 So, we're talking about the article on self-control revisited, right? Why doesn't anyone actually read Skinner and Mom? I can tell you why. Because he's dry-handed. You should read your Skinner. That also doesn't mean it's deity. Just reading, right? Anyway, failures of ABA, why intercauses, such a generally rich American thing. Oh, yes. Okay. So, we were talking about what is the self, what is the control, all that fun stuff. I got a little long-winded, so we're going to speed this one up a little bit. But, I did want to focus on one other little thing here. When we start to go inside the organism, when we start to look for events and explanations inside of the being, and I don't mean biological stuff, that's a different level of analysis and we're going to have a little video on the levels of analysis. But, we should, and we do, maybe, I don't know, but if we don't, we'll have it later. Probably is one of these, because it would be great. So, sorry. I digress. When you go inside that organism, it's so easy to just posit things, to put things in there and all of that explains it, but you don't have any evidence for it. So, we've got to watch out for that. So, a word of caution here. The problem apparently, like, there's a strong tendency in psychology to fall back to intercauses for explanations. Because the history of psychology, however, indicates that the pursuit of intercauses is not particularly profitable in terms of theory of practice, and it goes on. I think that point is often missed. Science tends to make mistakes, right? It's okay. It's self-corrected. But then you make the mistake again, and it's self-correct to make the mistake again. There seems to be something associated with what we call general psychology, right? And this approach to keep going inside the organism. We try it. We've tried it over and over again, and it just doesn't get anywhere in terms of the core science until you go out and start looking at things in the environment. So, just be cautious of that when you're looking at your interpretations of behavior, especially with self-control. It is not inside the organism. It's a thing. It's a behavior you engage in, and we're going to replace the term self-control with self-management by the end of this topic. So, but we want to get into self-reinforcement. Now, this is really cool. In here, science and human behavior, Skinner talks about self-reinforcement. And if you read it on a superficial level, you'll walk away from it, assuming that Skinner's like totally behind the idea of self-reinforcement. Great. Great behavior. All you got to do is engage in the delivery of a stimulus that has been shown to increase the probability of response, contingent upon the response being performed, but you got to do that to yourself. But he's not completely convinced that it exists. So if you read this on a surface, you're going to think that it's an okay thing. But if you dig in a little deeper, you're going to, and you actually pay attention to the words. In other words, why isn't people actually read Skinner anymore? You're going to find out that there's not a lot, even Skinner's like questioning whether or not self-reinforcement is a thing. Can you deliver them? Here's... I mean, Tom's done a great job of outlining this stuff, but let me just put it in context for you really easily. If you could do that, you wouldn't have a self-management or self-control problem in the first place. If you could withhold your access to the reinforcing stimulus that I'm going to call ice cream, then I wouldn't have this belly right here. Right? Why? Because I have a self-management issue. I'm going to short-circuit myself. I'm only going to deliver reinforcers once I've done a particular behavior that may have made a healthy response or whatever. But I can short-circuit that by just going and getting the ice cream. And it's that short-circuiting that probably led me to develop a self-management plan in the first place to have to go to the gym before I give myself access to ice cream. But that's an odd problem, because if I could do that, I wouldn't have had to. Right? So it is the self-management problem in a nutshell. If there is an ability to self-reinforce, and it's questionable. There's some literature that shows it. There's quite a bit that doesn't. I tend to be along the lines of not supportive of genuine concepts of self-reinforcement. You can sure try. I don't think that's going to hurt you. But I do believe that it's lacking in empirical support to say that I can reinforce my own behavior. Which pains me to say, because I want to just say that you can. So anyway, Skinner doesn't completely buy into it. Some authors do. Some books, I got stacks of books back here. Some of those books do as well. But the evidence is questionable when you start to dig into it. So anyway, keep that in mind. So let's see what else is important here. Ecological validity is a big issue when you're looking at self-management and engaging in behaviors that are used to manage your own responses. To do this research, to do these studies, you want to be out in the actual world in which they happen. These contrived situations inside a laboratory don't necessarily generalize. So that's an important point that Dr. Brigham makes there here. So reciprocity. We covered that in the last video a little bit. Just remember environment influences behavior. Behavior influences environment. And that's something we can definitely do. Oh, and that definitely fits with an erratical behavior perspective. So let's be cautious with adding that out. So conscious private events. This is a fun one. So they may reveal connections about your environment. They kind of just describe things, right? So another behavior analyst once told me that the idea of what you're kind of that running thought the consciousness is, it's more like a tape recorder. It's like recording the events that you're observing in the world. And then we're tweeting those back to someone. Well, there's a lot of errors that you make. As Tom here says, unfortunately, imprecise conditioning operations produce the verbal repertoire for describing private events. In other words, people just full of shit. Then, you know, sorry for shortening that up, Tom. But you know what? That's just true. So in a metaphysical causing the physical, we got to worry about things like mind causing physical things. So so so that's that's an issue in here to work worth reviewing. Let's see what else accurate measures. Oh, yes. Yes, I forgot how the technician reads about. That is a great section self monitoring. I'm thinking when you're monitoring your own behavior, you really got to be cautious with a couple of things. I think the most important thing when you're monitoring your own behavior, if you're taking away from this is making sure that what you're measuring is an is an accurate representation of what you're actually trying to measure. So self monitoring, if you're tracking the number of cigarettes smoked, maybe you should track the number that you actually smoked and not what you think you smoked. So make sure you have accurate representations. There's a little bit more detail on here than that that's important. And self instructions seem to be very useful. So basically an antecedent intervention, however, they're really just real falling behavior. So you can reinforce rule following behavior as we know. So make sure that happens more as he's approaching. So we could go on and on and on and talk for another 15 minutes about this. But I do think that we just kind of close this thing out really quick. So self control, as we originally talk about it, is probably a term that we should get rid of. We should probably think about self management. And here's why. Nudgy has a lot of self control. That sentence makes sense to you. The problem is, is that it's completely BS. Why? Because we've reified the concept of self control. We've created a hypothetical inside the organism that doesn't exist. Nudgy has a lot of self management. It's lacking something, right? What does need self management? What skills? Nudgy has a lot of self management skills. So Nudgy has the ability to manage his own responses. He can control the controlling responses by setting up contingencies in the environment, maybe utilizing people to deliver reinforcers for you. So you don't have to do that whole self reinforcement thing, which causes you to get into a trap. So I think that's enough for now on our first article. So there you go. See you.