter control is real.

[B]

I was surprised Counter Control didn't. Wasn't a title of its own.

[C]

I agree.

[A]

It had come up multiple times as sort of like a end of a paragraph. And this might lead to counter Control, but this is the first chapter that I think he got real time and it was really defined.

[B]

And I wonder. He defines it as behavior that deflects punishment or the threat of punishment.

[C]

And I'm wondering if he didn't make his own chapter because I felt, I wonder if he felt unsure because every other chapter had some laboratory evidence that could fit into it. But here, as he just says, like, it's really hard to capture counter control within the laboratory because the participants, the rats, don't have direct access to the experiment.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So he's right. So I'm wondering if he was like.

[A]

Is that like in Gremlins when the gremlin escaped and like killed the professor?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

That can't happen in Ratatouille when they run the health inspector out of the restaurant.

[A]

Yep. There are plenty of real life scenarios, but let's go to the ones that are fake. You know, in A movie.

[C]

But. No, but like rats. Right. But in it he said that there's very little laboratory evidence because the counter control can't happen. But they have seen a lot of punishment inducing aggression.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

In the literature. Because you can just put an unsuspecting pigeon in there. You can chuck a monkey.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we don't.

[A]

We don't engage in that, you know, as society, because again, we're talking about, you know, multiple sources of control in our lives. You know, if your boss starts yelling at you by the rat experiment, you would then punch your boss in the face. But of course, we don't do that because there are so many other contingencies in place, you know? You know, if I punch my boss in the face, I'll get fired.

[C]

Watch out, poss. I'm coming for you.

[A]

Maybe I actually got in a fight, you know, in school, and I got in trouble. Yeah. But again.

[B]

But again, I think, like, all the music examples. Right. There's like so much counter control, I think, in music. Right. Or like, welcome to the jungle. Or like, school's out for summer. Like, those are great counter controls.

[A]

School's out for summer. I do, I do love the idea that I'm gonna write a song about blowing the hell out of my school and how we all kind of laugh about it. Like, oh, that's an amusing song. But like, no, this song was not written as, like, won't this be a funny song? It was totally written by Alice Cooper, sort of like, God, I hated school when I was a kid and I wanted so much to blow up the school. And it was the best thought ever because my teachers were super mean. But I'll write a song. It'll be kind of funny, you know, And I think somebody even brings up the idea of the artist as a lot of, you know, behavior that we would consider to be, you know, psychotic or completely unhelpful in society. So many artists have taken that counter control and they've turned it into something that society.

[B]

Control and counter control.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And what?

[B]

Right. Fight the man.

[C]

Yeah. And then when you're talking to non behavior analysts about control and counter control, I think people get a little bit nervous, I think when behavior analysts will talk about, oh, yeah, I can demonstrate functional control. I can turn behavior on and off, you know, based on the environment that makes people a little bit uncomfortable. Right. And so they're like, who? Like, how can you just talk about that with us? It's like, oh, yeah, of course we can demonstrate functional control. We can manipulate the environment. But then I feel like outside people, like, what gives? Who gives you the right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is that where they talk about this? Like, who's doing the controlling?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, that's throughout the book. But I think that also comes to the idea that even counter control. Sidman doesn't use that term as counter control. It's a bad thing. Counter control is a principle. And then he even brings up the idea of, you know, think about the American system of government where we have our executive and our judicial and our legislative branches and they have checks and balances as that being how counter control can actually be of benefit to society. The idea that we all should be able to exert some amount of counter control over the people around us. However, for the most part, when you see counter control, it is in response to the coercive practices that our society provides us or engages us with and the general society.

[C]

Probably what he thinks may ask, like, why should behavior be controlled? Like, why are you even talking about that? But we know that behavior is controlled by contingencies. Right. So I love that he says on page 218, he says, experimental behavior analysis do not advocate behavioral control. They study it like literally, I loved.

[B]

This chapter or this paragraph.

[C]

And then they study applied behavior analysts do not make. Make conduct controllable given the existing control. They try to modify in directions that individuals and communities consider desirable. And then he's like, mic drop.

[B]

Yeah. It's like a physicist isn't considered to be a proponent. Oh yeah, yes. Like a behaviorist isn't a proponent of the principles of behavior. You study them. They exist on their own. Yeah, I love that. I love that.

[C]

And I do like that he, he, you know, brings to light that our behavior, usually we give control away to like large entities. Right. Like the government, law enforcement. Right. We all engage these things and that we want to make sure that they're acting in our best interest as a group.

[B]

Sometimes they're not.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

And then he gets into coercive groups do not hold power usually for that long. Right. There is counter control that is either a built in mechanism to very strong government or occurs organically through the people in some form of uprising or coup to balance out an overly coercive government.

[A]

So before we get to the big ending chapters discussing why we as a society engage in coercive practices and how we might do a better job. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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[A]

And we are back discussing the second half of Murray Sidman's Coercion and its fallout. So we've been talking about all the coercive practices our society engages in. But before we start talking about some of the light at the end of the coercion tunnel, I want to make sure that our listeners know that, hey, you know what? Here at this podcast, we're not all about coercion. We like to reinforce our listeners. And one of the ways we like to do that is by being ACE approved. Yes, by listening to this podcast, you can earn continuing education credits. All you need to do is listen to the episode and then go to our website abainsidetrack.com get CEUs and you can order CES for listening to the show. The first code word, because you're going to need to know two code words as part of your application, is parsnip. P A R S N I P. Parsnip. It's a root vegetable. Some people listen to this, might not eat too many parsnips. I think we live in New England, so we got a lot of root vegetables in the wintertime. It's kind of part of the heritage. Turnips. Parsnips are kind of the same thing, but they're slightly different.

[B]

No one likes either.

[A]

Do you remember that awesome story Stone Soup?

[B]

Of course I know the story Stone.

[A]

Soup, Rob, in which there was a.

[B]

Some sort of adorable pigs.

[A]

Well, it could also have been a hobo. I had a version where there was a hobo. But in any case, there's like a magic rock which gets everyone to give the hobo or the two pigs all these great things, including things like parsnips to make a delicious soup that everyone can enjoy.

[B]

Soup from a stone.

[A]

Soup from a stone. But the code word's not Stone or soup? It's parsnip. An ingredient in soup.

[B]

Parsnip from a stone.

[A]

So when we left off, we sort of rounded the bend on all of the ways that Murray Sidman describes our society as being awful, awful coercive monsters. But let's talk about why. Just like, you know, the organism is always. No, I know. That's not his point. I know. But again, the organism is always right. Why do we, the royal. We engage in coercive practices so readily when we know, well, some of us know that there are better ways to.

[B]

Change behavior because the punisher sees immediate reinforcing effects and the side effects that almost always do occur are delayed. Thereby we don't always see them being tied to the reinforcer of the punishment because they are so delayed for the reinforcer.

[A]

Jackie, Counterpoint, counterpoint.

[C]

We also need to think about side effects.

[A]

Not really a counterpoint. It's actually just a co point.

[B]

Co point.

[A]

Contrapoint.

[C]

Contrapoint.

[A]

No, that would be against. No, it's. It's a.

[C]

It's a. I don't know. But what I can say is that side effects.

[B]

Co point.

[A]

Co point.

[C]

Side effects also may be delayed as well. So they may not be immediate. So you may not tie those side effects to the actual punisher.

[B]

She said the same point. Better.

[C]

Oh yes.

[B]

We only have the one point.

[C]

One point. Just saying over and over again.

[B]

Yep, I'm going to say it again. No, just kidding.

[A]

Two times is enough. I did like. And it's in my notes and I can't remember if it was explicitly in the book or if I sort of had extrapolated from it, but the idea of our society as being fluent in the delivery of punishment. And I think we do have to address the idea that even those of us who understand how reinforcement is a much more effective treatment for changing behavior than any sort of a coercive practice. So negative reinforcement certainly, certainly more than punishment. We are all so much better at delivering punishment that I think there is a huge amount of response effort that would need to be engaged with to use reinforcement practices. And that seems very sad. But I think it is a truth that changing society. I think these last chapters really point out if we wanted to change everything to be more of a reinforcement based economy, it would take an extraordinary amount of work. And what do individuals not love to engage in? Why new behavior that requires a high amount of response separated and results in delayed reinforcement, slow change. So that is going to be a real problem that we face in changing all of society.

[C]

I also like the point that he. He says that it's easy. That's one of his points. And then he's also said that punishment's easy. Yeah. We don't need a lot of training. Right. It's short, it's quick. And then I also like that he says that it's inevitable. Right. So. Because there's. Things are gonna happen.

[B]

I know, but we were gonna have this part be positive.

[C]

It is positive.

[A]

Well, I think that idea that there is an inevitability to coercion.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Nature will always exist. Nature engages in coercion. It always will. We can't change nature.

[C]

There's also social competition. They talk about that.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So that's always gonna exist. But it's how we manipulate the contingencies of reinforcement that counteract that.

[A]

Well, however, I did think about the idea of competition as. And I did think about a recent development. Now, it is with a very narrow understanding of business and technology. So this may be totally wrong. And please write in if I'm way.

[C]

Off base and you need more attendance for our next. Our August preview, so do it.

[A]

When I heard competition, the idea of we only have so many resources, therefore there's always going to be some amount of coercive behavior because we all want to gain access to as much of that pie as we can. I think about Microsoft, the company. Now, if you grew up in the 90s, you might remember the antitrust lawsuit filed against Microsoft when Microsoft had an operating system. In that operating system, they had an Internet browser. They had. They'd cornered the market on sort of computers and computing and using.

[B]

They had the toasters as the screensaver.

[A]

Yeah, around that time. It was later. That's later. That's Windows 3.1, I think.

[B]

No, Windows 95.

[A]

Oh, that. Windows 95. Okay. So, yes, it was around that time, and it was determined that Microsoft was a monopoly. They were trying to control all the business. Therefore, that's. That's un American. That's. That's illegal. And so they were. They had to break off certain components of their business. And there was that concern of, oh, this huge business is going to fail now because they can't be overly competitive. But now much of what Microsoft's platform is on is the idea that, well, we own these clouds and we can do all this cloud computing and we have all these services, and we can put our services everywhere. And if we put our service on your device, your device benefits, so you make more money. But we also make more money because our services are on your device. So a Lot of their business model really is, I don't want to say antithetical to the idea of competition because I don't know enough about it, but it is the idea of we're providing a service and we want everyone to have that service. And you're using our service allows you to benefit from the fact that you're using our service, your company, your, your pipelines for content, whatever operating system you're using and how that really does show that there are ways that we can all win. You know, there are business models that do allow for everyone to gain. You know what's, what's the old saying that the rising tide raises all ships.

[B]

Microsoft can win a lot.

[A]

I. Not exactly that's what they say and again, I'm oversimplifying it, but there are ways, I think as a society we can get around the idea of competition and still be successful. You know, you think about, well, if every society were making money, then every society would be doing better. But that would allow for everyone to have more money, which would allow for everyone to buy more goods and services, which would allow for every business to do better. There are ways for us to grow as sort of a worldwide society that don't involve around coercive practices.

[C]

That's true.

[A]

We don't think about them too often, but they exist.

[C]

They do exist. And I think it also tying into that point, you also think, have to think about how you can bridge that gap between the behavior and the consequence when the behavior won't immediately be reinforced.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So in this sense they're thinking more long term. Right. They're not thinking in the, in the, in the moment. Right. In the moment, right now we're not going to charge you a million dollars so that we can have a million dollars. They're thinking that lawn, if you're benefiting, you're going to stay with the company which is going to produce the company more money. Right. But I think that is a really crucial point that we often lose because it's not immediate. Right. And I always think about this when we're thinking about the environment.

[B]

Right, Right.

[C]

Yeah. You can say it because you love me.

[B]

About money exchanging hands. I get really confused.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Rob already knows.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

I can't follow any movie, but you like a mobile plot.

[A]

There's a mob or a heist. But now someone buys something at a store, it's just. Forget it.

[B]

Yeah, I'm completely lost. But I'm okay, I'm on board.

[C]

Okay, good. Go ahead, tell me what you were thinking. No, you. I'LL tell you. So I was thinking, like, think about a change that you need to make, right. To be more environmentally friendly. So I was thinking about how I could reduce my plastic consumption. Short term, that's actually kind of annoying, right? Short term, that's going to be super annoying because I'm going to have to like. And probably more expensive, right? So I have to buy more things that are glass based. I'm going to have to go to the grocery store and think about other products that I might buy that are not made in like in plastic. Like I can't do frozen foods anymore because they all have the plastic lining in the inside. Right. So if you think about that, the short term consequence is pretty aversive, right. Because it's more work for me, but it's bridging that gap between the short term consequence and the long term benefit. And so then like, maybe I tell someone I'm doing it and then I show them. Right? So then maybe those actions will reinforce the actions of like removing the plastic and then knowing, right then I'm not gonna like be killing myself and other people in the long distant future.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But when I read, when I read that part, when he's talking about how you can counteract those immediate benefits for a long term consequence that would be beneficial for all, I thought about the environment because I think there's a lot of work we have to do, but it'll be better.

[B]

I was thinking about this in terms of what Rob was saying, that nature itself is coercive. And that's really like the ultimate example that we're facing right now is climate change. And what are we going to do as the humans who have created this problem to fix it when there's clearly no short term reinforcers available that are going to help start and sustain this behavior that ultimately is going to be a huge punisher.

[A]

I'm lucky I will just be dead and my children can deal with the problem.

[B]

Well, then you're part of the problem.

[C]

Yeah. Another little, like, dated portion of this is they're like, don't teach kids, like overarching consequences. Like if you murder someone, you'll go to jail. Right. Or if you murder someone, you'll die because those don't have immediate effects.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Because you don't think of yourself as being dead or dying when you're young, right? You're like, I can jump off this bridge and only go through this tiny hole and not hit that rock and die because I'm invincible. But I love. He was like, but if you take away their portable tape player, that might be a more immediate consequence. I love a portable tape player.

[B]

And he updated this in 2000.

[A]

And your child will say, what the hell did you just take away? I don't know what that piece of technology is.

[C]

I don't even know what that does. What are those buttons? But I laughed about that, and I highlighted it and put it in a little square so that I would tell.

[B]

You guys about it. Nice.

[A]

Now, we're getting into the last couple chapters, which do start to talk about the different ways, ideas. And Simmons is very honest about. These are ideas I have that may or may not work, but let's start somewhere. And chapter 16 is the first of those chapters called Is there any Other Way? Which I wish he'd called there's got to be a Better Way.

[C]

And this is going to represent our dissemination station. Right. Because the whole book has been about. This is what's happening now. And now our dissemination is, what can we do about it?

[A]

Yep.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

When we look at the idea of any other way, of course there is another way. And certainly Sidman will tell us, well, it's positive reinforcement. And there's a quote on page 240. Positive reinforcement works and coercion is dangerous.

[C]

I highlighted that, too. It's our guiding principle. Right. This is what we should always remember.

[A]

So there you go. So if you take one thing out of this book, I'll be really sad if that's the only thing, because that is part of everything you learned as a behavior analyst. It's in the ethics of code. You should know way more than that. But if you learn two things, make sure that's one of them. Sidman is very open about how positive reinforcement, while it is that guiding principle, he's not so naive as to think and positive reinforcement will solve all the problems. But he does understand how there'll be a component of positive reinforcement in all of these solutions that somebody, hopefully all of us, and not just us here, you there, come up with to make society a better place to live. I think one of the first things, the first things he brings up as what we need to get out to society at large is the idea that control exists. And once we get people to examine the belief that control means bad rather than control is always there, no matter what you do, they'll always be a level of control. We can start getting individuals to engage in control that is more appropriate. So by using positive reinforcement as their control of choice, rather than refusing to accept the control exists, therefore continuing to engage in Coercive practices.

[B]

That makes it sound so easy. Right? But, like, this boils down to, like, the fundamental difference between radical behaviorism and generally our entire culture's way of thinking. Right? Which is the difference between free will and behavior. That is a product of its history. But it's not as easy as perhaps that makes it seem.

[A]

Diana, it's going to be as easy as getting people to accept climate change. I will yell at them, and I will show them science and facts and make them feel stupid, and they will change their behavior. Right?

[C]

Science.

[A]

I will get Bill Nye to scream it from the rooftops.

[B]

He's already done that.

[A]

And it worked great. Right?

[C]

It didn't work. Bill Nye is secretly, like when kids are watching their TV shows, he's secretly giving them subliminal messages like, tell your parents climate change is real.

[A]

No, unfortunately, it is sad that it is not that simple. That step one, convincing people that control exists, is probably the hardest of these steps. Because honestly, once everyone accepts, yes, control exists, I think it'd be a lot, I think this sort of end. Let's engage in these types of control rather than scary control.

[B]

That's a scary idea to most people. Right?

[C]

I love that he. He ties this in when he talks about, like, saying no and how no shouldn't be viewed as a punisher for any type of behavior. But he says no should now come to serve as. But rather do this. I like that. But rather. So no signals that other alternative behavior will be reinforced in the absence of doing that behavior.

[A]

And that's the idea of discipline.

[B]

Right?

[A]

And when we think of discipline, take a second, think about the word discipline. What do you think of? Just think, you karate, you at home. You probably thought of what Jackie said.

[B]

Karate.

[C]

Jackie said karate because people need to have discipline.

[A]

Did you at home say karate?

[B]

The nuns rapping you on the knuckles?

[A]

We thought of, yep. And I'm thinking most people thought of discipline as some sort of, like, a negative thing. Not like karate punishment, probably not karate. Unless they thought of, like, coercive karate.

[C]

I thought we were doing an association right there, and it worked. Discipline.

[B]

Karate.

[A]

Ralph Macchio, Karate Kid. No discipline. And Sidman defines discipline as training by instruction and practice. So that goes into what you're saying, Jackie, the idea of karate. We need to change no to be a statement of discipline. In terms of training. It's a training statement. When we say no, wouldn't it be great if we all heard the word no and said, oh, that's not the right way to do it? But there's another way to do it. And I know you, caregiver or person in charge or boss will show me the right way to do it so that I can be successful, as opposed to no now, which is no, which is go to hell, jerk. Don't tell me how to do my job. You're probably wrong and I hate you because I'm having some sort of aggression related to your coercion right now. I don't want to live in that society anymore. I'm tired of it, folks.

[C]

So what about the change? What about talking about how we can use positive reinforcement at home and in school? School?

[A]

You know what? That's a good idea, Jackie. Let's get into those last chapters. We actually talk about real. Well, I don't want to say real solutions, but let's talk about possible solutions that are worth trying. And Simon is very honest. Like, it's not like. And if everyone just followed my ten point plan, society would not use coercion. He is very honest about, like, I have no clue if these things will work. I don't want to oversimplify the problems. However, I know some version of positive reinforcement will do a better job than any of the coercive practices that have been used since time immemorial.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So, all right, let's talk about positive reinforcement at home and school, which sounds like his own great book.

[B]

It does. It does.

[C]

Well, a lot of the things that he says about the home really resonated with me and how we talked about positive parenting in that book that we talked about last year in our book club, because they were like, yeah, contingencies are important. Right. You need to set limits. You need to follow through, but you also need to make sure that you're delivering a lot of positive reinforcers for appropriate behavior and making sure that kids don't feel like if they make a mistake, that they're gonna lose that. Right. So I like that. That feeling. I do also love these notes that we should bring up. That.

[A]

There's the notes I wrote.

[C]

Yeah. The special demands of children. They apparently don't know how annoying they are. I love that.

[B]

But it's true that he meant that small children, they are the center of their own world. So they're always asking for something and presenting pretty much constant demands.

[A]

They haven't. They haven't learned that there are other people that have different needs and wants than them.

[B]

Right. And it takes sort of transcending the environment in which you're in to not allow your children to become conditioned punishers to you.

[C]

Right, right.

[B]

Like if they're responding to them in ways that are, are then relieving to you, but punishing to them.

[A]

It's like that. It's. It's like in positive parenting, most of the behavior our children engage in is that weed behavior. It's really annoying and it seems to grow really fast. And if we don't pay attention to it and focus on the things that they're doing right, our children will grow up nicely. Whereas if we spend all our efforts on trying to punish the behavior that we hate, we'll just teach a bunch of children either what they should do to piss us off the most as a form of counter control, or we'll just have children that hate us and try to escape from us as fast as possible.

[C]

Right. I was actually glad that I read this over the weekend because I just did an 8 over an 8 hour car trip today. And in the car my young 2 year old sang a song about Michael Finnegan. I don't know if this song, if.

[A]

You guys want to hear, wasn't my name Michael Finnegan. He had whiskers on his chin again Poor old Michael Finnegan Begin again again.

[C]

So she sang that for about an.

[B]

Hour and a half and literally so.

[A]

Close to have a personal device. Let me, let me positively reinforce your being quiet by continual access to electronic media.

[C]

But literally I was like, oh my God, I want to yell at her so bad. I want to scream like shut up. Because I just couldn't. I like. She was like, begin again. And they could be quiet for like two seconds. And I'm like, yes. And then it would come back literally for an hour and a half. But I chose to be like, nice job singing. You're really using your words. But I didn't mean it.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And I wonder if she didn't know that, but she picked up on the.

[A]

Sarcasm in your voice.

[C]

But yeah, so I think that's. It's sometimes really hard. Right.

[A]

Because it's the same principle as you would have in school and the Simmons brings up in school. It's really the same whether you're at home or at school. So whether you're a parent or you're a teacher, what we should be focusing on is what behaviors do we want them to engage in. If we show them how to engage in those behaviors and then go out of our way to positively reinforce through praise, through access to tangibles, the stuff that we want to see more of, we'll see more of that behavior. If we ignore the behavior that we don't like, and we reinforce the behavior that we like. We don't need to punish anything, but we'll see the good stuff happen more and the bad stuff happen less. The issue that we run into is that it is so easy to engage in punishment. It is something that we've learned ourselves. So we engage in the punishment procedures. We are reinforced for engaging a punishment procedure. We therefore engage in more punishment procedures. We don't necessarily ever teach anything. It's the same as school. Why do kids not want to go to school? Because more often than not, they encounter punishment contingencies.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And this is even. And I think our modern schools are much kinder and much more aware of the challenges our students face than ever before. And it's still very hard to get everyone to get on board with this idea of, no, no, no. It's a lot of work to teach the new behavior. Sidman even goes as far as to discuss, wouldn't it be great if we all paid more attention to Fred Keller's work of our personalized systems of instruction? Because, hey, isn't that almost an automatic way to just focus on positive reinforcement for new behaviors rather than all the crap that kids really hate dealing with in school, which is the. No, you're wrong. No, you're wrong. I hate school. I'm gonna engage in counter control now. My teachers even matter at me.

[B]

I loved his ideas about teach something and then tie the reinforcer into what was just taught. Right. So like, teach a math skill and then use it to go shopping and purchase a new item.

[A]

Oh, that was great.

[B]

Or learn to write a paragraph and then get to write a paragraph on something you like.

[C]

Or.

[B]

Or write a paragraph about debate about something that you like. Right. I thought that those were really nice and made me, like, fantasize about making my own school.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In which you, you know, use PSI to, like, drill the things you need to learn and learn them as quickly and efficiently as possible and then spend the rest of the time doing enriching, reinforcing activities on what you just learned. Wouldn't that be great?

[A]

Well, that goes into. Into the next chapter. The positive reinforcement in institutions, the idea of our prison systems, you know, and I loved how he described the prison systems almost as an idealized school. The idea of we have individuals, you know, who gets incarcerated. We all know who gets incarcerated. It's not the rich white people who run businesses.

[C]

Except for Martha Stewart.

[A]

Well, she got out to.

[C]

She got incarcerated, though.

[A]

She did.

[B]

But I think about her a lot.

[A]

But again, I feel like that was the Case of like, I guess eventually we have to put one of these white people in jail. We'll put her in jail, and then she baked for everyone and then she's nice, she'll probably deal with it okay. And then we'll move on and then we don't have to do it anymore. Who goes jail? People from low socioeconomic classes, people who didn't finish school, people who don't have a lot of skills. They are the individuals who, who don't have a lot of access to reinforcement. They mostly meet coercive contingencies. When people are put into our prison systems, I think we all similar to how Sidman talked about the idea of we need to accept that control exists. We all need to accept why do we put people in prisons? Because we want to hurt them. We want them to feel bad for the things they did. We want it to be punitive. If we all accepted that we put people in prison because we wanted bad things to happen to them because we're mad at them for committing crimes, we'd be a lot closer to reforming our prison systems than we are now. Which is this fake idea of, oh, they're gonna learn from their mistakes. Oh, they'll be better people when they come out.

[B]

It's clear that that's not how our.

[A]

So step one exceptional system works. Only ever supported the prison system because you want to see people punished. That's not good. But I feel like Murray Sidman would say, you know what? The person who says, I want someone to go to prison because I want them to feel awful is probably closer to changing our society than the person who's deluding themselves into thinking I wanted to go to prison. And because they need to be rehabilitated and we'll give them a second chance, that person's much farther. They sound nicer, but they are much farther from any sense of how can we re establish our society to be non coercive because they're deluded. They don't understand what prison is.

[B]

We're not funding our prison systems in any way that will allow them to be rehabilitated.

[A]

We don't set up. Even if we were funding, we give them more money. We don't actually set up the systems to allow for any amount of education. But going back to your point, I've gone off on a angry tirade for a minute there. Just like in school. I loved how Sidman discussed the idea of what if we set up contingencies of hey, you are not forced to go to school or learn a trade or learn new skills in prison. But if you do, you will get access to privileges. What are those privileges? Start token economy stuff. Oh, you get cigarettes or you get access to the exercise yard more often or oh, you get access to more TV time. But over time you will have learned to engage in learning behavior. What will you find more reinforcing then now you get access to books. What do you find reinforcing when you have more access to books? The idea you're going to get a job. Now clothes suddenly become reinforcing because you want to apply for a job when you get out of prison. So if we just spent the time of teaching a couple small behaviors using basic behavioral principles, we would allow for the development of new reinforcers. Like you said way earlier in the show, Diana, those cusps, once you find new skills, you will find new reinforcers.

[C]

Well, I think there's a lot of reason why people go to prison. Right. So their environment may not be set up for success. Right. So prison may actually be a better environment than what they were going that what they were leaving. Right. So those people may actually want jobs and that's the only way they're going to get a job is to go to prison.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So that could be, that could be a way to think about it because we, I don't.

[A]

Well, I think we're talking about what are the jobs. What are the jobs the, you know, many of the individuals who are going to prison would be able to get when they leave prison. They're going to be jobs that do not provide probably as much potential for reinforcement as continuing to engage in criminal behavior. That's one of the reasons we see high recidivism rates with prisons.

[C]

That's a big word and thank you.

[B]

There are ways to change this.

[A]

Of course there are ways to change this but.

[B]

And Sydney describes this right now. And then another problem that that is continuing is that individuals who have served their time and are out of prison are still met with a lot of punishers within our society regarding past, regarding going to jail.

[C]

So if you've been in jail, yep, that's also a punishment can be very.

[B]

Difficult to get a upstanding job. You can no longer vote in our society and you're just viewed as sort of a less than citizen in many different ways. So there are things that can be changed outside of the prison system as well as inside the prison system to provide these individuals with more opportunity access when they leave to reinforcers.

[A]

And again, I'm only going from Sidney's book, I am not an expert in our, you know, the American penal system. But at least going through the book, the average prisoner who goes to prison, if you don't go to school, you're going to get punished or you're going to be put in solitary confinement. So we're not necessarily teaching individuals to value education the way that I think reinforcement would allow for more value for education. We're sort of setting up the same course of systems that many of these individuals saw when they were not in prison, which means they're not necessarily learning new behavior so much as engaging in whatever behavior they have to, because they're in the closed system that a prison is. And once they leave prison, they may have learned a few new skills. However, they haven't necessarily learned about new reinforcers. Many of the reinforcers are the same. They don't necessarily have enough of the skills to in. To access some of those reinforcers, even if they wanted those reinforcers. And like you said, Diana, they're still going back the exact same course of society they left.

[B]

Yeah. And that can be a big problem. And you know, what one views as valuable education may be different than what someone else views as a valuable education. And I think we want to be careful there as well with putting a judgment on what's a more valuable education. I think the programs that have been most successful in providing job opportunities and educational opportunities to individuals in the prison system have looked at what are your. Just like we. Just like we do as behavior analysts.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Like, what are your individual interests? What are your individual strengths? And how can we combine those into something that when, when you leave are going to provide you an opportunity to access reinforcers readily and provide for you and your family in a meaningful way.

[A]

Yes. And I, I honestly do not know whether that is something that has been a part of prison reform in the past number of years since this book was written. I have no idea. I again, only can speak for the. The book itself. All right, so I'm sorry if this, this next section might sound weird or like we cut off a bit. And I'll be honest, it's because we did. The last chapter of the book, Law Enforcement and Diplomacy, was when we really did. We actually had a nice, like 10, 15 minute conversation about what that entails, what the ideas were, and it was really one that was. I don't. It was. It was not heated or angry, but it certainly was. Nobody left that, given how long our episode is already gone, given how low kind of wrap we want to wrap up the book club for the year was one that we felt we weren't going to be able to do enough justice to law enforcement justice. We weren't going to be able to give the time it needed, I think, to put together the coherent arguments, even if all we talked about was what Sidman put forth. So just very briefly, the chapter really talks about the idea of law enforcement and diplomacy as wouldn't it be nice if we looked at some of those systems and how many of these systems that we think of as there to support us really do still engage in some amount of coercive practice? And wouldn't it be good if we could think of ways to flip head around and use positive reinforcement? You know, one of the ideas I think he has is what if you got pulled over and the police officer gave you a ticket for great driving and it was worth 10% off at your next trip to McDonald's or something?

[B]

I actually would love that.

[A]

But again, we'd have to change a lot of how society sees it. Because even if I knew there was a good chance I got pulled over to get a ticket for how great I was driving, my first thought would probably be, oh, God, I got pulled over by the police. It's going to be bad. But again, I think that goes to the point that Sibbon's making of so many of our supports in society. We think of with kind of that negative connotation to it, or we might think of with that negative connotation to it and there might be better ways to handle things. But again, that's a chapter I think you should read, Think about, discuss with your friends, your own. We had a very fun discussion, but again, I don't think we were able to give it enough time for the show, given how long we're going. So we decided we would keep that to ourselves. If you're interested in talking with us about it, write us on Facebook or send us an email with your thoughts and we'll be happy to share it on the preview episode for the month. And that brings us to the end of Coercion and its fallout. So with a book club, it's really hard to sum up every single thing that we might have learned from a book or we might have learned from our discussion. But why don't we go around the table and just really quickly, since we don't have a dissemination station, talk about something that we took from this book that we found interesting, either that we thought was positive about this book, that we were concerned about with this book book, but our overall thoughts on. On the work itself.

[B]

I Think this book just provides a really nice opportunity for us to reflect on our own behavior as well as how our society functions as a whole. And attempting to recognize where coercion is occurring in our own life, how we're responding to that, how we may be creating coercive practices within our own relationships with one another, and then also thinking about how our society is currently operating and where coercion might lie, and that and overall giving us a better understanding of how the world works.

[C]

Yeah, I like that. And I like. I thought there was a lot of examples where we could think about society as a whole and how we might be able to change those practices, albeit probably tiny and small. Right. Because we can't go and, like, overtake government, but how we can shine society as whole and how we think about things such as the nursing home example. I think those are really helpful and eye opening because it's. I didn't think about that before. And this is. I'm gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie the second time I read this book. Way better the second time than when I read the first time. I don't think I got anything of substance out of the first time. So I think I was just, like, reading and I was like, oh, yeah, this is great. This is great. It's great. But then I put it down and I was like, I did it right. I read the book. So I think if you've read it before, it might be beneficial to read it again because you might be in a different place.

[B]

Yeah. And even though it was written a while back and then even the updates they did were a while back, there are many timely examples and points that Sidman makes that I think are of the moment that definitely deserve a reread. And the other thing I want to mention is whenever we read anything, all these. All these things that are written by sort of the first generation behavior analysts, you just love the perspective that they come in with. Right. And they're always tying things back to the experimental literature. And there's both a grounding in the principles and then a lofty reach towards optimism and the overall breadth that behavior analysis can and really should have. And to me, that's always so refreshing and valuable that. But I encourage everyone to go back and read the old dudes.

[C]

There's some ladies and ladies. There's a few ladies. Not many, but there's a few.

[A]

For my kind of final thoughts for this being my second read of the book that I noticed a lot more of the flaws in terms of it as a work And I certainly feel bad bringing that up because Murray Simmons.

[B]

A man while he's down, just passed.

[A]

Away, so he can't write in and tell me what a jerk I am and how wrong I am. In my understanding, However, I do think the core components of the book still rang true. And I know when I first read this, it really did change my thinking on how I did everything, how so much of my being was one of coercion in my interactions at work, in my interactions at home, in my interactions with friends. So much of what I have learned to do is coercive.

[C]

I. I'm part of that plan.

[A]

Yeah. And similarly, I think when we talk about cultural competence, the idea that we all have to acknowledge that we are from specific backgrounds based on who we are. And while there's nothing wrong with being who you are, you have to acknowledge that your development came from a place of different reinforcers, different punishers than somebody with you. I think this book does something very similar in terms of, as a society, we engage in lots of different behavior, much of it coercive, not all of it, and all of us to different extents, but we are all engaging in some amount of coercion in our practice. And whether you do as many of the terrible things as Maria Sidman describes.

[C]

In the book, there's a lot of terrible things.

[A]

Whether you felt like you read this whole book and you're like, I don't do any of that. But I know there was at least a moment where you thought, well, in that area, I used to do that and I don't anymore, or, well, I still do that a little bit, and I'm going to change. I don't think there's going to be a moment that any of us listening to this podcast are going to hear and feel like, nope, there's no coercion in my practice in any component of my life. I'm sure there's some. And you know what? Maybe in another generation or two, people could read this book and be like, wow, I can't believe people ever behaved this way.

[C]

I hope so.

[A]

And that would be great. That would be really great. I think, number one, is going to be convincing individuals that control exists, similar to how I think behavioral economics convince people that nudging and changing behavior exists. We have to convince people that control always exists. We then get to choose. The positive is we get to choose what that control is going to be, and we can make it better control than it was before.

[C]

Love it.

[A]

And that brings us to the end of the show. We did it Another book club. What did you say, Diana? In terms of talking about coercion and its fallout? I find book club to be slightly coercive and that we are taking, you know, multiple hundreds pages and trying to cram it into a short amount of time. I hear you. It can be tough. I want to make sure everyone gets that second secret code word, and it is portrait. P O R T R A I T. Portrait. Like a portrait of an artist as a young man or a portrait of Van Gogh or other artists as a young man.

[B]

Talk about coercive. It took me three tries to get through Portrait of an artist as a young man.

[A]

I never even tried as a young woman. Portraits good, I think. Well, that brings us to the end of another book club. We're gonna close the book on this episode, right?

[B]

Ha ha ha ha.

[A]

I want to thank Jackie and Diana for being here and doing the book club again. These get very different than our normal episodes in which we're talking about very, very specific research.

[C]

So wait, before you say that, when you say very different. One time when I was in high school, there was on my friend's fridge, there was a magnet. It said, first it gets real, then.

[B]

It gets different, then it gets real different. I. And so that's what book cup is to me. Real different. And also been real. And it's been fun, and it wasn't all real fun.

[A]

And then also a poll behind the curtain. It's been a couple weeks due to vacations. We've recorded an episode, so we all kind of had to get back into the podcasting mindset, which is not always easy to do. So I hope you all. I'm gonna thank you all the listeners. I hope you all enjoyed our discussion of coercion. It's fallout. And I want to say, again, I think we all want to say a big thanks to Murray Sidman and his contributions to the feast.

[B]

Thank you, Murray Sidman.

[C]

Thanks, Murray. You're amazing.

[A]

If you enjoyed the show or if you're interested in hearing about our topics, when we talk about specific research articles, why not subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, or if you don't like the show, hey, leave us a review on any of those places. You can also find us online. We're on social media everywhere as ABA InsideTrack. Our website is abainsidetrack.com and you can always email us with thoughts, with ideas for future topics, and for any comments@aba insidetrackmail.com we'll be back next week with another full length episode, but until then, keep responding. Bye Bye Bye.