Ineffective Natural Contingencies

Grandma's Wisdom: The problem with you members of today's younger generation is that you must have instant gratification; you cannot delay your gratification.

The Behavior Analyst's Wisdom: The problem with people who have poor self-control, who have poor impulse control, is that they choose smaller, immediate reinforcers instead of larger, delayed reinforcers.

This makes sense to most behavior analysts because of the gradient of delayed reinforcement: the greater the delay between the response and the reinforcer, the less the impact of that reinforcer, and the less the increase in the future frequency of that response as a result of that reinforcer. In fact, the delay gradient is so steep that there has been no clear ...