Intro to ABA Cooper, Ch.1 Essay Example

Intro to ABA: Cooper, Ch.1 Paper applied behavior analysis the science in which tactics derived from the principles of behavior are applied to improve socially significant behavior and experimentation is used to identify the variables respondible for the improvement in behavior behaviorism the philosophy of the science of behavior determinism the assumption that the universe is a lawful and orderly place in which phenomena occur in relation to other events and not in a will-nilly, accidental fashion empiricism the objective observation of the phenomena of interest experiment a carefully controlled comparison of some measure of the phonomenon of interest under two or more different conditions experimental analysis of behavior a natural science approach to the study of behavior as a subject matter in its own right explanatory fiction a fictitious or hypothetical variable that often takes the form of another name for the observed phenomenon it claims to explain and contributes nothing to a functional account or understanding of the phenomenon functional relation when specific manipulations of one event (IV) produce a reliable change in another event (DV), and that change is unlikely to have been the result of confounding variables hypothetical construct a presumed but unobserved process or entity mentalism an approach to explaining behavior that assumes that a mental, or inner, dimension exists that differs from a behavioral dimension and that phenomena in this dimension mediate behavior methodological behaviorism a philosophical position that views behavioral events that cannot be publicly observed as outside the realm of science parsimony the practice of ruling out simple, logical explanations before considering more complex or abstract explanations philosophic doubt an attitude that the truthfulness and validity of all scientific theory and knowledge should be continually questioned radical behaviorism a form of behaviorism that attempts to understand all human behavior, including private events, in terms of controlling variables in the history of the person and the species replication repeating conditions within an experiment to determine reliability and increase internal validity, or repeating whole experiments to determine the generality of findings science a systematic approach to the understanding of natural phenomena (as evidenced by description, predictiona nd control) that relies on determinism as its primary rule, experimentation as its basic strategy, replication as a requirement for believability, parsimony as a value, and philosophic doube as its guiding conscience the 3 levels of scientific understanding description, prediction, control 6 attitudes of science determinismempiricismexperimentationreplicationparsimonyphilosophic doubt 7 characteristics of applied behavior analysis appliedbehavioralanalytictechnologicalconceptually systematiceffectivegenerality