Achievement Place: modification of the behaviors of pre-delinquent boys within a token economy.
Token economies reliably improve everyday living skills in pre-delinquent boys—even when points are delivered on only 8% of days.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Six pre-delinquent boys lived in Achievement Place, a group home. Staff gave points for four skills: being on time, cleaning rooms, saving money, and watching the news. The team ran four ABAB reversals to test if points really drove the change.
What they found
Points worked every time. Promptness, cleaning, saving, and news watching all jumped when points were available. Room-cleaning stayed high even while points faded to only one day in twelve.
How this fits with other research
Phillips (1968) started the same program three years earlier. The 1971 paper adds tighter ABAB proof across new skills. Robinson et al. (1981) later moved the idea to a classroom. They showed hyperactive third-graders did nine times more work when tokens bought game time. Hangen et al. (2023) sounds negative at first: tokens alone were weaker than candy or free time. Their lab study simply warns us to check backup prizes, not to drop tokens. Together the set shows tokens work, but only if kids can trade them for things they actually want.
Why it matters
You can run a token economy anywhere: group home, classroom, or clinic. Pick daily skills that matter—room care, homework, exercise. Link points to strong backup reinforcers. Fade slowly so gains stick. One easy start: hand a point each time a client is on task, let them swap ten points for five minutes of a favorite game at 2 p.m. Track the behavior across days and you have instant proof the system is working.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The "pre-delinquent" behaviors of six boys at Achievement Place, a community based family style behavior modification center for delinquents, were modified using token (points) reinforcement procedures. In Exp. I, point losses contingent on each minute late were effective in producing promptness at the evening meal. During the reversal phase, threats (which were not backed up with point losses) to reinstate the point consequences initially improved promptness but the last two of five threats were ineffective. In Exp. II, point consequences effectively maintained the boys' room-cleaning behavior and, during a fading condition where the percentage of days when the contingency occurred was decreased, the point consequences remained effective for over six months, even when they were delivered on only 8% of the days. Experiment III showed that the boys saved considerable amounts of money when point consequences were available for deposits but saved little money when no points were available. Also, when points were given only for deposits that occurred on specific days the boys deposited their money almost exclusively on those days. In Exp. IV, point consequences contingent on the number of correct answers on a news quiz produced the greatest increase in the percentage of boys who watched the news and, to a lesser extent, increased the percentage of correct answers for the boys who watched the news. The results indicate that "pre-delinquent" behaviors are amenable to modification procedures and that a token reinforcement system provides a practical means of modifying these behaviors.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1971 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1971.4-45