Behavior analysis and decision making.

Fraley (1998) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.

The paper maps how tools we already use—stimulus equivalence, choice trials, rule-governed behavior—can study how people decide.

It tells cognitive psychologists, "Hey, our methods answer your questions better than mental-talk models."

There is no new data.

The finding is an argument: behavior analysis already owns the gear to study reasoning, so we should export it.

If we do, we can replace guesses about the mind with visible, countable behavior.

Branch (2019) later echoes the same export plea. Branch says our built-in single-subject replications can rescue mainstream science from its "replication crisis.

Ghaziuddin (2000) shows the idea in action. M uses reinforcement history to explain why employees keep dumping money into failing projects—an everyday decision puzzle.

Bacon et al. (1998) seems to push back. They tell applied BCBAs to ignore inferential stats and trust visual analysis. Fraley (1998) instead urges us to share our methods with stat-heavy cognitive labs. The two papers target different audiences: L speaks to clinic staff, E speaks to researchers. Same toolbox, different markets.

You already run choice sessions, equivalence classes, and rule statements. Those same routines can measure client decision skills—like picking a healthy snack or choosing to study first. Offer your protocol to school or clinic teams who now rely on surveys. One concrete step: graph one client’s daily choices across two options, show the trend line, and explain the contingencies. You just turned "poor self-control" into visible reinforcement history.