Practical Considerations for Researchers at Teaching-Focused Colleges.

Growth in the discipline of behavior analysis depends on research production in basic, translational, and applied areas from a variety of perspectives and research groups. Although doctoral programs in behavior analysis prepare students to become productive researchers, leading behavior-analytic journals tend to publish articles from a more circumscribed set of researchers than might be expected given the recent growth in the field. One reason may be that as new researchers graduate from their training programs, they take positions in very different environments from those of their training, such as teaching-focused colleges or clinical settings.

Willingness to produce disadvantageous outcomes in cooperative tasks is modulated by recent experience.

Cooperative behavior represents a situation in which individuals sometimes act in a way that produces a gain to another at a cost to themselves. This may be explained by a history of repeated interactions with others in which such behavior has resulted in reciprocal cooperation from others. Sometimes, even with reciprocal cooperation, gains and costs are unbalanced between partners.

Reciprocity With Unequal Payoffs: Cooperative and Uncooperative Interactions Affect Disadvantageous Inequity Aversion.

Cooperation among unrelated individuals can evolve through reciprocity. Reciprocal cooperation is the process in which lasting social interactions provide the opportunity to learn about others' behavior, and to further predict the outcome of future encounters. Lasting social interactions may also decrease aversion to unequal distribution of gains - when individuals accept inequity payoffs knowing about the possibility of future encounters.

Expansion of Sidman's theory: The inclusion of prompt stimuli in equivalence classes.

Stimulus equivalence is defined as the ability to relate stimuli in novel ways after training in which not all of the stimuli had been directly linked to one another. Sidman (2000) suggested all elements of conditional discrimination training contingencies that result in equivalence potentially become class members. Research has demonstrated the inclusion of samples, comparisons, responses, and reinforcers in equivalence classes.