Social validation of component behaviors of following instructions, accepting criticism, and negotiating.
Teach every micro-step of following instructions, accepting criticism, and negotiating—typical adults will like it and naturally reinforce it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team filmed short scenes of adults with and without intellectual disability.
Each scene showed either the right or the wrong way to do three social moves: follow instructions, accept criticism, and negotiate.
Community judges—people off the street—watched the clips and rated how much they liked each version.
What they found
Scenes that used every step correctly got the highest like scores.
Judges clearly preferred the full, polished versions over the sloppy ones.
This tells us the small steps we teach really matter to typical adults.
How this fits with other research
Laugeson et al. (2014) later asked parents and teachers to rate the NECC-CSA skills. They also picked the same kind of core moves, showing the 1992 logic works for kids with autism too.
Zigman et al. (1997) took the idea to work sites. They told staff to first check which social moves bosses actually care about—straight from the 1992 playbook.
Spriggs et al. (2016) and Walsh et al. (2018) both added brief BST plus video modeling after they picked the validated moves. Their students made big gains, proving you can teach the liked behaviors quickly once you know what they are.
Why it matters
You no longer have to guess which parts of “follow instructions” or “accept feedback” to teach. Show the full, correct version to a few typical adults in the person’s daily world—coworkers, peers, family—and ask, “Would you like this?” If they say yes, you have a green-light target. Then chain or BST those exact pieces. Social validity becomes your built-in prompt for picking goals and showing funders why they matter.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study evaluated whether behaviors often taught as part of social skills training are judged favorably by others. Community judges evaluated the performances of people in various situations requiring one of three social skills: following instructions, accepting criticism, and negotiating to resolve conflicts. These skills were displayed in videotaped scenes by actors with and without mental retardation who acted out roles that had different types of authority relationships, and when different components or clusters of behavior (nonverbal, specific verbal, or general verbal behaviors) were performed well or poorly. The highest ratings by judges were of videotaped scenes that depicted correct use of all behaviors, regardless of which skill was being examined, whether or not the actor had mental retardation, or what the relationship was between the two actors. The lowest ratings were of videotaped scenes that depicted poor performance of all behaviors, and intermediate ratings were obtained when only some of the behaviors were performed poorly. These results, as well as the verbal responses of judges to questions, indicated that the different behaviors commonly used in teaching the skills of following instructions, accepting criticism, and negotiating are relevant to judgment of social performance, and are likely to be reinforced and maintained by social contingencies.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1992 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1992.25-401