Rachlin's extended self: Influences on a Brazilian research group
Run Bernardy’s quick money-trade or dot-judge demo to let students experience Rachlin’s self-control ideas firsthand.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bernardy et al. (2023) show two class demos they run with behavior-analysis grad students.
One demo has students trade hypothetical money with friends to feel social discounting.
The other demo has students judge if dots on a screen are random to learn about self-control.
The paper is a story of how they teach, not an experiment with results.
What they found
The authors do not report test scores or behavior change.
They simply describe the steps so other teachers can copy the activities.
How this fits with other research
Dugan et al. (1995) give a similar ready-to-run class demo, but their task is self-monitoring and IOA instead of self-control.
Both papers are methodologically similar: short, cheap, no data collection, just teaching tricks.
Albright et al. (2015) also mix stats and behavior analysis, yet they use computer equivalence training and do measure learning gains.
Bernardy keeps things low-tech and skips measurement, so the goals overlap but the routes differ.
Why it matters
You can run these 15-minute demos in your next grad class or staff training.
Students collect their own data, feel the concept, and remember it later.
No gear, no ethics board, just a slide deck and coins or dot pictures.
Try one and you will never need to lecture about social discounting again.
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Join Free →Open class with the social-discounting money game: have students choose to keep R$20 or give more to a close friend and watch the curve appear.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
We pay tribute to Rachlin's work stating that researching and writing for posterity is an act of self-control and altruism. We show how Rachlin's work influenced a series of seminars at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) based on his book from 1989, Judgment, Decision, and Choice. This influence is illustrated through two empirical exercises conducted during our seminars, where students were actively involved in data collection and analysis. The first exercise is about judgment of randomness involving coin tossing. The second is a replication of a procedure by Jones and Rachlin (2006) about social discounting of monetary quantities. We use these empirical examples to highlight some of Rachlin's major contributions to the science of behavior and their implications to our seminars and to ourselves as researchers.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2023 · doi:10.1002/jeab.809