 I don't know if you've noticed, but my notepad has shrunk. But ironically, I have more to say. Anyway, I don't know, cold opens. Tough. All right, here we go. Henry Schlinger, Jr. I don't know if Brad's trying to mess with me here, folks, but he's doing some awful interesting bad reviews by the camera. Play with your lilacs, Brad. Ha ha ha ha ha. That was a rule, folks. And this article is about rule following. Sorry, rule govern, rule behave, whatever, though. I'm like, I don't even know what time it is, all I know is I'm food deprived. And because my business partner says you can't eat past midnight, it's kind of like a surgery thing. And he says you'll find out in the morning. He says, read this article. I said, okay, I'll read the article. And why I'm doing all that under rules, I don't know. So anyway, here we go. If you gather the fact that maybe this article is about rules, maybe. Is there a reason you have brussels? You're trying to get me to engage in behavior. You deprived me. Folks, it's not really a joke, okay? Because I'm salivating more than what I normally would at the present. Like, I can't even talk as I'm so damn hungry. Beside the point, would you stop? Can I get at least into the article before you start to give us the example? All right. So, Schlinger, 93, Hank, Henry, whatever you want to say. Junior. So, this is a great article, as they all are, because published. Separating discriminative and function-altering effects of verbal stimuli. And for those of you that actually believe what I just said about every article is great because it's published, you know, I'm full of beep. Let's see, this wasn't the behavior analyst, so it's gotta be great. Because anything by behavior analyst is better than anything else, because we all know this. All right, anyway, so rules. So, this article is long, and wrap or difficult. But it's good. And I like it. And if I didn't like it, I wouldn't be presenting it to you because I picked it. Food. All right, here we go. So, rule. You might have heard me go off sometime on, if you've ever met me in person, I've probably gone off on about rule following versus rule-governed behavior. And what is a rule? Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. And it's really the only part of verbal behavior I actually really like. Most threats to verbal behavior, including all the Skinner stuff, it happened, like, whatever. Like, not my thing. So, Brad's really good with it, so that's why when you see verbal behavior, you usually see videos from him, because he understands it, and I don't. You know, we can go through this whole article, but it's a pretty in-depth. So, let's just look at some of the core pieces here. All right, so you do, if you've got your Skinner text, if you've read verbal behavior, it is useful to have read that and understand it in order to understand what's going on in this article. Okay, he does refer back to some of his pieces in there that are useful. So, rule. The first off the question that we're really gonna work at here is, is there a discrimination effect, or is there a function-altering effect? And by function-altering, I literally don't mean changing the function of a behavior. I mean changing the function of stimuli, all right? So, for example, the moment that you reinforce someone, the moment that a reinforcer becomes a reinforcer, that stimulus has changed. It now has reinforcing properties, the value of it, the function of that stimulus is now different. The moment you use classical conditioning, so you take a neutral stimulus, Pareto conditions, what they can do with a non-conditioned stimulus, that neutral stimulus changes its function, all right? So, when he's talking about function changes, versus discrimination, this is what he's getting at. Is the stimulus changing, is the function changing of those words when they basically become a rule? Or is a rule simply a discrimination? So, don't go near there, which is a reference to one of my favorite movies. So, because the movie was recorded in the 80s, I can't say the rest of the movie because it would be drastically offensive to everyone else out there. But the next line is brilliant, thank you, Robin Williams. So, is a rule just a verbal discriminative stimulus? Fair question. And this article basically argues that that's the way everybody treats it, including maybe Skinner, maybe? So, anyway, beside the point. So, if a rule is just a verbal discriminative stimulus, then what the heck's the point in coming up with the term rule? Because you already have a term for it. Discriminative stimulus, like you don't need the extra word. And not only do you not need the extra word, you don't even need special research. Because why? We already know about SDs. And we're gonna go into a little bit about SDs with the Jack Michael article in another time. So, we talked about functional altering operations instead of thinking of these as discriminative stimuli. And this article is presenting kind of that bigger picture, right? Of Lixon, this probably isn't just SDs. There may be some situations where verbal behaviors are SDs. And I don't really wanna get into all that, but, because that's not the surprise. The surprise is that the functional altering operation of this stuff. So, Skinner identifies in verbal behavior that rules are really also about contingency specifying stimuli. So, CSSs. I guess, getting a style of sheets. Why? Like, acronyms, wow. Like, people that are like into, yeah, anyway. I get sometimes I have troubles with all the acronyms. So, contingency specifying stimuli are rules. Those rules are function altering stimuli, okay? So, if we think about it that way, it makes more sense. So, it's challenging to distinguish between CSSs and SDs when we're talking about verbal behavior. It's very challenging. And there's no really clean way to know which one's which. And in order to really get into that, you really gotta get into what the definition of an SD is. And to get into the definition of an SD, we gotta go into some other research because with the way we all talk about SDs, even in a professional pseudo colloquial sense, we probably all talk about them wrong. And just to give you a little bit, we're talking a lot about Jack Michael on SDs and he died yesterday. So, this is kind of the little, the irony of these planned videos was that we're talking about Jack Michael the day after his death and that's really sad because the field is like, man, he was awesome. So, anyway, some of the stuff that Jack Michael was talking when I keep looking over at the article because I wanna grab it, but talked about how do you actually identify what is a descriptive stimulus and some of the things. It's not as easy as just it comes before behavior reliably, that's not enough. So, when we're talking about verbal behavior, we're gonna run into the same problem. Is it actually a discriminative stimulus? Or do these words have a contingency specifying stimuli within them? And a contingency specifying stimuli would be like, Ryan, don't eat that, I'm just looking for a battery. Ryan, don't eat the phone, you'll get sick, right? So, eat, there's the behavior. And the consequence of eating the phone, getting sick, right? So, if I eat the phone, I'm gonna get sick. So, contingency specifying stimuli. So, don't eat the phone, don't touch the hot plate, don't step out of your car where it's moving to record videos because you might get run over. People are gonna do it anyway. Let's see, there's a whole bunch of things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of the things that we get into here is the implications of failing to identify this stuff properly gets you to focus on the wrong piece. And one of the pieces that you focus on is rule-government behavior, right? Which leads only to the SD-type effects of rule-government behavior. Because you're thinking what the rule governs it. So, it governs it, it comes first, blah, blah, blah, and that's just hooey, right? The note that I made here about this is that we should not give verbal behavior special status simply because they're verbal. They're verbal stimuli, sorry. So, verbal stimuli are just stimuli, folks. It's just stimuli, right? That they happen to form words and have some other things associated within this realm of what verbal behavior is all about. But anyway, we were also run into a big reification potential here, where you're creating something that isn't necessarily there out of the rule, right? And that you're specifically following some hypothetical constant called rule. Anyway, it's one of the problems. Methodological problems, how do you ask questions about rule following or rule-government behavior? If you're focusing on the discriminative function of a rule versus the function-altering effect of the rule, then your research questions are gonna be drastically different, right? So, in the literature, according to Schlinger, we always talk, it's almost always referred to as a discriminative effect. But oftentimes, it might actually be a function-altering effect, right? So, anyway, developmental course, oh, that seems to have a developmental issue with it. So, the younger you are, the younger you are, the more likely it is you're just talking about Estes, or that the rules are more associated with Estes if you're describing your environment. And as you get older, you'd be more likely to do CSSes. So, I kind of wanted to get in, oh, that's Michael A. too, small. All right, so let me give you an example of a function-altering example using this, I can give you an example of a function-altering example. Here we go. So, I've been food deprived, we already talked about that. It was by accident and not at the same time. So, I am food seeking behavior, and literally my mouth is watering at the moment, because Brad is messing with a thing of pretzels. These are virile pretzels, they're actually pretty good. Glutino, gluten-free, big pretzels, okay. So, oh, he's gonna throw one to me. I caught it, very good. All without a rule. Nope, maybe there was one, or just SD. No, it was a motivation. He's messing with motivation. So, oh, I bit hard. Yeah, I think those are poisoned. There's still a little bit left. It's slightly unprofessional, but hopefully it makes the point. Ooh, leftovers. So, the point being that, oh, that was really good. Actually, those are surprisingly good pretzels, folks, and this is not an advert for whatever pretzels were. They're surprisingly good for being gluten-free. Anyway, what was I getting at? I am so damn hungry, food deprived. Okay, so, food deprived, right? It's kind of a motivating operation. It's gonna give me a search for food. Like, I'm gonna be more likely to search out for food and eat it. But did you notice that with one single word, a rule was created and followed. The word was poison. Thank you. So, and I don't mean the band. As he was going to say it, ain't it, ain't it. Every rose has its thorn. So, anyway. So, the, It's like you wore that girl's poison. What? Oh, you went, oh, you went boys to men. Is that boys to men? No. That girl's poison. Yeah. Back to the video? Yeah. Talk about music for a while. Yeah. You can sing, I can. He sings. Evocative effect, so, wow, sorry. So the poison, one word is all it took, right? Instead, he didn't describe all of the contingencies that were at play, right? If you eat that, you're going to get sick because it's poison, one word. Which is. No, no, no, no. Right. Thank you. You're welcome. BBD. Take a brief moment for 90s music. Remembering how awesome it was. All right, there we go. So, let's get back into poison. Oh, no, that song is so stuck in my head. All right, so evocative effect of the food deprivation is gone. What's cool about the function-altering effect of rules. We have rules and quotes because I hate them. But anyway, this word, this particular stimulus, changed the value, or changed the stimulus itself, to the point to where even though I'm food deprived and motivation is all established, I spread the food out. Now, obviously we're joking, but you get the point. So that example of poison is taken from the article and it uses that as a point to show you that the particular word poison is definitely not a discriminative stimulus in that particular example, but it has a major impact on behavior. And also because it doesn't have all of the components of a CSS, the question then becomes how in the world is it actually working? So this is a great little article, not little, but I do want you to remember there's a couple of things about it that it's, we don't know, at least at the time of this article, right? We just don't understand all this stuff. And I think this is where relational frame theory is going and starting to get into more complex analyses of verbal behaviors, whatever you wanna say. But the thing that I don't like about rule-governed behavior is that there's not this hypothetical construct of a rule floating around actually governing your behavior. I like to think of it as rule-following behavior. Now, Slinger argues that maybe that's not the best way to go because it implies the organism has, it implies some sort of cognitive experience in the organism. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. You can be reinforced for following rules or you cannot be reinforced for following rules. Like I might follow Brad's rules, but not the dog's rules. You know what I mean? I mean, from my perspective- We both take the principle. What's that? We both take the principle. We all take the pretzel, actually, before the, you know, little bit of pretzel. Oh, hell yeah. Okay. I'm wrapping up. So rule-following behavior to me is the thing. This article gets into more about the differences between discriminative effects and functional-altering effects of words that would be used as rules. So, there you go.