Behavioral economic influences on treatments designed to decrease destructive behavior.

Chen et al. (2001) built a treatment that treats communication like money. Kids could "buy" breaks, toys, or snacks by asking nicely.

The team first ran a mini-market in the clinic. They watched what kids chose when breaks, food, and attention were on sale.

Next they priced the new FCT response cheap and destructive behavior expensive. The package wiped out problem acts and lifted talking and compliance.

Destructive behavior dropped to zero. Communication and compliance shot up.

The same lesson markets teach shoppers worked for kids: when the deal is better on the good side, people switch.

Owen et al. (2020) later showed the rule still holds even when the pay-off is odd. They thinned the schedule for mands that forced adults to comply with the child and still got a 97% drop in problem acts.

Allen et al. (2001) ran a near-copy test the same year. They offered only food for talking and left problem behavior on free pay. Talking still won, proving the economic idea works without extra extinction.

Gutierrez et al. (1998) looks like a clash but is not. They gave breaks for compliance and saw no drop in destruction. The key gap: in the 1998 study the break also served up attention, so the "price" of problem behavior stayed low.

You can skip long extinction battles. Just make the good response pay more, more often, and more easily. Run a five-minute choice test, find the high-value stuff, then let the client "shop" with words. Start Monday by giving three tokens, bites, or seconds of iPad for each calm request while you withhold or delay the payoff for yelling.