The effects of token procedures on a teacher's social contacts with her students.

One preschool teacher worked with 12 typical kids.

The class used a token board.

Some days the teacher gave tokens only to kids who talked to her. Other days she gave tokens to the same kids no matter what they did.

The researchers counted how many times the teacher spoke to each child during both kinds of days.

When tokens were earned, the teacher talked to those kids about twice as often.

When tokens were free, her talking dropped back to baseline.

The effect showed up right away and stayed steady across three swaps.

Zerger et al. (2016) saw the same pattern with adult attention instead of tokens. Contingent praise raised kids’ active play, free praise did nothing.

Lipschultz et al. (2017) looked at compliance and also found that free toys or high-p sequences failed; only contingent rewards worked. Together these papers show the contingency, not the item, is the active piece.

Fluharty et al. (2024) scaled the idea up. They used group contingencies with middle-schoolers and still saw big gains. The 1970 token trick still works; we just package it for larger groups now.

You can turn any reinforcer into a people-magnet by making it contingent. Pinpoint the students you want the teacher to engage more, put their names on a token board, and deliver tokens only after brief chats. The teacher’s social approaches will climb within a day, no extra training needed.