 Right off the bat, peers are your best models. No question about it. This is something that we've used quite extensively in terms of getting people to engage in healthy behaviors or lowering their risk and the types of behavior that they do. Ultimately, we want to use peers to teach people what to do and show people how to do stuff. And the idea is that you're not going to copy some old guy or some old person. You're going to copy somebody that you're more likely to identify with. And you're going to imitate their behavior much more readily than you would imitate somebody that is not dealing with any of the similar situations that you may be dealing with in life. So that's the core reason why peers are generally the best models. It doesn't always work out. It's just that it's a good guideline to follow in terms of modeling. A lot of factors associated with that, you already mentioned age, socioeconomic status. If you're looking at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, and he may be similar in age to some of you folks, but his socioeconomic status is a whole different thing. I don't know if you followed the news semi-recently here, but this will actually date the lecture, but that's OK. I don't care. He's been going to the, you know, Facebook is doing their IPO, right, their initial public offering. And so they're going public. They're going to be on the stock market. And of course, Zuckerberg's out there trying to raise interest for this. And what does he do? He shows up at these investment firms. And typically, you show up in an investment firm. If you're going to be suit and tie, you know, full-blown, no, not Zuckerberg. He's in his hoodie, you know. So that I'm not going to suggest that you do that. You know, it may look like a fun thing to do. And I'll bet all you guys understand that you probably shouldn't do that. So he's just raising hell with the folks back east and all these investment firms and things. Because they're like, how could this young punk show up in a hoodie for these important meetings? So he kind of capitulated. And then he showed up in just a sweatshirt. No hoodie, but he's still had like a pullover thing. Hilarious. Anyway, because of that socioeconomic status difference, it's not likely that you'll model that behavior if you went into an investment banker situation or you had your own company that had an IPO and things like that. So you would probably be like wearing a suit or something. Appearance, people that look like you, right? You're more likely to model there. You're more likely to imitate the behavior that they're modeling. And this doesn't just have to be like, ooh, they're brown hair, blue head, no, no, no. I'm talking about all sorts of things. Do they look like somebody that you might associate with? Are they similar in that sense? Or they have a similar style as you. Then you'll be more likely to model their behavior. It also falls along the lines of ethnic status, too. So you're more likely to imitate those that are of similar ethnicity. In order to be a good model, you want to show the behavior and its effects when you're doing the modeling. So if you're showing somebody what to do, you want to show them what to do, plus, and not just describe it, but actually show it. So physically show them what is going to go on and how to do the particular thing, and then show them the effects of that. When I teach people how to use a hand plane, I kind of play a little trick on them and they don't know it. But it's part of modeling. And I'm just kind of being a little bit sneaky. But what I'll do is I've got one of my hand planes that's just crazy sharp. And I don't use it very often. But when I say crazy sharp, I mean, it's sharper than any razor blade you can buy in the store. And it took a long time to get it that way. But the cool thing is, is that with the right piece of wood, you can slice off a piece of wood that's so thin you can actually read a newspaper through it. So what I'll do is I'll get up there and demonstrate. I'm like, look, blah, blah, blah, talking about stuff and get a really hard piece of wood. And actually, in the process of talking, I actually swiped this hand plane across the wood. And the end result is that what comes out is this beautiful ribbon. And it's actually so thin that you can read a piece of paper through it. I show people that, or read a newspaper through it. So I show folks that. Are they likely to get that with the hand planes that they're bringing to the classes and bringing it to my shop and learning about? Probably not, because they probably didn't spend the five hours to get their blade or the iron, as we say. They didn't probably spend the five hours to get their iron that sharp. But if they did spend that time and if they do have their plane set up right, then they can get that effect. So I'm demonstrating that. It's also kind of setting them up for the next class, which is hand plane restoration and sharpening, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, you get the idea. Another example here is this website. So Bartleby.com slash 141. It's a great little tool to help you learn how to write. This is a book called The Elements of Style. There's a current version out there. It's better than this one, but this one's free. And it's the same thing. This is the classic, so to speak. And the new one is called Elements of Style by Strunk and White. So it's two authors now. But anyway, it's just an updated version of the old book. And the idea with the old book is that when Strunk wrote this, he demonstrated what to do while he was telling you the rule. So he used the rule in his writing as he was telling you the rule. So he was actually modeling the behavior, worked really well. In fact, it's actually kind of for an English composition text. It's kind of funny. And there's some humorous parts in it. And it's a great little tool. And even if you buy the regular book, The Strunk and White, it's the same sort of thing. And I recommend it for anybody. This book is what I can credit this one book with improving my writing dramatically. Because it finally made sense. The problems that I was having and the mistakes I was making, somebody finally was able to point them out. And they did it in a way that, again, they modeled it. They showed you what the error was, rather than just telling you what the error is. Oh, use a comma in this scenario. No, they showed you how to use that comma. They showed you how not to use the comma and all that stuff. So use multiple models. So the more models you see doing that same particular behavior, the better off you are. In terms of the learner, the person that's doing the imitation, they're going to be more likely to engage in that particular behavior because they're seeing multiples do it. And they get a couple of different perspectives. When I run a hand plane, I look one way, but my body looks one way. But when the next guy or the next person's running it, it looks they may be standing a little differently. And that stance that they may be using may be better for the person that's trying to learn the task. It's also a form of social influence. Monkey see monkey do, right? You see a lot of people doing it. You might be more likely to do it. Yeah, OK. At some level, I'm not sold as completely happens when you're talking about two or three models. This might happen when you're talking about 200 or 300 models or 10 or something like that. I don't know. I'm not 100% sure on this particular one. But there is evidence in your book goes over the references about how this actually works. And I could see it in some educational settings where having two people demonstrate something might be more likely. And I told you about the one where we were doing the hand plane stuff. And I do it one way and then Rick does it another way and that type of thing. So it does work in some sense. But the social influence stuff, I think that's more reserved for large batches of folks. But who knows? I could be just off my rocker here early in the morning. Use rules with your modeling. Tell people what you're doing. Tell them what rule you're following as you're doing it. Pressing down and walking forward. So when I'm using the hand plane, I'm actually pressing down with one hand. One hand is putting all the pressure on the plane. And the other hand is just guiding the back of the plane along. There's no pressure on that second hand. It's not pushing down. It's just guiding the back of the plane. And then walking forward is instead of using your arms, walk the plane across the wood. So when I'm demonstrating how to do it, I'm not up there actually just showing them physically. I'm also saying those things. Push down. Walk forward. Push down. Walk forward. And I walk through. I use that statement as we go through the process. And I remind them, push down. Walk forward. Push down. Walk forward. That way it gets them into the habit of doing it in a way that's much easier. And of course, when I'm teaching somebody to do that, I show them that I'm doing that particular task. I'm using that rule and I'm benefiting from it. And then I also show them what happens if I don't use the rule. So I show the consequence. And that's an important thing when talking about modeling is showing those consequences. What's the benefit? And I told you before that I showed people that end result, that nice, fine ribbon of wood and that you can see through. And that just gets people to go, wow, even though they don't realize that it's not that cool, because it's really easy to do with the right type of material and with the right type of wood and the right sharpness of a plane. But it gets them that shock effect. Like, it's so cool, man. They think it's really reinforcing. And that's great. That's exactly what I want them to think. And then I go through and I show them what happens if you rotate the iron wrong or you push on the wrong spot on the plane and it damages something, right? It chips the wood or it doesn't tear nicely or it tears, it doesn't slice the wood, that type of stuff. So you show them the consequences for appropriate behavior and you show them the consequences for inappropriate behavior and they're much more likely to follow those rules then. Physical guidance. This is something that is used commonly. May have mentioned this before. I've used physical guidance to help teach a kid how to eat with a spoon, like eat breakfast with a spoon and eat cereal and stuff like that. So you can actually physically guide them and you put your hands on their hands and have their hands holding the spoon, one hand holding the bowl, the other hand holding the spoon. It's like, okay, now we're actually gonna physically guide that up to their mouth, right? And then what you can do is just back that off and combine that with fading. So you use physical guidance and then you do that a couple of times where I'm actually physically, basically feeding them but they're holding the spoon but I'm the one doing all the control. And then I start to do less and less control. In other words, I don't force their hand, I let them guide me but my hand's still on their hand while they're eating. And then do that a few times and then you back off another step and you just kind of lightly, very gently, you might touch their hand throughout the process and maybe not touching it the whole time but gently touching on their hand and then you back off and you just kind of shadow their hand. And then after that, you don't do anything, you just stand there, right? So you're fading out your SD, you are the SD, right? You're guiding your physical handling of that spoon, physical handling of their hands and all that stuff. Anyway, that's the guiding that we're gonna fade that out. And those are all the SDs. Situational inducement, this is probably one of the more effective self-management techniques that are available and it also works for managing other people's behavior but I'll talk about it in context of managing your own. My point is that you already know how to behave in certain situations. So use those situations to help select for appropriate behavior or a change that you may want and use those situations to your advantage. I'm gonna jump right into this. The idea of modifying your environment, right? Modifying the discriminative stimuli and self-management, we talk about making some physical change to your world and making that physical change is what this is all about. Modifying some environment. This is not modifying a thought that doesn't work as well as what we might think it is. I think it would. Sometimes it works, it's not generally very effective. So we want to make some physical change. So this gets kind of lost in here but the idea here is that let's say you don't want somebody to smoke in your home. Then really simple, take away the ashtrays and somebody like, can I smoke with that? Sorry man, I'm not gonna have ashtrays in here. Can you smoke outside? Makes it that much easier. If you don't want to smoke in your home, same thing. Give away the ashtrays. Put them outside. Let's say you don't want to quit smoking, you know, I don't know why you wouldn't want to quit but if you did want to quit smoking or didn't want to quit smoking, then you could just take your ashtrays and put them outside. Then at least you're not gonna have a house that smells like cigarettes. Step one, right? So you've changed your environment a little bit. And it was really simple. You just removed something from your environment and you know that that ashtray is in a sense an SD for smoking, right? Because it makes smoking easier and it makes it more reinforcing. Why does it make it more reinforcing? It's because you're avoiding a messy house here and avoiding a fire and all that stuff if you're not using an ashtray, right? So that ashtray is actually an SD for negative reinforcement when you're smoking, okay? So you can then take that SD and move it to a different location to select for smoking in a different spot. So if you don't want to smoke in the car, don't put an ashtray in there. Of course there's problems with that because then you ash out the window and all that stuff. But anyway, another example, this has nothing to do with smoking, but put condoms in the nightstand, right? You wanna use condoms, if you're having sex, then guess what? Don't leave them in the bathroom unless you're planning on having sex in the bathroom, or whatever, don't put them in the laundry room unless you're gonna have sex there, don't keep them in the kitchen, so on and so forth. The point is, is that put them where you're gonna need them, right? Because that changes your environment in a way that's more likely to select for the appropriate behavior. Again, if you have to get out of the moment, so to speak, and go up to the bathroom, so ooh, I'm gonna go get my condoms just like, yeah, right. You're hot and heavy, things are getting heated, and then you're gonna take a break and go get condoms in the bathroom, not likely to happen. So if they're right there, then you can just reach over and grab them. That makes it much more likely to occur. You can also change the environment in terms of location to select for different responses. So I think your book goes through a great example of how they were dealing with some couples that were having some relationship issues and they talked about changing the environment as a whole and going to another place to start a discussion because that new place will not select for the old argument. So the new place is not connected with that typical argument that they were always having so they would go to a new spot and then start a proper discussion and have a friendly conversation. And then the idea is to fade in some of the old stimuli, like home, type of stuff, to continue to select for those new responses, all right. So again, there you go. So start the discussion in a public place, whether they're at home, this would likely reduce yelling and screaming because people just don't yell and scream in public. Generally, it doesn't always work, but you get the idea, all right. So again, situational inducement is about modifying your actual environment. It works really well if you already have control over a given, or if you're already performing a given behavior, but you're just not doing it where you want to or when you want to, then you can use situational inducement to select for.