 I think we'll start this out with the demo. We've got a hell of a chain, as you're going to have eight hands. You're going to have to fill out. You're going to have to buy the function full of it. We might be wrong. We're funny, but it's not always a joke. You know what I mean? There are mental designs that... No, I lied. Ha ha! Back with... I don't even know what the hell we're going to talk about. All I know is that we're supposed to talk about something regarding experimentation. So, let's get into the concept of experimentation as a whole. Right? So, like many authors and like many people, we've been... Behavior analysts of my generation were heavily influenced by Sidman. Right? Even those that were a little bit above me, if you will. So, before me. Heavily influenced by Sidman. So, one of my favorite things from Sidman is a quote that says, We conduct experiments to find out things we do not know. He doesn't have that accent, but I just figured it would impact. Right? So, why do we do experiments? To find out things we don't know. I mean, it's just brilliant, right? So, where do you go with this? Right? What's the next step? The next thing is, what is the... What's an experimental question? Sometimes experimental questions can be difficult to figure out. You have to be really cautious with your experimental questions. We have to make sure that things are testable. We have to make sure they're public. All these different criteria. Testability and, I don't know, specificity and empirical and I'm not going to get into all that stuff. It's for another series of videos that some day before I die, we will get to. And if I don't, then, well, we didn't. So, and I'm dead. Now I'm talking myself into a circle. Experimental circles. We don't do those. So, that's one of the things we have to be cautious about in experiments to make sure we're not using circular logic. But we'll come back to that at another time. Again, probably before I'm dead, if I'm lucky. So, experimental questions. What are they? They're the question that you're trying to answer in your experiment. They are the thing that you want to know about. Right? So, when Sid has been saying that we find out, the experiments find out things, find out stuff that we do not know, right? Have answered questions about things that we don't know. Then the answering thing is about a question and that question is the thing that you want to know and that's an experimental question. What effect does a tie have on behavior? Right? So, now we can find out what effect a tie has on behavior if we do an experiment. If we do it in the right way. Now, it's kind of tight. There we go. Right? So, we could do that, right? We could do, we could find out what effect ties have on behavior using a properly designed experiment, which leads us to experimental design. There's lots of them. They don't have time to get into them in this video and make this video palatable and interesting and brief enough for you to watch the whole thing. But we will do it in another video, including ABAB designs, ABAB designs, ABAB designs, ABABD, ABAB, ABAB designs, reversal designs, and all sorts of designs that are just kind of popping into my head right now. Lots and lots and lots of different research designs. Why are they important? They're important because different types of research designs allow you to draw different conclusions, okay? So, these different conclusions, well, sorry, they allow you to answer different questions in different ways, which can lead you to different conclusions and getting all ahead of myself. The experimental design technique is the procedures that you use when you conduct your experiment that allows you to draw the experimental conclusions. So, when you conduct the study, the conditions that you put people through, do you put them through a baseline first? Do you do an intervention phase? Do you bring them back to baseline? Or are you doing other designs where you have an intervention and a baseline and a different intervention, or sorry, a baseline and an intervention and a baseline and an intervention and a baseline and an intervention? There's all sorts of different things we can do. How those work is a topic of another video, but that's your experimental design. So, when you have a research question, you match your design to it. Some designs don't work with certain research questions. Again, we'll get back to that. So, we have to go, well, what's in a research question? Well, there's a couple of things. Dependent variables and independent variables. So, we're going to focus on independent variables first. Independent variables are the tightness of the tie. All right? So, it's rather tight at the moment. Let's see if I tighten it up a little bit. Let's see if you watch the color. There we go. Now, we're getting a really good tight tie. I'm not messing with my voice. The tie is messing with my voice. All right? So, if the independent variable is the tightness of my tie, I'm going to tighten up a little bit more because it gets loose as I talk. All right? So, if the tightness of my tie, I suppose the dependent variable would be my behavior. You could also probably measure the color in my face about now. I can't personally see it because we don't have a monitor, but I can feel that it's getting rather warm and my voice is getting rather scratching. All right? So, the independent variable, tightness of the tie, dependent variable, my behavior. Good thing off of me. All right? So, there we go. Whoo! So, as always, we're going to go back to the basics. Independent variables are the things that you want to know about. They're the things that affect behavior. They're the things that you want to see what effect they have. If I check everybody up with a really tight tie, does that do the same thing to everybody or does some people pass out and hit the floor? All sorts of interesting questions. What happens if you check up the temperature in the room? What happens if I punish you with this? All right? Those are all independent variables. That is the independent variable, right? The dependent variable is what happens. It's what you measure. In our field, it's your behavior, right? So, other things that we're going to talk about. So, that's independent, dependent. Dependent is dependent upon the independent. That's another way to think about it. The subject. What's the subject with us? Behavior. Subject is often the person, but the subject of study is behavior in any way you get the idea. So, the subject in the study could be a person, but the subject of the study could be behavior, right? So, notice how I said that. Of the study and in the study. There's your key. Let's see what else do we have in here. Oh, the experimental setting. The environment into which the experiment occurs. This has to do with external validity and all sorts of other types of validity. So, we want to make sure that if we're going to do a study in a lab that we also maybe replicate that study out in the real world to see if it has the same sort of effect. So, experimental setting is drastically important. Why is that important? Because it has to do with the control of extraneous variables. When we bring an experiment into the laboratory, what we really try to do is control for things like this. All of those things on that list are extraneous variables that might affect behavior. Let's go back to our example of tightening up the tie. Hold on. I got to grab the right one. All right. So, that's our independent variable. Oh, shoot. So, what are the things that could affect the independent variable, the tightness of the tie? What sorts of things could have an effect on my behavior? What are possible other scenarios that are going on in this particular environment that could explain my behavior other than the tightness of this tie? All of those. In other words, what you're seeing is anything and everything that you didn't control for is appearing on that list, which basically means everything in the dark world, whatever the heck it is, it's all there. Those are extraneous variables. They are concomitant variables in there, confounding variables. They mess with your ability to draw conclusions about the independent variable. See if I can just straighten it up. There we go. No, that's good. It wasn't a very effective intervention. All right, here we go. So, I'm good. We're back to normal. So, we try to control extraneous variables, confounding variables, concomitant variables, they're all the same thing. We control those in the laboratory in really highly controlled settings to draw conclusions about the independent variable. And then we go test that stuff out in the real world and see if those same types of things happen. I'm trying to think. Is there anything else here? No, replicability. We need to make comparisons. We'll get into baseline logic in another video. I don't know. Hold on one second. I'm going to check my notes. Ha ha ha. It'd be fussy. I was hoping the camera would adjust, but it didn't. So, that's pretty much it. So, we're going to come back and talk about baselines in a later. That was a video on behavior analysis. If you like it, please share it. Please subscribe. Please donate. We'd like to eat. I'm hungry.