A Review of Recent Research on the Manipulation of Response Effort in Applied Behavior Analysis.
Response effort is the distance, force, or number of behaviors a response requires; adjusting it is a low-cost, reliable way to change behavior in ABA.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Shawler et al. (2021) read every recent experiment that changed how hard a response is.
They pulled studies from clinics, schools, and animal labs.
The goal was to see if effort tricks still work across places and people.
What they found
Making a task easier almost always raised the wanted behavior.
Making it harder almost always cut the unwanted behavior.
The team calls effort a cheap, fast tool for any setting.
How this fits with other research
Richman et al. (2001) and Dagnan et al. (2005) show the same rule in FCT.
When the mand took more steps, kids went back to hitting.
Keep the picture exchange at two moves and aggression stayed low.
Pinkston et al. (2017) seems to disagree.
They say high force did not kill behavior; it just hid small presses.
The review keeps both stories.
Effort still works, but you must count every tiny response or you will miss the effect.
Why it matters
You can start using effort today.
Put the cookie on a low shelf to boost asking.
Move the cookie up high to lower grabbing.
Count every try, even the soft ones, so you do not quit too soon.
What is response effort in ABA?
Response effort refers to how much work a behavior takes: the distance to travel, the force or pressure needed, or the number of discrete actions in the response. It is an antecedent-based, environmental variable, not a trait of the learner.
As a general rule, behaviors that take less effort occur more often, and behaviors that take more effort occur less often, when reinforcement is otherwise similar. That makes response effort a practical lever for behavior change.
How practitioners manipulate it
This review summarizes recent clinical and organizational studies that changed response effort as the independent variable. Clinically, reducing effort increased appropriate eating, compliance, and manding, while increasing effort helped decrease self-injury and pica.
Organizational applications increased safety behavior and recycling by making the desired response easier. Because effort manipulations are cheap and often improve treatment integrity, they are a strong first option when you want a desirable behavior to compete with a problem behavior.
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Cut your client’s three-step mand to two steps and watch problem behavior drop.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Response effort refers to the distance, force/pressure, or number of discrete behaviors required to engage in a response. In applied behavior analysis, response effort has been used as an independent variable to address a variety of target responses. In this manuscript, we summarize recent clinical and organizational studies in which response effort was manipulated to increase a desirable behavior or decrease a problematic behavior. Recent clinical applications include the manipulation of response effort to decrease self-injurious behavior and pica and increase appropriate eating, compliance, and manding. Recent organizational applications include the manipulation of response effort to increase safety and recycling. We also review the collection of data on treatment integrity, social validity, and maintenance in response effort research and analyze the effectiveness of response effort manipulations. We conclude by discussing the putative behavioral mechanisms responsible for the effects of response effort manipulations and by providing some directions for future research.
Behavior modification, 2021 · doi:10.1177/0145445520908509