Rethinking motivating operations: A reply to commentaries on Edwards, Lotfizadeh, and Poling (2019)
The MO concept is under renovation; drop the old two-part label and watch how value and stimulus control move together.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Edwards et al. (2019) wrote a reply to other scientists who had commented on their first MO paper. They did not run new experiments. They clarified and sharpened the new definition they had proposed.
The authors wanted to keep the conversation going. They asked readers to test the tweaked MO idea in real cases.
What they found
The team found that the old MO split—behavior-altering versus function-altering—may not help you in the clinic. They suggest dropping it.
They also stress that MOs change both how much a reinforcer is worth and how stimuli guide behavior. The reply keeps the concept loose so future work can refine it.
How this fits with other research
Poling et al. (2020) picked up the baton one year later. That paper pushes the same rethink even further. It tells you to watch how MOs and discriminative stimuli work together, not just how MOs act alone.
O'Reilly et al. (2008) gives you a concrete example. Three kids got a quick taste of their favorite item before play time. Problem behavior dropped during the next session. That real-life test shows the practical side of the ideas Edwards et al. are debating.
Edwards et al. (2019) and Edwards et al. (2019) look like twins. Both came out the same year and both want to redefine MOs. One focuses on stimulus control; the other answers critics. They reinforce, not contradict, each other.
Why it matters
If you write functional analyses, keep an eye on this debate. The old MO labels may fade. New language that blends value change with stimulus control could make your analyses clearer. For now, stay flexible. Try describing MOs as value-plus-control shapers and see if your team finds the story easier to follow.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
As we acknowledged in our initial article (Edwards, Lotfizadeh, & Poling, 2019), the MO concept as popularized by Michael and his supporters, which we hereafter call the “current” concept, has served behavior analysts rather well. For that reason, the revisions of the concept that we proposed in our initial article, no matter how slight, should be challenged. We are grateful to the commentators, most of whom trained with Michael, for exploring the limits of our reconceptualization and for raising issues that we failed to consider. Herein we address what we view as their primary concerns. It is not our goal to argue that they are wrong and we are right, but rather to further discourse in the hope that it helps behavior analysts better understand some of the factors that modulate certain aspects of behavior.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2019 · doi:10.1002/jeab.542