IN PURSUIT OF GENERAL BEHAVIORAL RELATIONS

Efforts to develop behavioral technologies from advances in basic research assume that results from studies with nonhuman subjects can, in some instances, be applied to human behavior. The behavioral principles likely to be most useful for application are those that represent robust general behavioral relations. Basic and applied research on behavioral momentum suggests that there is a general behavioral relation between the persistence of behavior and the rate of reinforcement obtained in a given situation. Understanding the factors that affect behavioral persistence may have important implications for applied behavior analysts that justify studies aimed at establishing the generality and limits of the functional relation between reinforcement rate and behavioral persistence. Strategies for establishing the generality of behavioral relations are reviewed, followed by a brief summary of the evidence for the generality of behavioral momentum.