Transcript for:
Understanding Reinforcement in Behavior Change

All right, everybody. This week, the module we're covering is on reinforcement. This week and next week are probably the most important modules that you'll have if you want to understand behavior and learning.

So reinforcement is all about strengthening and maintaining behavior, and it's the reason that behavior, including learning, sticks around while you learn something. So this is just a law of science that's been demonstrated repeatedly with more than 100 years of research. And it basically works like this.

Reinforcement is the addition or subtraction of a stimulus immediately after a behavior. And it increases the future probability of the behavior. It's important to note here that it is not necessarily reward.

A lot of the things that act as reinforcers are things that we're not even aware of. All that has to happen is that the right kind of stimulus, either subtracted or added to the environment right after, or as a result of our behavior, that happens and it changes the probability of the behavior. We know that reinforcement happens when that probability changes.

If we try to reinforce a behavior, but the probability of the behavior doesn't change, then that means we didn't actually reinforce it. That's an important concept. to grasp here.

That when we say that something's reinforced, we're saying that it's strengthened. So it's not strengthened, it's not reinforced. So let's look at this example. Got a couple of people here.

One says hi and the other one approaches. They say hi back. So look at what we have here.

We have the individual in the blue shirt saying hi. And as a result of that behavior, the person in the orange shirt came over and said hi as well. Now, we have to now look at the effect that that stimulus change had on the behavior of the blue shirt guy. So if that effect was that he's more likely to say hi in the presence of the person in the orange shirt, then we would say that the behavior was reinforced.

by the person approaching and saying hi back. So we have a behavior, hi. We have a stimulus after the behavior the orange shirt person approached them said hi and if the probability increases that blue shirt will say hi in the future then we can say that reinforcement happened. But the probability doesn't increase if that same situation was presented over and over again and the person stopped saying hi then we wouldn't say that reinforcement happened. Let's look at this other example here.

So now we have another stimulus. Now we're looking at the orange person. They approached and said hi but blue shirt said can't talk now.

As a result the orange shirt moves away. So the behavior of saying can't talk now resulted in orange shirt moving away. If they're more likely to do that behavior in the future, so if the blue shirt is more likely to say can't talk now under certain circumstances and the person left and they're more likely to do that in the future.

And we say that that behavior was reinforced. So whatever the circumstances were for that blue shirt, they wanted to say hi, and they got reinforced by them returning the hi, but they didn't want to talk. So there's a set of circumstances there that made it so they didn't want to speak right then. They don't have time.

So they said, I can't talk now. As a result of that behavior, that person left. And because of that person leaving, and that's what the individual wanted, that person left. behavior is more likely to happen in the future under the same set of circumstances.

So in that situation, we can say that reinforcement occurred. Another thing to look at is, you know, whether or not that stimulus change is an addition or a subtraction, or minusing or plusing something. And we actually use that in our language when we're talking about reinforcement. to say whether or not a stimulus was added or removed. And basically it means do we get something or do we avoid something?

And we refer to those differences as negative and positive. In reinforcement and behavioral science, we use a lot of terms that are, uh, that correspond to math. And so when you think negative and positive in terms of math, you don't think of good or bad. You just think of plus or minus, kind of like this number line.

We've got a number line, uh, anything less than zero is taking away minus or negative numbers. Anything that's adding to zero is addition or positive. So when we say positive and negative reinforcement, we're saying that some behavior got strengthened, right? That was the effect, but it was strengthened because either something was added to the environment, positive, or subtracted, negative.

So reinforcement happens after a behavior. It's the addition or subtraction of a stimulus. If it was addition, we'd say positive. If it was subtraction, we'd say negative because we're minusing or plusing something.

And again, the key here is that it increases future probability of behavior. We know that this is what changes behavior. We have tons of research to support that. The question then becomes if behavior didn't change, whatever stimulus happened wasn't sufficient enough to act as a reinforcer. So you can't say that you reinforced and it didn't work.

You can say that you attempted reinforcement. You couldn't say you did it and it didn't work because you didn't actually reinforce anything. You didn't actually strengthen anything. Now there's one way to look at different types of reinforcers or different classes of reinforcers and it's called take a seat. But I'm going to teach you a different way to look at it.

This is a common way that you might hear in the literature, but there's another way to look at it as well. We'll talk about that here in a little bit. So reinforcement, if you remember, is a stimulus change. It has to happen after the behavior, and it has to have an effect of strengthening the behavior.

So here's an example. Colin puts his clothes in the hamper. Mom says nice job and gives him a piece of candy. That sounds like what people think of as reinforcement, but we don't really know until we know whether or not it actually resulted in a strengthening of behavior. Now here in this example, Colin increases putting clothes in the hamper in the future.

So that means that reinforcement did happen because there was something that happened after a behavior, but most importantly, it strengthened the behavior. Now here's a non-example and I have it set up exactly. the same way.

The only difference is Colin decreases putting clothes in the hamper in the future. And this is important when it comes to learning and behavior is we can have an idea of what might act as a reinforcer but we can never be sure and oftentimes the thing that we think is acting as a reinforcer actually isn't having that effect. In fact, When I'm dealing with behavior change issues and problems, the primary reason that there's a problem is usually because we're accidentally reinforcing the wrong thing and we're not reinforcing the right thing even though we think we are.

So let's look at this example. I want you to try to guess whether or not this is reinforcement. So we have an antecedent. That's something that comes before the behavior.

Mom asks Billy to pick up his socks. Then we have the actual behavior itself. Billy picks up his socks.

Consequence is mom says, thanks, Billy. All right. So we've got a behavior and a consequence, but we also need one other thing to know whether or not it's reinforcement.

We need to know what the future probability of the behavior is. Well, here we have that information. Billy picks up his socks more often when asked by mom. So is this reinforcement? Yeah, it's reinforcement.

We got a behavior. We have a stimulus change that comes after it. And we have a future probability.

Now look at this one. Everything's the same. The only thing I changed was that future probability.

Billy picks up his socks less often when asked by mom. So we have the behavior. We have a stimulus change after the behavior. Mom says, thanks, Billy, just as before. The only difference is that it didn't result in an increase in probability of the behavior.

So because of that, we can say that reinforcement did not occur, right? Maybe mom was hoping that thanks ability would act as a reinforcer, but it didn't. So it didn't occur.

All right, here's another example. All right, so we have an antecedent, and that's just what we call information that surrounds a behavior that comes before it. We have a behavior. Student walks around the room. We have a consequence.

Teacher sends student to the office. Student's walking around the room. Teacher gets upset.

Says, hey, go to the office. In the future, the student walks around more often. Did reinforcement occur? Yes, reinforcement did occur. We had a student walking around the room, and then we had a stimulus change right after that.

The teacher sent the student to the office. So think about that. When the student goes to the office, there are things that are being added and subtracted to their environment.

That student is subtracting the classroom from their environment, but they're adding the office and the people that are up there to the environment. So with reinforcement, it can be that stimuli are added and taken away. It can be either or both.

In this situation, we would... say that there are both things occurring. But what's important here is that it's reinforcement because the behavior stuck around.

It happened more often in the future. The probability of it went up and that means that it got reinforced. Now the teacher, by sending the student to the office, never thought that they were reinforcing it, but that doesn't matter.

What matters is, did it actually act as a reinforcer? And in this example, yes, it did. Alright, so here's another one. You get a party invitation.

It's the day of the party. You see on the clock that it's the time that you would need to get ready or go to the party. So those antecedents are there. But instead of going to the party, you stay home and watch Netflix.

Now, there's a consequence to that. You get the Netflix and you get, you know, stuff that's at home, maybe more comfortable clothes. But you also avoid an awkward conversation.

So if I was analyzing this with someone, we would look at this as a form of possible reinforcement in which they're not engaging in a social behavior that perhaps they really feel like they should or want to. And they're not doing it in order to subtract or avoid something. They're trying to subtract something from their environment, those awkward conversations.

If we saw that that happened frequently and the probability of staying home watching Netflix increased, then we'd say that was reinforcement. So the behavior of staying home watching Netflix was reinforced in this situation by the subtraction of that awkward conversation at the party. So we'd say that this is reinforcement.

Since we're subtracting, remember that's negative. The minus symbol is negative. So that would be negative reinforcement.

All right, so here's a few other ones. You show the word cat and say what word to a kid. We'll say that you're teaching them how to read some basic words.

Child says cat. You say great job. Child's more likely to say cat in the future.

So the behavior is them saying cat. They did it. Was there a stimulus change after they said that word? Yes, there was you said great job. Do we have information that tells us whether or not the probability increased?

Yes, we do it did increase so that is Reinforcement stimulus happened after the behavior and increased its probability now Let's look at the next one Karen turns in a high quality sales report. You're a manager Let's say for this example and you say hey, this looks great Karen But Karen stops turning in high quality sales reports. So there was a behavior.

There was a stimulus after the behavior. You said this looks great. But Karen stopped doing it, right? So we've got a couple of the components.

We've got a behavior. We have some stimulus change that happened after it. This looks great.

But we don't have the increase in probability, right? In fact, we have a decrease in probability, right? So something else is happening there.

It's not reinforcement though. Let's look at the next one. Your phone beeps. You look at it. You get a message.

In the future, you continue looking at your phone when it beeps. So in the presence of a beeping phone, we get this behavior, looking at it. And when you look at it, there's a stimulus change there.

Oh, there's a message. I get to read this information. In the future, you continue doing that. And so we would call that reinforcement. There's a stimulus that happened after a behavior and...

Remember, most importantly, it increased the future probability of the behavior. So, reinforcement really matters because it governs a lot of our behavior. If a behavior occurs with any regularity, it's being reinforced.

But sometimes it's difficult to really identify that reinforcer. If you want the behavior to stop, You've got to make sure somehow that it doesn't get reinforced or that some other behavior can crowd it out. So for all the different types of behaviors you can think of that people don't want to do, that won't happen. They won't stop doing it unless it stops getting reinforced or some other behavior can take its place.

Likewise, if you want a behavior to get stronger, there's lots of behaviors we wish we would do more of. But if it doesn't get reinforced, then it's not going to get better. So a behavior for it to get stronger, either it has to get reinforced and it has to get more reinforced than some other behavior.

So if I have two options, you know, I'm sitting there on my sofa and I can go outside and take a walk or I can go to my refrigerator and get a piece of cake. The walking behavior, it probably isn't going to compete well with that because the walking behavior may not be as reinforcing. The cake is going to be reinforcing, right? I already know about cake.

It tastes good and it's there and I've put in a lot of effort. So if you want a behavior to get stronger, you've got to try to set it up so that that behavior is more likely to result in reinforcement than some other behavior. So the way you use reinforcement is you operationally define the behaviors first of all. You've got to figure out what is reinforcing in the second step and you do that by just looking at the individual's preferences, their values, what you've observed through interviews with the people and you use all of that information to try to figure out what is really reinforcing and valuable.

to the individual. Now we're lucky in that some of our reinforcers are simply engaging in behaviors that we find valuable. So for example, taking a walk or exercising, you know, those behaviors might not seem highly rewarding, but if we've learned over time that they are valuable, then simply the act of doing them can be reinforcing.

However, You don't get that reinforcement until it's done. And so there is this little bit of a catch there. I've got to go ahead and gauge and put forth the effort before I can get the reinforcer.

However, if I've got to put in too much effort, I'm probably not going to do it. For that reason, one really important technique for changing behaviors is starting small and then gradually increasing. Increasing starting so small that there's just hardly any effort there at all that way you can Finish it and make contact with that reinforcement feel good that you did something rather than feeling like Though this didn't work for me again because I didn't do it again. So when you're using Reinforcement you want to set the stage so that You're more likely to get reinforced for good behaviors less likely to get reinforced for problem behaviors. And there's lots of different ways to do that, including just setting up small goals for yourself or removing the possibility of doing the problem behaviors.

My example of the cake, you know, if I wanted to remove the possibility of eating cake, I would make sure that there wasn't any cake around or it was at least really hard to get to. Alright, so there are some rules with using reinforcement, and one way you can remember these is through the acronym DISC. And that's deprivation, immediacy, size, and contingency. When you're trying to use reinforcement, the first thing you want to do is you want to have the individual, yourself, in a little bit of a state of deprivation for it. So if I am going to reward myself with a conversation with a friend, if I...

do my workout, I'm going to make sure that I don't access that before the workout. So if I get a text or something and it's not an emergency, I'm not going to interact yet. I'm going to make sure that I do the behavior first and then interact.

What that does is it makes the reinforcer more powerful. It registers with a greater effect on your brain that this is something you want to keep doing. because the payoff was big.

And it feels big because you deprived yourself of it a little bit beforehand. The other thing we want is immediacy. The immediacy of reinforcement has to be really critical. We've got to have some signal that reinforcement is occurring usually within the first 30 seconds of a behavior happening.

So if you've set up a reward for yourself, let's say if I am going to go for a walk, then I'm going to, and I do that for a few days, then I'm going to buy myself a new shirt. That's not going to work as well if you just put that rule out there or that expectation, I'm going to buy myself a new shirt. What would be better is if I walk, I'm going to give myself $1 towards a shirt and then immediately When the walk was over, you made a note of that. And that little note, $1, would act as a reinforcer. And it would cue you into the value of that behavior that just happened because that immediacy is there.

Size matters as well. So the reinforcement needs to fit well with the amount of behavior. So sometimes, you know, it would take a...

big reinforcer to get somebody to move on their behavior at first. But what you can do is if you can't offer a big reinforcer, you can just make the behavioral expectations smaller. So it's so easy to do that it doesn't require much reinforcement.

And so you'll hear that sometimes in popular culture lately is like a nudge. So it's just a tiny bit of behavior and then you get a little bit of that. that shot of reinforcement. And then contingency, you know, whenever you set up, if we're going to reinforce a behavior, we've got to make sure that people aren't accessing the reinforcement.

We call that bootleg reinforcement, where they're able to get it even though they didn't do the behavior. All right, so we've got these different reinforcement types. We also call this classes of reinforcement. These are different reinforcement classes because they all fit within a particular type of reinforcement.

And earlier I gave you one acronym. This is probably a better one for you guys to use as you're getting started here. It says everybody eats.

So the types of reinforcement that you're going to be looking for, you're going to be thinking about them in terms of category. First one is escape and that is where the behavior results in an escape, an avoidance, or a delay. The second one is attention and attention is any kind of human interaction.

These two, escape and attention, as far as problem behaviors go, are the two biggest factors and why problem and that maladaptive behaviors are occurring because they're allowing somebody to escape or they're allowing somebody to get attention or some combination of both. Tangible, which is I think what people commonly think of in terms of reinforcement, is something tangible, but that's actually more rare that that's the actual factor in a behavior issue. There's also sensory.

So sensory is where the experience produces its own reinforcement. So it feels good or at least it feels better. you know, scratching and itch is sensory.

Stretching is sensory. Watching. TV or listening to music, those are sensory.

They're a little bit tangible because it requires a TV or a speaker, but they're also a sensory type of reinforcement. So these things can kind of interact and combine with one another, but these are the broad categories that you want to look at. And for behavior change and for learning to occur, especially if you want to apply it to your own life, You want to figure out how are these things creeping in when a problem behavior happens.

So when you do a behavior that you don't want to do, you got to figure out what is this allowing me to escape or is this giving me a little bit too much attention? You know, what is it doing? Why is it feeding this behavior?

And then you want to figure out what's some other behavior that I could do that would still allow me to access these different types of reinforcement. So this brings us to our project activity six. You're going to learn more about reinforcement in this module and the next one and through your chapter. But what I want you to do as part of your project activity for the week is I want you to now come up with your intervention plan. At this stage, you have operationalized your behavior so we know exactly what the behavior is.

We know how you're going to measure it. And you've even collected some data on it so you have an idea of how much you're actually doing the behavior now. So at this point, we've got to figure out what should we do to try to get that behavior to change. We call that the intervention.

And I've created a few options that are common in behavior therapy. And they're easy to do. So it's a combination of both.

There are some other common ones that are difficult to do, but these are easy to do. And so I want you to select at least two of each of these. I'll talk about what each of them are. Here's one thing that you can select and people often do, and it's prompts. A prompt is some sort of stimuli that you purposely put in the environment to...

remind you or to cue you in to engage in the behavior. I had a gentleman that I worked with who he had some circulation issues and if he didn't move around frequently his feet would fall asleep I guess go numb and he would fall and at his age and weight it was pretty dangerous for him to fall. So what we did was we got these small little stickers they're what you use if you're selling stuff like in a garage sale, little round stickers. And we put them around his living area where he was and then in the kitchen as well. And so we placed them in different places and then every few days we'd move them around, let him see where we're putting them.

That way he couldn't avoid them, but they also didn't really stand out too much. So wherever he was, his gaze would naturally come across one of these stickers and it would remind him, oh, I need to stand up and move a little. And it worked.

That increased how much he would stand around and move. And eventually he learned that habit. He learned that behavior where that prompt wasn't really needed. So here's some examples. So one is small stickers around the room.

a bright orange object on your desk. So the more unusual and visual an object is, the more powerful it can be as a prompt. But there are other prompts too. A simple to-do list. If you have it in a specific place where you're easily able to see it and it's conspicuous, right, it's easy to see and consistent, A to-do list can actually be a prompt.

When we work with children with disabilities, we'll often use picture prompts. So these visual pictures, they kind of demonstrate what to do and they'll always be available so that the kids can refer to those to remember what they're supposed to do in a particular situation. But any kind of prompt will work. So it's just some sort of stimuli that cue you to engage in a behavior. Here's another option, and you can pick at least two.

I want you to pick at least two. You can do more if you want, but at least two. This is behavioral momentum, and there's a lot of good research here where if you get somebody to do... Two to three high probability behaviors.

High probability means that they're really likely to do them. And so another way to look at it is easy. If you get somebody to do three really easy behaviors just before the more difficult one, they're more likely to do it. So, for example, if you really dread studying, but you wanted to use this intervention to try to increase how often you study, what you would do is you would come up with three things.

that were super easy to do. So I'm going to get out my book. I'm going to get out some scratch paper and I'm going to grab a pen and sit down at my desk. So you're not making any commitment to study. All you're doing is you're saying, I'm going to do those three things.

I'm going to try to do that twice a day. If I study great, if I don't, well, then I don't. But I'm going to try to just do those easy behaviors. And then what that would do is it builds momentum and the mechanism there is that you're actually getting minor reinforcement for engaging in behaviors that you value and you're decreasing the response effort a little bit because now you're all set up to study, right? So it just takes one little thing off of your chain of events required.

Another example, if you're doing like more of an exercise type of behavior. I'm just setting up three little behaviors. So I'm going to change into my workout clothes, I'm going to put on my workout shoes, and then I'm going to sit there in that place until I'm ready to work out or decide to do something else.

And again, that is a little bit of behavior that, you know, deep down you value. And so you're getting a little trickle of reinforcement and that gives you that momentum to keep moving. And there's also a low level of commitment, right?

I'm not saying workout. I'm just saying I'm putting on my workout clothes, shoes, and sitting until I'm ready to do something, workout or something else. So here's another one.

And this is one that really forms the basis of most of our therapies that we do. And it's called functional equivalence. Basically, if somebody's not doing something that they feel like they should be doing, what's usually happening is that there's something else that they would rather be doing.

So something else is out there that is more reinforcing than whatever it is that they want to do. So step one is to figure out, what am I doing instead of the behavior that I want? If I'm wanting to exercise and I'm not... what else am I doing?

Maybe you're on that comfy sofa watching TV or playing a game or on social media. So you figure out what is the behavior that I'm doing instead of what I want to do. And then you figure out what's that class of reinforcement that eats. Well, I'm on social media, so maybe it's...

It's attention. That attention is any kind of human interaction. There's a tangible here because there's my phone.

So it's really that combination of things. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set a small goal to engage in the behavior and I'm going to give myself as the reinforcement that reinforcement that I was getting for the problem behavior. That's the functional equivalence. So if I got a little bit of attention through my phone for sitting on the couch and not exercising, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make my phone available and or social media available after I exercise.

Right. So that requires a little bit of restricting something that's easy. So you'd want to make it easy at first. So I'm going to keep away from. the social media and I'm just going to walk to the end of my driveway and come back, right?

I'm going to keep it super easy because I don't want to have to compete with sitting on the couch. That's too reinforcing. So I can make it easy, get rewarded for it. And then what I'll find is that it gets easier to do more.

So examples, you know, I want to watch TV and drink coffee instead of workout. Well, okay, what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to set up an easy workout goal and I'm going to withhold watching TV and drinking coffee until after it, but I'm going to make sure that it's there. I'm going to make sure that's available to me.

You know, if I'm rushed in the morning, and I want to do this, I need to set my workout to be short enough so I'm still having time to have that TV and drinking coffee. Because if I don't, then I'm doing something difficult and I'm losing reinforcement. And that's a recipe for disaster.

So with functional equivalence, we're figuring out what's reinforcing the problem, the thing that's getting in the way, and how can I use that to reinforce the behavior that I want. to do. So you can also do negative reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement is you do the behavior in order to avoid something you don't like. So one example would be giving a dollar to a friend each day that I don't work. So you take that dollar, you put it behind a magnet on the refrigerator, and you and your friend know if you don't work out, that dollar is theirs. Another example, you know, if you aren't using money, it could be just a chore. So I'm doing dishes tonight.

I write it on there. It's not my night to do dishes, but I'm going to write that on a card, put that on the fridge. And if I don't study, then you get that card and I have to do the dishes.

Another powerful intervention is using the attention class of reinforcement or the social class of reinforcement. And it's public posting. Now we're not talking about just social media posts.

This has been around before that. We're just talking about posting something so that the public or other people can see how you're doing. And that can drive you to do well. When you post that you're doing well, you know, hopefully that recruits some positive attention that's adding.

some attention, positive reinforcement, but also it's avoiding feeling like you didn't do a good job. So it's subtracting negative attention or aversive attention. So the way you do this is easy.

You just make others aware of your behavior change goal. And it could be a group of people, or it could be one person that you, that you work with on this. You want to let them know beforehand what you're trying to do and you even want to let them know what they should do when you get it right or when you don't do so well.

So you have others are aware of it and then you have some kind of display where they can see your progress. Here's some examples. One, placing a chart in a public place in your apartment.

So like if everybody, you know, goes in and out the door, so you put a little chart right by the door. where people can see how you're doing. Another one that might be a little more covert would just be sending a daily text to a friend to tell them how you did.

The key here though, it's got to be daily, right? You can't just send it when you did it right. You got to send it when you do it wrong as well. So they're expecting every day to get a text.

And then maybe you guys talked about how you'd like for them to respond. And then social media. So I said that posting isn't just social media, but it could be, right?

That is a good way to do it. You could have a daily social media post. You'd want to make everybody that would see the post aware, hey, I'm about to start this behavior change project. And one of the interventions I'm using is called public posting. So I'm just going to let you guys know how I did it.

If I do the behavior, you know, I just want you guys to like it or whatever. Um, if I don't do the behavior, I don't really, you don't, don't do anything. You don't have to comment. Just don't do anything. You know, let them know how, how to respond if that's going to be important to you.

So then you just post that, that daily update. On the social media, it can be a little bit dangerous because if you, uh, if you don't do the behavior, um, your friends are, are nice people hopefully. And they're going to say, oh, it's okay.

You know, you. You know, I think you're healthy, you know, I like you how you are, you know, and they can actually reinforce you for doing something other than what you want to do. So you got to be careful that you don't fall into that trap.

All right, so this is another really important part of behavior therapy and behavior change, and it's called shaping. Now, we can get into the complexities of shaping, and we actually will. in the next module and through your readings.

But basically, the idea is we're going to start with something that's small and easy to do. This is really, really important. When people are trying to change their behavior, it's not just that they're trying to change their behavior, but they're trying to do something instead of what they're already doing. And what they're already doing is getting some form of reinforcement. Otherwise, you wouldn't do it.

So the only way to really compete with that is to really start slowly. When people set big goals, and you may have had this experience already, most of us have this experience in our lifetimes, when you have an overly ambitious goal, what ends up happening is that you're super excited about it, you're really motivated, and maybe you do it for a couple days, maybe even a couple weeks, but it goes away because you didn't really build up the skill. right?

It was too much. It was overtraining for your brain. It was something that would not be sustainable. But if you start really small and just let that little bit of reinforcement trickle in, you know, I didn't walk 30 minutes, but I walked a minute today, you know, that's going to hit you with a little bit of reinforcement. Even though it doesn't seem like it, it's going to hit you with a little bit of reinforcement, and that's going to pay off.

big dividends. So if your goal for example is to walk 30 minutes, you're going to commit to walking three minutes the first day. I mean you can be ridiculously small at first and then slowly build up and that amount will increase pretty quickly. Now when you set these goals for shaping, you can do more if you want. So I'm going to say, hey I'm going to do one minute and that really takes pressure off like one minute.

That's easy. I can do that. But once I'm out there and I do that minute, If I want to walk more, I can.

That's fine. But I set it up for one minute. If I want to go in, that's fine too.

But I set it up that way so that it's telling me the response effort here isn't much at all, but it's going to be rewarding. All right. So I want you guys to select at least two of those intervention options, but you're going to have to tailor them to your plan.

So I gave you a brief description and some examples, but you're going to have to work them to fit your plan. And I want you to write this plan as a series of very specific steps. I'm not going to tell you how many words or sentences the plan has to be.

All I want from you is specificity. That I could look at your plan and I could recreate it to a T. be specific. Pick two of those options, be specific. For example, if you're going to use prompts as an example, don't say I'm going to use prompts.

What type of prompt are you going to use? What size is it going to be? Where is it? What color is it going to be?

Is it going to be like those little stickers that I said? Where are you going to put them? When were you going to put them there?

Be really specific. That's the key. So I'm not looking for length of your post about this or your intervention plan. I'm looking at specificity.

The more specific, the better. Now, you have to select at least two of these options that I gave you, but you can add other things. If there's other things you want to try in your plan, feel free to try those things. If you want to do more than two, absolutely do more than two. Two is just a bare minimum.

This activity, I'm going to have you post it to the discussion. So in the module, there will be a discussion post, and you're going to post your interventions that you selected, and you're going to be really specific when you write them. All right, guys, that's it.

We'll have that module up for you so that you can post that activity. Again, this is a really important topic, reinforcement, so if you don't read any other chapter, I know you read every chapter, but if you don't read any other chapter, definitely read this one today. We'll talk to you soon.