Selective Pressure: An Applied Research Journey belongs in serious BCBA study because it shapes whether behavior-analytic decisions stay useful once they leave a clean training example and enter case conceptualization, intervention design, staff training, and literature-informed problem solving. In An Applied Research Journey, for this course, the practical stakes show up in stronger conceptual consistency and better translational decision making, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Four Corners ABA
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →Applying selective pressure to prevention behavior Behavior that prevents uncertain or future "bad things" from happening has tremendous value to humans, our organizations, and our planet. Bad things include chronic diseases, workplace injuries, environmental degradation, and climate change. Generating and sustaining behavior that prevents bad things from happening is a chronic challenge that requires perpetual effort and selective pressure. Such selective pressure, meaning selection by consequences, requires social and behavioral engineering, as well as adaptation over time. Humans have an impressive capacity to think about and plan for the future, and act in ways to achieve future imagined outcomes. However, for individuals and organizations, there are typically powerful reinforcers for risky, wasteful, or damaging behavior that compete with prevention behavior. In contrast, prevention behavior is typically followed by a neutral or non-event, and behavior is not shaped powerfully by "nothing bad happening." The current presentation will use examples from an applied research program to illustrate the problem of prevention behavior, and the importance of applying selective pressure in organizations to advance human safety, health, and well-being. These examples will also illustrate the importance and power of engineering and design interventions that eliminate or reduce hazards to safety, health, and well-being from the environment, thereby reducing reliance on costly and effortful methods for generating prevention behavior.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
Dr. Ryan Olson earned his bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Utah State University, and advanced degrees in Industrial and Organizational Psychology (MA) and Applied Behavior Analysis (PhD) at Western Michigan University. He is a Professor at the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences at Oregon Health & Science University where his research program has focused on occupational fatality surveillance and prevention, and on safety and health interventions for isolated workers in demanding occupations (e.g., commercial drivers, home care workers). Dr. Olson is a founding investigator and current Co-Director of the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center - one of ten Centers of Excellence in Total Worker Health® funded by CDC/NIOSH. In addition to his work within the Center, Dr. Olson leads an internationally recognized safety and health intervention research program with commercial drivers funded by NHLBI. Dr. Olson is a past President of the Organizational Behavior Management Network and a charter member of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology, and serves on the editorial boards for several journals in these fields.
All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.