 All right, everyone. Welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. So we're going to finish up this time talking about generalization This time we're specifically going to be talking about the research around Generalization and some of the clinical applications we've seen in the literature Now when we're talking about generalization, you can take generalization all the way back to some of the earliest studies in Behavior analysis. In fact, you'll remember John Watson who was Methodological behaviorists his study with baby Albert was a perfect demonstration of generalization Remember the basic methodology of the study as we train baby Albert that in the presence of one particularly white fuzzy object, there's going to be a loud noise and if he reaches for that That object in the presence of that white fuzzy object. There's going to be a loud horrible scary noise And then we present him with other white fuzzy objects And we see does he reach for those and we see that that avoidance from the original trained stimulus Generalized to lots of new items. This was an early example of generalization And this is a demonstration of what can happen. We can have avoidance become a generalized repertoire. It can be part of a person's responses We also see that there are times when we hope That generalization will occur. In fact, we can train and hope that generalization will occur, but it doesn't So this will date me But when I was younger I participated in something called the dare program and the dare program was a situation where a Officer would come into your school and teach you about drugs They'd be like this is what drugs are and these are the ways which people use drugs and don't do drugs And then there'd be a little test and then you get like a t-shirt and you could get little prizes if you agree that you weren't going to use drugs and then we started evaluating the literature related to how effective it was and We discovered that despite Millions of dollars being spent on this drug abuse resistance education that Dare was ineffective What they discovered was that not only was it not Effective that there may have been some instances in which Exposing and explaining to children what drugs are may have increased the likelihood that they consume those substances in this case what we see that dare was in principle was an example of Train and hope it was someone coming into an instructional environment Teaching you a lot of behaviors and saying okay when you get to the real environment do this But we also know that train and hope generally speaking is really really ineffective Instead what you need to do if you want to have something like the dare program where you go into children in one environment And you want to see generalization to another is you want to try something like the Eddie Eagle program So the Eddie Eagle program is almost like the dare program It's got a lot of common features, but the difference with this program is that it's Empirically supported its research conducted by a behavior analyst in Florida the program it works like this very much like dare You would have a trained officer and an assistant come into classrooms They would work with very young children and Eddie Eagle would teach kids what to do if when they were at home They found a firearm so we know that Unprotected or unlocked firearms can be a real danger for kids kids Well, you know, they see them being used in shows or they see other people using them Emulate the behavior that they observe and they can hurt themselves or others in the Eddie Eagle program The officer and their assistant comes in and they roll play through what what do you do when you find a gun? And so they bring in the toy gun to the classroom They're like, okay We're gonna hide it somewhere around the room and we're gonna do a couple of trials Can you find the gun and when you find a gun bring it to me an officer or bring it to your teacher Who's a caring person who's gonna protect you bring it to an adult so you can be safe? And again, remember this is research if you want to learn more about it. You can check out Milton burgers 2003 study What they did in this case was they evaluated what do kids learn here? And they found that the kids in the Eddie Eagle program Mastered those skills when they were in the classroom environment But when they did some probes when they did some trials at home when they would kind of plant a gun in the kids Homes later to see if they would then take the gun to the adult. They wouldn't do it So you see there was a lack of generalization training in this particular case what the researchers had to do Was they had to do some trials at home They had to actually go through some of the training experiences to get the child to bring the gun to their parent and then when they Planted other guns around the home. They found there was an increased likelihood that the the children actually followed through And admit the response but only if they reinforced and did some some training some trial in the new environment So you have to make sure that when you're training in one environment That you do a few trials you do an opportunity to Re-teach and do a little booster training in each of the environments where you're gonna go to make sure that that behavior occurs Now this builds on a larger body of literature about our potential to comply With instruction so when we talk about compliance compliance is a kind of behavior And it's a kind of instruction following a rule following behavior. Why do people follow instructions? Well, it could be that the person who gives you the instruction Is likely to reinforce that that behavior that they're telling you to do and it's also likely that the person Who gives you the instruction will punish non-compliance. So it could either be positive reinforcement They'll do something for you or it's negative reinforcement You're trying to escape or avoid some unpleasant consequence that could be associated with not following the instruction We see that compliance or following rules Uh seems to generalize to lots of different people and in lots of different settings And one of our classic psychological studies the mill room experiment Is a perfect example of rule governed behavior that generalizes to different places So you'll remember the mill room study Was one where researchers would bring in a research participant displayed here on screen as the person in the seat s and the participant would have to Kind of teach an actor in another room shown with a They would have to teach them a series of word associations Well, the actor was just that they were an actor And the whole point of having the actor there was so that the actor would make a lot of mistakes and the subject in the experiment would be asked to Shock the learner, right? They would be asked to deliver a punitive Uh consequence for not following along with Or not learning the association In this case the experimenter was also present the experimenter indicated on screen with an e Would be there and in the event that uh, the participant started Not delivering the shock or asking questions about whether they really should follow through or Being concerned or not not following instructions the experimenter would say the experiment requires that you continue And what was very interesting is in some of the replications We saw that compliance was likely to occur under certain circumstances and less likely to occur under different circumstances We see that compliance or rule following Was likely to occur when the person was affiliated with an incredibly prestigious university If they thought the the researcher was from Yale university They would go all the way through with this experiment Even if it seemed as if they were hurting or even killing the actor in the other room If the researcher had a very soft affect if they said things like the experiment requires that you continue People would follow through with with killing the participant in the other room The the person the actor would sort of feign a heart attack and fall over But we found that under other circumstances in different antecedent Arrangements there was much less compliance So if the experimenter was not in the same room but was given the instructions over the phone people would not follow through as well Or if the experimenter was kind of goofing around or being very funny and very gregarious and telling a lot of jokes People would not follow through with their instructions to continue with the experiment The mill room study is a perfect example of compliance and the generalization Of our rule following behavior and we see that generalization In this experiment was more likely to occur under certain stimulus circumstances When we talk about rule governance and rule following behavior We know that it's also kind of difficult to follow your own rules and it's especially difficult to try to reinforce Your own behavior. So a haze study for instance in 1985 they were looking at whether or not Setting a goal making a rule for yourself Would be an effective way to change behavior and what was interesting here is they divided participants into four different groups In one group participants were asked to make a private goal They would write down what their goal was they would fold it up and put it in a jar and you save it The second group was asked to make the same goal But they were asked when they met that goal to give themselves a reinforcer The third group was asked to set a goal and share it with everyone so that they would be Accountable publicly and the fourth group was asked to also set a public goal and then they could deliver reinforcement to themselves When they met that goal and the results of that study were pretty interesting So the group who made a private goal for themselves saw some improvement But the group who made a private goal and then had to reinforce themselves Saw less reinforcement. It was interesting because you would think that with reinforcement being present That you would get more meeting of the goal However folks who made a public Declaration of what their goal was Saw 50 more achievement than folks who made a private goal And folks who made a public goal and delivered reinforcement for themselves saw the best improvement in their performance So we see here in this case that kind of rule following rule governance accountability This is a kind of advanced Compliance you're following the rules and not only have you made a rule But you've announced the rule to the whole world And now the whole world in some way is holding you responsible the presence of others knowing your goal Makes you more accountable. You're more likely to comply with your goal Now you can use compliance to your advantage. So if you know That self-reinforcement doesn't work What does work is telling others what your goals are having a public goal sharing it with someone Or sharing it with someone and asking that other people to be Accountable helping you keep yourself accountable to meet your goal And I can imagine those of you sitting there saying well, what does this have to do with generalization? Meeting a goal all of this involves a kind of high probability behavior Following a rule meeting your own goal communicating your goals to others creates a situation Where you're more likely to follow through with your goals because you have a history of social reinforcement for meeting other people's goals So it's an advanced kind of conceptual Application of how do we take this generalized rule governing behavior? How do we use it for our own benefit? Well, we make ourselves accountable to others because we know that we will follow through when we are accountable to others And we follow through Because we have a history many of us of being reinforced for following through Okay, so just in summary remember that many school many new skills do not Generalize outside of the instructional setting just like eddy eagle remember just because you train it in one setting Does not mean it's necessarily going to generalize to another so you have to make sure that if you're already investing in teaching the skill You have to have a plan To make sure that that skill generalizes where you need it to go If you're going to invest in teaching the skill make sure that you're planning the investment of teaching the generalization I'll see you guys next time