Browsing by Author "Staddon, J"

Now showing 1 - 16 of 16

Open Access
College Admissions Ride the Equality Roundabout
(Academic Questions, 2019-12-01) Staddon, J
Open Access
Did Skinner Miss the Point about Teaching?
(2006) Staddon, J
The Darwinian metaphor, to which Skinner was an early contributor, has been a commonplace for several years. Operant learning is seen as an interplay between response emission (variation) and reinforcement (selection). In applying his ideas to teaching, Skinner emphasized selection almost exclusively. But the real puzzle posed by non-rote learning, in both animals and humans, is not selection but the sources of variation that cause an action or an idea to appear for the first time. It is in this sense that Skinner’s whole discussion of teaching may have missed the point.
Open Access
Diverse Identities are Irrelevant to Science
(Academic Questions, 2023-01-01) Staddon, J
Open Access
Facts vs. Passion: The Debate over Science-Based Regulation
(Academic Questions, 2020-01-01) Staddon, J
Open Access
Object of Inquiry: Psychology’s Other (Non-replication) Problem
(Academic Questions, 2019-06) Staddon, J
Open Access
On Responsibility in Science and Law
(1999) Staddon, J
I argue that responsibility and determinism are not antithetical but mutually supportive ideas; that factors affecting responsibility, such as drugs and mental and physiological conditions, may be the occasion for increased or decreased penalties; and that the decision in such cases is not scientific but moral. I conclude, contra some modern authorities, that there is no opposition between science and law.
Open Access
Scientific method: How science works, fails to work, and pretends to work
(2017-12-01) Staddon, J
© 2018 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. This book shows how science works, fails to work, or pretends to work, by looking at examples from such diverse fields as physics, biomedicine, psychology, and economics. Social science affects our lives every day through the predictions of experts and the rules and regulations they devise. Sciences like economics, sociology and health are subject to more 'operating limitations' than classical fields like physics or chemistry or biology. Yet, their methods and results must also be judged according to the same scientific standards. Every literate citizen should understand these standards and be able to tell the difference between good science and bad. Scientific Method enables readers to develop a critical, informed view of scientific practice by discussing concrete examples of how real scientists have approached the problems of their fields. It is ideal for students and professionals trying to make sense of the role of science in society, and of the meaning, value, and limitations of scientific methodology in the social sciences.
Open Access
The Case for Carbon Dioxide
(Academic Questions, 2020-01-01) Staddon, J; Morcombe, P
Open Access
The Devolution of Psychological Science: Memes, Culture, and Systemic Racism
(Academic Questions, 2021-09-01) Staddon, J
What a successful model of social science looks like, and how far the social sciences have strayed from that model?
Open Access
The Diversity Dilemma
(Academic Questions, 2021-09-01) Staddon, J
Racial and ethnic diversity can contribute to greater intellectual diversity, but there is no guarantee especially if one group is easily offended.
Open Access
The new behaviorism, second edition
(2014-01-01) Staddon, J
© 2014 Taylor & Francis. This second edition is a completely rewritten and much expanded version of the first edition, published nearly 15 years earlier. It surveys what changes have occurred within behaviorism and whether it has maintained its influence on experimental cognitive psychology or other fields.This groundbreaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, the dominant movement in American psychology in the first half of the 20th Century. It then analyzes and criticizes radical behaviorism, as pioneered by B.F. Skinner, and its philosophy and applications to social issues.The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" toward the core of science, which is an economical description of nature. The author argues that parsimony -- the elementary philosophical distinction between private and public events, even biology, evolution and animal psychology -- all are ignored by much contemporary cognitive psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well as a philosophically defective cognitive psychology point to the need for a new theoretical behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as "consciousness" that have been either ignored, evaded or muddled by existing approaches.This new behaviorism provides a unified framework for the science of behavior that can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical issues such as law and punishment, the health-care system, and teaching.
Open Access
Theoretical Behaviorism, Economic Theory, and Choice
(History of Political Economy, 2016) Staddon, J
© 2016 by Duke University Press. Choice behavior is studied differently in humans and in animals, and different theories have arisen to explain the results. I suggest that an approach derived from animal studies is also appropriate for human choice. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s prospect theory, a popular two-part account of human choice, is a functional theory amounting, after some years of evolution, to a classification of types of deviation from “rational” reward maximization. Animal choice, on the other hand, can be explained causally as the outcome of competition between a set of possible responses with different “strengths." The strength of each response is directly related to its historical payoff probability, and responses compete in winner-take-all fashion. An “active” response occurs and is strengthened or weakened depending on its outcome. If it is sufficiently weakened, it will be supplanted by the strongest “silent” response. This cumulative effects (CE) model has been tested in operant conditioning experiments that show, for example, that when choosing between two identical probabilistic choices in a “two-armed bandit” situation, animals will fixate on one if the payoff probabilities are high, but be indifferent if they are low, a pattern not easily deducible from any kind of optimality theory. Kahneman’s distinction between “fast” and “slow” systems is indistinguishable from the distinction between active and silent responses in the CE model, which therefore offers a causal account of human as well as animal choice behavior.
Open Access
Truth as a Consensus of Experts
(Academic Questions, 2024-04-24) Staddon, J
Open Access
Variation and Diversity: A Tribute to Freeman Dyson
(Academic Questions, 2020-01-01) Staddon, J
Open Access
What's in the journals?
(Economist (United Kingdom), 2018-07-07) Staddon, J
Open Access
What’s Really Wrong with America
(Academic Questions, 2020-01-01) Staddon, J