 All right, so let's talk about ethics. It's Veronica Howard. We're gonna talk about ethics and when we're talking about differential reinforcement, typically, when we mean ethical considerations, we wanna talk about, first of all, understanding, differential reinforcement and the procedures that go into it, and we wanna think about if we're using deceleration techniques like extinction and we're trying to replace a behavior with something else, how do we go about doing that? What are our ethical obligations? I'm gonna do just a quick callback to our conversation about extinction. Remember on screen, I'm showing you this meme. It says, one does not simply use extinction without teaching a replacement behavior. What they're saying there is, you gotta use differential reinforcement. You have to not just deprive a person of something that they want, something that they need. You don't wanna deprive people of reinforcement for the sake of decreasing behavior. You need to be teaching people how to get that reinforcer in a more appropriate way. You need to make sure that that person can still contact the reinforcer that they need, but in a way that's maybe going to be less harmful. It's gonna hurt them less or it's gonna harm other people in a much smaller way than the target behavior. Let's put it in a different way. The most ethical way of decreasing an undesirable behavior, the most ethical behavior deceleration technique is differential reinforcement. And I say that because we wanna make sure the client can still contact the reinforcer, but that they can get it for something else. What I mean by that is, think about smoking, right? Typically we understand that the reinforcer for smoking for many people, not for all people, but for many people, the reinforcer that comes from smoking can be the nicotine itself or the physiological effects that come from nicotine. It can be that it's been a classically conditioned association, nicotine results in stress relief and blah, blah, blah, blah. But let's just imagine for a second that the reinforcer is nicotine. There's one way in which we do not want the learner to contact that reinforcer. We do not want them to smoke because the side effects of actually lighting up a cigarette or a cigar and inhaling and putting that in their lungs is that they're gonna probably develop lung cancer. So are there alternative ways in which the learner can contact that same reinforcer, nicotine? Without having the undesirable side effects of smoking their lungs? Well, yeah, of course. A person could use a nicotine patch. They could use nicotine gum. They could potentially vape, but the FDA is out on that. I think the current research is suggesting that maybe don't do it because if you've got unregulated vape cartridges and it could lead to really bad, the point I'm getting at here is that, yes, you can get the same reinforcer in a different alternative method. And that's the heart of differential reinforcement. How can we find the same reinforcer for a different behavior that's less harmful? So the name of the game here really is about reducing harm. How do we change the behavior in a way that's socially valid, socially acceptable? So differential reinforcement research shows us has been rated by clients, by parents, teachers, caregivers and by mental health professionals as more socially acceptable, more socially valid than other behavior deceleration techniques. And I mean extinction, punishment and even medication used to decrease problem behavior. So differential reinforcement is an incredibly powerful procedure, it's the most ethical way of decreasing undesirable behavior. And I strongly, strongly encourage you if you ever need to decrease a problem behavior, don't just try to use extinction, don't just try to use punishment. Don't teach the client what not to do. Teach the client what to do instead. Use differential reinforcement. Come on back, we'll continue the conversation with some variants on differential reinforcement. I'll see you guys next time.