 Choices, folks. That's what we're here to talk about today. Quasi-experimentation, design, and analysis issues for field settings, cooking, camera, or applied multiple regression correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences. Going and going. It's not a bad book either. The question is, which one holds more behavior? Which one will get me to read more right now? The longer one. The less later, the longer one. Maybe the easier one. Maybe the one that has more jokes giving our channel. Maybe the one that has more value associated with completing it. Believe I can probably make more money as a consultant with this book than with this one. The irony is I shouldn't be able to, but I do believe that would be the case. So I think I will need to focus on applied multiple regression correlation analysis for behavioral sciences. Going and going. So anyway, for those of you that don't know what books I'm reading, go by them. They're great books. And for those of you that wonder what we're talking about today, if you haven't figured it out already, it's matching law. That's obvious. Right. I'm sorry I tried to make it. No, it's salient. It's sorry. Look at what happens when you give the cameraman one whiskey, little tiny one, just a smidge. So for those of you that think I'm lying, you're wrong. All right. So the matching law, a tutorial for practitioners. I haven't had any whiskey. A tutorial for practitioners. Reed and Kaplan from the University of Kansas published it back. Behavior analysis in practice, baby. All right. The timing of that notification is brilliant. All right. And the irony is it seems to hold quite a bit of behavior because somebody's attending to that and not attending to the lecture at hand. Not that it needs to be. All right. So this article, I am not going to go through it in gross detail. But what I am going to say is read it. All right. Why am I going to say that? Because it's important. So the first thing you need to know, matching law, it is not a procedure. How many times I've heard, I'm going to use matching law. I just want to run out of the room. I'm assuming that was a post. Ryan, your posters need to have better tools to attach them to the wall. And for those of you that think I'm talking to myself, I'm not. I'm talking about to Ryan O'Donnell at the Daily BA to which we purchased those posters because they're brilliant. I also bought the stickers or he gave them to me. I don't remember that went along with the posters, which are even better, but I have no idea where they're at. And he did give us a behavior nerd thing, which is kind of cool behavior. So we're not advertising for him and he didn't pay for that. We just like lying. He's a good guy. Anyway, back to matching law, a tutorial for practitioners. So the first thing you need to know that matching law is really about choice. This isn't a special procedure and it kills me every time I hear somebody say, I'm going to use matching like, I just want to die. Just a little bit on the inside, not officially die. Just a little anyway, choice. Matching law views choice as an allocation of responses across alternatives. Okay, I could be lecturing to you right now. Sorry, I laugh. I'm like, what's the alternative? I could be upstairs eating with my family because that's what they're doing right now. Brad and I could be having a drink. We could be communicating about other things or we could be sitting here lecturing. There must be some inherent value in doing this because the monetary value is no. So there must be some other reason why we're doing it. So the point is that matching law describes choice and it describes it from a perspective of allocation of responses. An allocation of responses across alternatives. You get the idea. So I'm going to do this over here. I'm going to do this over here. I don't know where the operating chamber went, but if there was two keys in it, this whole thing started with the rat or the pigeon, whatever it was, alternating the responses between two keys and levers. Anyway, really straightforward stuff. It's been applied in a lot of different settings. And this article goes through some of that problem behavior versus appropriate behavior in a classroom. That was Barrero, Barrero in 2010. It's been applied to the coaches of basketball, basketball coaches or no, basketball players at the NCAA. It's been applied to coaching calls in the NFL, if I recall correctly. The matching law is a descriptive tool. It describes behavior that has happened. And then you can make predictions based on it, right? It's not an intervention tool that you use, but you would design interventions based on your knowledge of behavior based on the matching law that describes those behaviors, those choices that an organism may engage in. There's several things in this article that it covers. It covers different versions of the matching law. It covers the generalized matching law. It covers, sorry, you know, that's gross, but it's just for you. So it covers Hearnstein's formulation of the matching law, which states that B1 over B1 over A1, whatever. It covers the generalized matching equation, which is the logarithmic transformation. Why do you do logarithmic transformations to smooth out the data to make it easier to make predictions, to make small differences more noticeable? That's it. I'm going to do a couple other things. Now, keep in mind, the generalized matching equation does add two constants, which is one is sensitivity to reinforcement, and the other is bias. So biases are those natural things that an organism may engage in automatically. For example, if you're looking at the probability that I'm going to write with my right hand versus my left hand, of course, I'm going to choose my right hand. I'm going to buy it because I'm right handed. So handedness is an example of one of those biases. There's some other color biases. Some people prefer other colors around them and things like that. So there's other organisms do the same thing. So bias is a thing. So you have to come up with, in this particular formula, some type of tool or some type of number to represent that. So anyway, I don't want to get into all the nuance of how that worked. You can look at it in the article and there's references to go through all of that stuff. Transformations and so on and so forth, but they do get into something important, which is about under matching and over matching. So over matching is something that you find when an organism provides more responses proportionately than what they're being reinforced for. Under matching is the opposite. They're not providing as many responses under that particular reinforcement schedule than what is available to them. Both of these have the exact same problem that they're not maximizing the amount of reinforcement available in their environment, which as a practitioner, you might imagine is something important to do, right? To maximize the amount of reinforcers available for an organism and the amount of reinforcers that person, that kid, that client, that dog, that whatever comes into contact with because that is going to influence behavior. Now, you may be going, well, wait a minute, I watched your video about McSweeney. I know, I know, all right? We're talking about sessions and reinforcers obituate, and you're obituating to reinforcers and so on and so forth. All that happens within this context of this and it applies and it's really confusing. There's so much about behavior that once you understand it, you realize there's more to understand and it all kind of falls. It doesn't fall apart. It just gets really complex. Let's see, what else? So I've got the under matching, over matching, applications in the academic world, programming for SPED and regular classroom behavior, performance, teaching, hello, all of this plays a role. There's research on all of this stuff, the amount of effort that an organism puts forth, and the matching in order to do all that stuff and effort is one of those criteria and blah, blah, blah, blah, and you get the idea that the whole thing is about maximizing reinforcement. Let's see, what's a couple of the notes here that I wanted to go over? Oh, this was one of the ones that kind of blew me away. High rates of external reinforcement decrease the sensitivity to reinforcing a single behavior. Think about that. That's really cool. So if your environment is really, really rich in reinforcement, we talk about that's been an awesome thing. Good luck trying to change a behavior in the context of that. Why? Because there's so much reinforcement available for all sorts of things to try and increase the probability of one behavior changing in that context is going to be rather difficult. Why are you changing? You're taking a coat off. You're going to cover a topic that you wanted to cover yourself. Oh, a couple of other things. This has been applied to self-intervious behavior for disruptive behavior that's not applied, but been evaluated in those contexts and the organisms match. There's another version of the matching law called the single alternative matching law. Basically, it's just a little algebraic transformation to the original formula. Seventh grade math, it's nothing fancy, but you do that and you realize that you can apply this in other contexts rather than just a choice between two alternatives. There's basically an infinite number of alternatives out there and we don't have time to get into it in this video. Anyway, the ultimate thing that I think that I wrote down as a takeaway for everybody out there applying this stuff is that every single time you're doing differential reinforcement, every time you better be aware of what the studies around the matching law say, because any time you're working with differential reinforcement, you are literally working within the context of the matching law, very specifically. You're always in that context because it just describes behavior and choice alternative, choice behavior, things like that, but in that particular situation, you're really, really, really going to be sensitive to it. The last point would be you can use whether or not an organism matches, how well do they match, to sensitivity to particular reinforcers or reinforcement in general. Are they not matching? You could ask the question, why? Maybe that's not a reinforcer for the organism. Are they matching too much? Are they under matching? Are they over matching? All of those particular things. Is that organism sensitive to it? Have you habituated? Have you not? So there's so much to apply here, but just keep in mind, here's another situation where we've talked about in other videos, we're going to talk about it here. E-A-B does apply to all the work you do and just because you may or may not be aware of all the E-A-B literature doesn't mean you shouldn't be. It's useful to be aware of these things, to find what others have done in a laboratory and see if that has any effect on what you do as a practitioner. So that's about it for that one. There's so much more to talk about that's kind of on it. For today's video, anyway.