Antecedent and consequential control of derived instruction-following.

The team asked young adults to follow new rules that came from stimulus-equivalence classes.

They first taught the adults to match printed words to pictures. Then they tested if the adults would follow rules they had never heard before.

Some rules paid off with money. Other rules cost money. The team watched which rules the adults followed.

Money consequences controlled rule-following every time. When a rule earned cash, people followed it. When it lost cash, they stopped.

Antecedent cues also worked, but only when the team set them up on purpose. Without clear cues, consequences still ran the show.

Prigge et al. (2013) and Speights Roberts et al. (2008) got the same split: antecedents help, but consequences drive the bus. They saw it with kids in classrooms; Denis saw it with adults in a lab.

Gomes et al. (2025) moved the idea into real schools. They used a group reward instead of single cash, but rule-following still rose when the payoff was clear.

Rojahn et al. (1987) showed punishment can flip matching-to-sample choices. Denis adds that punishment can flip rule choices too, even after the rule is "understood."

You now know that understanding a rule is not enough. If a client keeps breaking a rule you think they know, look at the payoff, not just the teaching. Flip the consequence first—add a reward or remove a payoff—and track what happens. You can add antecedent cues later, but only after the consequence is right.