 Now if you look in that picture on there and you might have to look close depending on the connection and you know How good this video ends up being but you'll notice one two three four rocks that are painted red I want you to think about that for a second. This is a real picture by the way. This is not made up This isn't Photoshop And I will tell you that this is taken in the eastern provinces in Afghanistan So you may know what those rocks are saying Because they're it's a rule The red rocks are a rule for mines It's like don't walk here. That's kind of what the rule is not interestingly enough You can't really see it, but there's actually writing on those rocks So the rule is actually written verbally here as well And it's written in Dari and it's written in posh to and no one writes in English for whatever reason but probably because there's Not many native English speakers living around those parts But what they do is when when you have a minefield or when you have a field that hasn't been de-mined All right, and you got to remember that Afghanistan was so heavily mixed with the heavy It's the heaviest Mind country in the world and and the de-mining there is still gonna take like another five or ten years And it's been going on for ten years. Okay, so Everywhere you walk especially when you're out in the sticks around the boonies It's there's guaranteed to be mines unless it's been de-mined So what they do is that the the de-mining folks will they'll come through and they'll clear the sides of roads Right, so they'll they'll clear the first 50 meters on either side of a road And that's kind of the low-hanging fruit and it keeps a lot of people safe It's not many folks are gonna be out walking through the countryside But then they put these red rocks for areas where there are likely mines where they've found mines nearby But they have not de-mined this area. So it's basically a rule saying don't go in here And if you go in here, you may die, right? No, some people go well, no, it's a discriminative stimulus and it's really not and the reason it's not is because of it was an SD And I guess it could be in this case but Then it would signal that you're gonna get reinforced for something and it is kind of that because there's a negative Reinforcement of avoiding the field and avoiding the death and all that stuff But that all implies that it's gonna have to happen multiple times and the probabilities and death is like less than one shot deal Okay, so they really are more of a rule per se So I've always talked about how rules need to be verbal Here's one case where they actually don't where that signal is telling you something else But in order for that to work in order for those red rocks to work I had to tell you this story Because if you're just cruising down a street in Afghanistan, you know, you're heading over to the local province or something like that Or actually like where this picture is head not to not Nangahar, yeah, Nangahar University. So heading out east To Jalalabad and this is right alongside one of the major highways You wouldn't know what those are you'd need somebody to explain it to you and once they explain it to you like, okay I can't hit not going anywhere near the red rocks well, this is More it's frustratingly common to see these red rocks over there. In fact, there's even some out by the golf course There's another rule that exists over there. That's just kind of funny is that if you see What is it You see sheep droppings in the rocks, right? So if you've got these red rocks, but on the other side, there's sheep droppings like in the background here There's a bunch of sheep droppings. You're okay You can ignore the red rocks because the sheep would have blown up any of the mines. Anyway, that's kind of one of those crazy things I'm gonna take a pause here for a moment Okay, so let's just keep cruising forward now that we know all about sheep poop and red rocks in Afghanistan, right? I Don't like what your book talks about in one sense in another sense. It's nice. It's great, but your book use the term Rule governed behavior. Okay, that implies that the rule actually has some Power over you is this governing power that's going to just like punish you and tax you and all these different things right so in other words, you know joking aside, it's saying that The rule has the strength and the rule is what is controlling your behavior, right? In reality, it's not Rule governed behavior is better described as rule following behavior And the reason that I say that and the reason that the handful of us not well more than a handful of us a majority of None of us behavior analysts now usually use the term rule following behavior Is because we know that rule following is a behavior that by itself can be reinforced or punished You can get reinforced for following the rules you can actually get punished for following the rules Imagine that if you if you follow the rules and for whatever reason the rules didn't work for you And you still ran into a problem or something like that Then guess what rule following behavior is going to decrease so rule following Is what we would all tend to use now? I'll bounce back and forth in the slides and I know there's a couple of slides that say rule governed behavior I slipped back into that because that's the way I was originally trained and because that is Well know what we're talking about when we say rule governed behavior. It's because we're setting up a scenario that we'll talk about in a little bit, but Just keep in mind that I prefer the term rule following behavior And it gets you to focus on the idea that is in this point Which is that the behavior itself of following rules is usually well developed as you grow older, right? But it's something that you learn throughout life Ultimately what happens with following the rules is it gives you access to more reinforcers And it allows you to avoid punishers if you follow the rules on the road All right, you're likely to avoid punishment when you avoid punishment Then you are getting negatively reinforced, right? You're avoiding some stimulus That's probably aversive like a ticket or an accident or something like that When you listen to what somebody else is telling you In terms of somebody trying to teach you a skill and say here's a rule for you and Follow that rule and things will work Okay, and that tends to be the case like apprentices have to follow a lot of rules and they follow the rules because they they don't want to have to Learn the hard way so to speak so by following the rules you get in contact with those reinforcers much quicker And we'll talk about some of those clear rules for the consequences are always best Don't hand plane against the grain You guys are going what the hell is he talking about now not point simple You know hand planes and the idea is you're trying to smooth out a piece of wood Well, you have to read the edge of the wood in the direction that the grains going so assuming you're gonna go with the grain always We can never really go cross grain. There's no reason to do that. So you're going with the grain No, there's still another direction that the grain is going the grain doesn't always It isn't always parallel with the surface of the wood. It's usually going down Into the wood or up against the wood so the idea is that You need to follow the grain in a way that won't cause it to tear away From the wood underneath that you want to slice it off, but you want to tear it out So when we talk about it, this is almost impossible to do without looking at a piece of wood, but Ultimately what we do is we say, you know plane with the grain of the wood read the wood And those are rules that we use To help people come in contact with the reinforcers of having a smooth finish and if you're doing hand-planning So clear rules for the consequences are always is always the best the rules here for For the red rocks pretty straightforward don't go in here Otherwise you will die or lose the limb or something like that. That's pretty clear You know, it's not like saying ooh look at the pretty red rocks. There might be something behind them end-to-end You know, that's a bad rule. That's not a good thing that you want to tell people First off, it's just mean second off. It's just not clear Unclear ones do work. They just typically don't work as well and they have a tendency to be Easily the rule-following behavior from unclear rules tends to be punished rather quickly or Extinguished rather quickly because you don't always come in contact with the reinforcers And there's the whole threat or command thing if you're gonna threaten somebody you're gonna threaten somebody and they Don't do what you're telling them to do You actually have to follow through with threat because if you don't follow through with that threat Then it makes those rules completely ineffective. So if I say, you know, I want you to study this material or else You know, it's like well, what the hell's the or else? And what am I gonna do to you? Right, so let's say I do you know do something like Freak out and spray a bunch of water on the class because you guys didn't study properly, right? Now I've at least followed through on my threat. I'm not gonna do that You know, so I'm not gonna give you those types of threats So because if I gave you the threat and didn't follow through then you now know that my rules are just pointless the same thing goes with commands