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THE token
Have you ever seen a token from the token economy where it all started? I had not until Keith Miller of the University of Kansas showed me this one. It is about 1 inch (25 mm) in diameter and is the same on obverse and reverse sides (the photograph image is approximately actual size). It is made of metal and has the substantial feel of a US quarter-dollar coin.
The token economy started with the work of Allyon and Azrin (1965) at Anna State Hospital in Anna, Illinois. It was described by them as “a motivational system for therapy and rehabilitation.” The first use was with chronically hospitalized psychiatric patients in an era when most of these kinds of patients were simply “warehoused,” with little treatment and less to do with their days and nights. Patients were given responsibilities and opportunities to earn tokens like the one shown in the accompanying photograph. The tokens could be exchanged for goods (e.g., snacks) and services (e.g., seeing a movie). Hence the token economy was indeed an economy with tokens as the medium of exchange.
From these closed psychiatric hospital settings, the token economy emerged and exploded onto the behavior-analytic world. Token economies quickly became a standard method of establishing and maintaining reinforcement systems not only in hospitals, but also in prisons, schools, half way houses, and anywhere else where behavior management and teaching was a part of the mission. Today, some 52 years after their use first was reported in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, token economies continue to be widely used by behavior analysts, teachers, rehabilitation counselors, and others who are concerned with therapy and rehabilitation.
Front of a first edition of Ferster and Skinner’s (1957) “Schedules of Reinforcement”
2017 is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Schedules of Reinforcement by Charles B. Ferster and B. F. Skinner, known by those of us who love it as Schedules. The book was over 700 pages long, weighed more than a large pigeon at ad libidum body weight, and contained more than 900 figures (one of which is shown in the photograph to the left), almost all of cumulative records. In 1957 it sold for the princely sum of US$ 9.50. The book was the culmination of Skinner’s laboratory work that began when he was a Harvard graduate student in the late 1920s. Ferster joined Skinner as post-doctoral researcher to help Skinner complete the research and write the book. Skinner was sufficiently pleased by Ferster’s work on the project that he honored him with first-authorship of the volume.
Schedules largely defined schedules of reinforcement, those ubiquitous arrangements of reinforcers in time and in relation to responses, as Michael Zeiler later defined them to be. The book contributed significantly to the growth of the science of behavior. The schedule performances illustrated became templates or standards for laboratory scientists studying schedules and using schedules as baselines to study other behavioral phenomena, such as delay of reinforcement or choice. If the performance generated looked like that reported in Schedules, there was greater confidence in the laboratory’s procedures. The schedules and their parameters described in schedules generated an enormous amount of research on both schedules of reinforcement and behavioral processes that could be studied using different types of reinforcement schedules.
Most importantly, the collection of all that schedule performance in one place was a powerful statement about the importance of environmental arrangements as determinants of behavior. Without altering the organism at all, but simply its environment by changing schedule requirements, an almost infinite range of response rates and patterns of responding could be generated. The implications of such profound behavioral effects was not lost on behavior analysts.
Sample figure showing cumulative record graphs of fixed-interval schedule performance from Ferster and Skinner (1957, p. 313)
Although the work described both previously known and few new schedules of reinforcement, it certainly did not exhaust the catalogue of reinforcement schedules. New schedules continue to be created in both research and application, limited only by the creator’s history of reinforcement.
Soon after it was published, Schedules was reviewed by David A. Grant in Contemporary Psychology under the clever title of “Pigeons Peck for Positivism.” The reviewer had a few begrudgingly appreciative comments, but the overall tone of the review was one of skepticism of Skinner’s approach to science.
Kennon A. Lattal, PhD
Dr. Andy Lattal is Centennial Professor of Psychology at West Virginia University, where, since 1972, he has taught and mentored 42 doctoral students. He has published research on a variety of topics related to the reinforcement and elimination of operant behavior and the history and philosophy of behavior analysis. A former Editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, he also has held major leadership positions in many of the major organizations dedicated to advancing behavior analysis. His service to behavior analysis has been recognized with SABA’s Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis and its International Dissemination of Behavior Analysis awards.