Learning through consequence — conditioning, reinforcement schedules, habit formation, and why extinction so often relapses.
9 topics · 22 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World
Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts & Jane Wardle · 2010
Tracking people forming a new daily habit, finds automaticity levelled off after a median of 66 days, not the widely repeated figure of 21, and that…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
'Superstition' in the Pigeon
B. F. Skinner · 1948
Pigeons fed at fixed time intervals regardless of what they were doing developed idiosyncratic ritual behaviours, showing that reinforcement…
+10 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Science and Human Behavior
B. F. Skinner · 1953
The full behaviourist case that conduct is shaped by consequences — overreaching about inner life, and still the best account of reinforcement.
+9 more at this level
12 of 22 works
Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts & Jane Wardle
Tracking people forming a new daily habit, finds automaticity levelled off after a median of 66 days, not the widely repeated figure of 21, and that missing a single day did not materially harm the habit's formation.
B. F. Skinner
Pigeons fed at fixed time intervals regardless of what they were doing developed idiosyncratic ritual behaviours, showing that reinforcement delivered on a schedule unrelated to a specific action can still shape behaviour by accidental pairing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Donald M. Baer, Montrose M. Wolf & Todd R. Risley
Defines applied behaviour analysis by seven dimensions a study must meet - applied, behavioural, analytic, technological, conceptually systematic, effective and generalised - founding the field's own standard for what counts as good work.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Walter Mischel, Ebbe B. Ebbesen & Antonette R. Zeiss
The original marshmallow-test paper, showing preschoolers wait longer for a larger reward when taught to distract themselves from the reward's arousing features rather than dwell on them.
James O. Prochaska & Carlo C. DiClemente
Proposes that people change entrenched behaviours like smoking by moving through a fixed sequence of stages, from precontemplation to maintenance, and that matching an intervention to a person's current stage predicts success better than uniform advice.
Robert A. Rescorla
Argues that decades of research show classical conditioning is not a primitive, automatic stimulus-substitution reflex but a sophisticated process by which animals learn the causal structure of their environment.
Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven & Dianne M. Tice
Argues self-control draws on a single, limited psychological resource that is depleted by use, so resisting one temptation leaves less willpower for the next - a widely cited claim a large multi-lab replication later found little evidence for.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. E. R. Staddon & D. T. Cerutti
A field-wide review arguing that operant behaviour follows quantifiable regularities - reinforcement schedules, choice, and timing - rather than being a loose collection of trained tricks.
Susan Michie, Michelle Richardson, Marie Johnston, Charles Abraham, Jill Francis, Wendy Hardeman, Martin P. Eccles, James Cane & Caroline E. Wood
Behaviour-change interventions had been described so inconsistently that they could not be compared across studies, so this builds a standard vocabulary of 93 discrete techniques - such as goal-setting or self-monitoring - that any intervention can be coded against.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bram Vervliet, Michelle G. Craske & Dirk Hermans
Reviews the laboratory phenomena of renewal, reinstatement and spontaneous recovery that explain why exposure therapy's gains so often fail to survive a change of context.
Benjamin Gardner
Reviews decades of loosely and inconsistently defined uses of 'habit' in health research and argues habit strength should be measured as automaticity itself, not inferred backward from how often a behaviour merely repeats.
Tyler W. Watts, Greg J. Duncan & Haonan Quan
A large, more socioeconomically diverse conceptual replication of the marshmallow test finds the link between preschool delay-of-gratification and later achievement is roughly half the size originally reported, and shrinks further once family background and early cognitive ability are controlled for.
link checked 17 Sept 2026