Ethical decision-making is, at its most fundamental level, choice behavior. Every time a behavior analyst faces an ethical dilemma, they are choosing between response alternatives that differ in their consequences, timing, effort, and social implications.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via RethinkBH
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Join Free →By definition, clinical and ethical decision-making are choice. Decades of research from the experimental analysis of behavior provide behavior analysts with a rich understanding of the variables known to influence choice. But how well aligned are the findings from basic research with the complexity of ethical decision-making in everyday clinical contexts? In this episode of Our Next Guest, we talk with Dr. David Cox, who has spent the past 14 years studying how basic research on choice helps practitioners think about ethical decision-making. In so doing, we discuss the many gaps in our current knowledge of ethical decision-making and the many exciting opportunities for impactful future work in this area.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | Ethics |
| COA | 1 | — |
Dr. David Cox can formally lay claim to being a bioethicist (master's degree from Union Graduate College), a board-certified behavior analyst at the doctoral level (PhD in behavior analysis from the University of Florida), a behavioral economist (post-doc training at the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), and a data scientist (post-doc training through an Insight! Data Science Fellowship). He has worked in behavior analysis for 20 years as a clinician, academic researcher, scholar, technologist, and all-around behavior science junky. From his work and collaborations, David has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and books. And, has had the fortune to serve as Editor in Chief for The Experimental Analysis of Human Behavior Bulletin and Associate or Guest Editor for Perspectives on Behavior Science, Behavior Analysis in Practice, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Psychological Record, Education and Treatment of Children, Toward Data Science, and Behavior and Social Issues. When he's not doing research or building quantitative models of behavior-environment relations, he enjoys spending time with his wife, two beagles, and two kittens around St. John's, FL.
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.