Browsing by Author "Staddon, John ER"
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Item Open Access A Remarkable Book(2004-05) Staddon, John ERWinston Churchill in old age was presented by the House of Commons with his portrait, painted by Graham Sutherland, a well-known British artist. When the picture was unveiled in Westminster Hall, Churchill looked at it for a few seconds and then commented: “The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art!” Just what he meant by “remarkable” may be inferred from the fact that the picture has never been seen again (Clementine Churchill evidently burnt it). It is in this sense that The Myth of Ownership is a remarkable book...Item Open Access B. F. Skinner: Mistaken – or Misunderstood?(2013-07-02) Staddon, John ERThe chief offense of “political correctness” is its unreflective certainty – about which causes to hail or demonize and about the necessity to take sides on every issue. Science has no room for such dogmatism, of course. Yet, human nature being what it is, in the softer sciences, at least, demonization of “outs” and automatic acceptance of “ins” is the rule rather than the exception. For many years in experimental psychology, the “ins” have been the “cognitive” psychologists and the “outs” the behaviorists, especially the radical behaviorist followers of B. F. Skinner, whose life and work are the topics of these two books...Item Open Access Fair Profiling(2005) Staddon, John ERThere are several strategies available to police “stopping” suspects. Most efficient is to stop only members of the group with the highest a priori probability of guilt; least efficient is indiscriminate stopping. An efficient option that satisfies one criterion for fairness is a strategy that matches stop probability to risk probability. But a strategy that chooses stop probabilities so that the absolute number of innocents stopped is equal for all groups is close to maximally efficient and seems fair by almost any criterion.Item Open Access On Responsibility and Punishment(1995-02) Staddon, John ERThe litany of social dysfunction is now familiar. The rates of violent crime are higher than they have ever been: Americans kill and maim one another at per-capita rates an order of magnitude higher than other industrialized nations. The rate of marriage has been generally declining and the rate of illegitimacy hits new highs each year. Tens of thousands of children have no fathers and no family member or close acquaintance who has a regular job. This pattern is now repeat-ing into a second and third generation...Item Open Access On Responsibility and Punishment(1995-02) Staddon, John ERThe litany of social dysfunction is now familiar. The rates of violent crime are higher than they have ever been: Americans kill and maim one another at per-capita rates an order of magnitude higher than other industrialized nations. The rate of marriage has been generally declining and the rate of illegitimacy hits new highs each year. Tens of thousands of children have no fathers and no family member or close acquaintance who has a regular job. This pattern is now repeating into a second and third generation. Illiteracy is becoming a problem and schools have so lost authority that the accepted response to armed pupils is to install metal detectors. Senator Moynihan in a celebrated article recently pointed out how we cope with social disintegration by redefining deviancy, so that crimes become "normal" behavior...Item Open Access On Responsibility in Science and Law(1999) Staddon, John ERRespon’sible, liable to be called to account or render satisfaction: answerable: capable of dis-charging duty: able to pay.2 The old Chambers’s dictionary gives a behavioristic view of re-sponsibility: in terms of action, not thought or belief. “Lust in the heart” is not equated to lust in flagrante. It is this view I shall explore in this paper, rather than the more subjective notion of moral responsibility, as in “I feel moral responsibility (i.e., guilt) for not doing anything to save the Tutsis [Hutus, ethnic Albanians, etc.].”...Item Open Access Temporal control on periodic schedules: Fine structure(1975) Staddon, John ERThe temporal pattern of the terminal response on periodic schedules depends on when responding begins. Pigeons pecking on fixed-interval and fixed-time schedules of food reinforcement responded, or accelerated, faster the later in an interval they began responding.