The Science
Our Science
Behavior analysis science is a comprehensive approach to the study of the organisms (Pierce and Cheney, 2017). Here at Behavior Analysis Online (BAO), we study and change the behavior of organisms, namely human beings, in the digital space. The digital space behavior of could be located on their personal devices (e.g. phones, tablets, wearables, etc.), home computers, online shopping, or a variety of other behaviors engaged in a digital space.
What this means is that we use our science to design and maintain software systems that provide a service to individuals and professionals in their daily work or personal lives. Whether it is corporate training, practice management, personal productivity, or classroom management, the behavior analysts at BAO use their scientific skillset to make your online experiences much more efficient and most importantly more effective.
Our Scientists
Everyone at BAO is a behavior analyst. Which means we study and apply the principles of behavior analysis science to improve behavior of social significance. More specifically, a behavior analyst is someone that analyzes behavior in a manner that is consistent with the philosophy, science, and practice of the field of behavior analysis. In other words, we use science to make the world an easier place for us all to navigate. At BAO, we focus on making the digital world easier to navigate. There are a few characteristics that make behavior analysts easy to identify, we focus on behavior as our sole subject matter (that includes online behavior and software design-behavior of course), we guide all of our professional behavior based on established scientific literature, the ethical code of our governing body (www.bacb.com) and have also established a framework for how we talk about behavior as a scientific subject matter. It’s like our own really cool secret language.
Our Instructional Design
Our software engineers have become pseudo-experts on behavior analysis science from the countless meetings they have had with all of the behavior analysts at BAO and some of the behavior analysts at our behavior analysis client-companies. As a result of this they have come to understand the importance of designing software systems that cover the four most important concepts in behavior analysis science, the four Es: (1) Making the software Essential, (2) Making the cues to use software features and modules Evident (3) Make the software Efficient to navigate in general, and most importantly, (4) make the software Effective for its end users. Those four basic concepts make up the four components of what behavior analysts refer to as the four-term contingency and is the foundation for how we design our software systems. The four-term contingency is true to its name as it is made up of four elements, namely, motivating operations (how Essential something is), discriminative stimuli (how Evident something is), the behavior (the energy that is exerted by the individual hopefully in an Efficient manner), and the consequences (no, not the bad type, but how Effective something is). These four elements make up the bedrock of our science and the manner in which we design our systems, or more simply put, our instructional design protocol.
Our Ethics
Although our employees are experts on behavior analysis science, we do not use that knowledge in a disreputable manner. Our team, takes ethics very seriously and ensures that all systems that are created use the power of behavior analysis science in a responsible and ethical manner. All of the behavior analysts that work at BAO are credentialed by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) as Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs) and our professional behavior is monitored by the behavior analysis community and regulated by the BACB to ensure that we follow the code of ethics as devised by some of the most prominent members of the behavior analysis community and further codified by the BACB. In short, we create ethical systems that do not coerce its users, but instead make the experience of using our systems enjoyable and most importantly, useful in their work or persona lives.