 at Washington State University called Self-Control Revisited. Or why doesn't anyone actually read Skinner? 1853. So you can see down there for a reference. So I have a long history with this paper. A very long history. This was, I first read this when I was a graduate student years ago. And every time I read it, I love it. You know, it's one of those things that makes more sense to me and more. I read it and in less sense and all that fun stuff. And you know, you have a different, it's like rereading Winnie the Pooh. You know, it changes its meaning the more times you read it and the older you get. So I actually enjoy it. You know, we read it a couple of times in the last week or so. I'm preparing for this talk and other reasons. But so I figured we just kind of dig into it. So it's an important paper to read. Now it was written in 1980. And I think that's something that we need to address right off the bat through our channel here. And then also importantly for students out there in the world that just because a paper is old doesn't make it bad. Doesn't make it any less valid. Some of the points may not be as valid as they once were, because times change, science changes, and maybe you have some new information to add. But in Brigham's article, he talks about a little bit about self reinforcement, a lot about self reinforcement. And a review of that literature for this article, ironically, hasn't changed that much. And it's now 2020. So even in that 40 year span, science didn't really dig into that problem as much as what I personally would have liked and maybe what some other researchers would have liked as well. So my point in general then is that just because something's old doesn't mean it's invalid. So remember that that a lot of papers or faculty members or whatever journal articles, even when you're writing, they want you to cite the most current research. Well, sometimes the most current most valuable article is an old one. So we're going to start off with this channel by reviewing some old, or this isn't a channel, this is a series, where we're going to start off our series by reviewing some old articles and some new ones, and we're just going to mix them. And as new articles come out, we're going to pick those and review those too. So anyway, beside the point, so self control revisited. Here we go. So I'm not going to read the article to you, but I just kind of want to get a gist of what's going on is that we're talking about self control as a whole, right? So and the I'm going to read Tom's thesis here is the thesis of this paper is quite simple. The term self control is inherently misleading and should be replaced with some other less value laden term, perhaps self management. And that's enough quoting for now. His point has to do with what happens when we use the words self and control and when you put them together. Right. So we all know that Skinner did a whole section on self control and that wonderful book, right, science and human behavior. And maybe we'll cover that chapter at another time. But so there's a section in there on self control and Skinner talked about self control. But that doesn't mean that I mean, just because Skinner talked about it doesn't mean it's the end I'll be all you don't have to stick with that, you know, science changes. And it's completely okay to modify things and change that you don't have to do just because it's exactly Skinner's way. So really the question ultimately becomes right off the bat is what does the self control, which immediately gets you down this weird philosophical hole of what is the self. And we don't have time to answer that in in this quick little video on what self control is. But just to kind of twist this around for you a little bit, sometimes people think of the self as some mind or some hypothetical construct inside of the organism is different than the biology. And I like to think of self or consciousness, if you will, as basically what the brain does. So in in the parlance that was told to me, mind is what brain does. Thank you, Dr. McSweeney. Not that there's some hypothetical epiphenomenon that exists independent of the biological organism. But it's just what your brain does. It produces this effect of consciousness, right? So maybe that's the self, maybe that's what it is. So if we dig into what Tom and Dr. Brigham's talking about here, what does the self control and it follows that you're talking about the behavior of the organism. So the organism engaging in a behavior, if you're engaging in self control, you're managing your own responses. The problem is that when you focus on the self, you tend to go inside. You tend to look for internal factors that are causing the control. And that is an issue. And I'll read you a quote here in a little bit about that. But it's an issue because psychology has always done that kind of since the beginning. You can go back to Wundt and look at how that all went and it went sideways and parachaped and all that fun stuff. And then you got the cognitive revolution, the behavioral and the cognitive and it bounces back and forth. But ultimately what you see is every time you try to go inside the organism for an explanation for their behavior, then you run into philosophical problems, logical problems and scientific problems. So in behavior analysis, we focus on that interaction between the self and the self. Ouch, that hurt. Sorry, whoever's listening that's a third, you know, diet and the radical behaviorist or a functional contextualist. I didn't mean to say self in that sentence, but it did. Anyway, so the interaction between the organism and the environment, right? It's the behavior and the environment. So we're going to call it reciprocity, which is ironic because in another point in the paper here, it talks about the value of reciprocity and how in the cognitive science reciprocity is an important concept in behavior analysis. It's wickedly important as well. In fact, that's the whole point of operant conditioning, right? You engage in the behavior. It has an effect on the environment. The environment in turn has an effect on your behavior. It's an interplay. It's reciprocity, right? So this sort of concept is not unique to just behavior analysis. It's not unique just to cognitive science. It's an important piece that plays a role. In fact, it becomes a huge role in self-management as a whole. So anyway, let's get back to the paper a little bit here because I'm kind of crass. Basically, what happens is the moment that you start to talk about self-control, you start to also get into concepts of things like willpower. People use the term willpower, which is just as bad because now you're reifying things and creating things inside the organism that there's no evidence for those things and so on and so forth. So really, if we want to put this in terms of behavioral literature, we think of the three-term contingency or four-term. However way you want to think of that, right? So I'm not going to talk about the four-term contingency right now, but let's just stick with the three, the stimulus, response, stimulus, but the focus being on that second stimulus, right? So the consequence. If you have trouble with the word self or you dig into that word self-control, you start to think about adding an organism level to that. So it becomes an S-O-R-S, right? Stimulus of the organism makes a decision about how to respond in that environment and then response in the consequence of that. So that O in that particular contingency, which happens to be a four-term, skipping the motivation piece of course, is like a bandura sort of approach, right? And that is a very cognitive oriented interpretation of self-control where the organism is thinking about all this time. So when we add those levels, when we add that interpretation, if we put that O in there into the organism in that contingency, that room for decision, you don't add any explanatory power, number one. Number two, the issue becomes that you can kind of put anything in there and you can immediately go right back to as Dr. Brigham says, you can create, you get a new set of idz, egos and super egos certainly exists here to quote, right? But what people might say is that there are self-instructions inside you, right? Or discriminations or other intervening variables. These are things that people are inferring that are inside, but there's really no evidence that it's inside. Maybe it's just out here. So I want you to keep that in mind as we go forward. First off, what is the self-controlling? Obviously it's behavior. Obviously we're talking about the controlled responses versus the controlling responses like skin or outline and science and human behavior. So that is important to remember, but you also have to remember that you got to keep this in the context of the environment. You can't just focus on what's inside the organism. So that's why we start to talk about some other terms that aren't self-control to help clarify this concept. So we're going to come back and we're going to keep going on this article, but that's enough for this quick one just to get you introduced to the topic. Thank you.