Jim Johnston

Everyday references to values don’t provide much in the way of hints about their fundamental nature. Our vernacular way of talking about values generally suggests that […]

The syntax of our vernacular dialect suggests that behavior originates in, comes from, or is possessed by the organism. It is difficult to casually refer to […]

In this post, I’m going to wander a bit afield from my usual focus on how we talk about behavior from a conceptual or theoretical perspective. […]

We grow up seeing causation in the world around us in its simplest terms – the stack of blocks fell over because our little brother hit […]

We do it all the time and it seems so harmless – saying something about behavior but adding a speculation beginning with “as if.” “She was […]

Tricky questions, perhaps because they come from different places and lead to different answers. There is more to this topic that you might suspect, so this […]

A recent thread on the Applied Behavior Analysis Facebook page asked the following question: “Can non-verbal animals mand or is this strictly a human verbal operant?” […]

One of the more common convictions shared by everyday folk – that is, those who haven’t been enlightened by training in behavior analysis – is that […]

Regardless of when you studied to become a behavior analyst, your journey was guided by the work of B. F. Skinner. Through his 20 books and […]