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Night of the Shaping Dead: Zombie Behavior, Shaping, and Resurgence

Published: Oct. 30, 2019, 2:13 a.m.

Criminal Behaviorology

Night of the Shaping Dead: Zombie Behavior, Shaping, and Resurgence

Being as it is the Halloween season, we can have some fun, right? Dr. Kennon Lattal wrote two blogs for the Aubrey Daniels Institute about zombies from a behavior analytic perspective. Why not? Dr. Lattal is on sabbatical currently, but was gracious enough to respond to my email questions. Let’s suspend the “dead man rule” in behavior analysis (where we say that if a dead man can do it we do not accept it as an intervention, i.e., “stay in one place,” “don’t make any noise,” etc.) and instead apply an undead rule as we seek to understand how to deal with zombies through behavior analysis.

Show Highlights:

- Why is shaping as a concept so important, and is it misunderstood – or just NOT understood at all?

- What makes social relevance important and how do we determine what might be socially relevant in one instance or another?

- How does one go about deciding where to start in terms of shaping behavior and how fast one should proceed from one step to the next? Do you find people are frustrated in the success of shaping because, with zombies or people, the progress can be quite slow?

- What is resurgence, and how can it serve as an explanation for societal problems such as addiction or criminal recidivism?

- How can resurgence result in behavior generally seen as positive (unlike what we usually see out of zombies)?

Dr. Lattal’s page on West Virginia University:

https://psychology.wvu.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty-directory/kennon-lattal

How to Shape a Zombie

https://www.aubreydaniels.com/blog/how-shape-zombie

Zombies and Resurgence: A Halloween Analysis

https://www.aubreydaniels.com/blog/zombies-and-resurgence-halloween-analysis

Article on Shaping (Ekerman, et al., 1980):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332956/pdf/jeabehav00082-0006.pdf

Article on Resurgence in the Mexican Journal of Behavior Analysis:

http://rmac-mx.org/category/vol-41-no-2-numero-monografico-2015/