Behavior Modification Quotes

I like maxims that don't encourage behavior modification. -Calvin

Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.

What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.

Because if I smashed anything, Team Jaiden would just get me into a behavior modification program, or maybe some doctor would put be on drugs for my ADD or bipolarism or depression or whatever they're calling being alive and feeling royally screwed these days.

According to the Shuos," Jedao said, "games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.

Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as “oppositional defiant disorder,” meaning “This kid hates my guts and won’t do anything I tell him to do,” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage.

It was quite obvious that without severe behavior modification, this boy would grow up to be a serial killer.

Christianity is not about behavior modification. It is about inward heart transformation.

Feminization from a behavioral psychology perspective, is nothing less than a socialized effort in deliberate behavioral modification of men’s natural drives and predilections to better fit the feminine imperative.

friend of mine uses “not my circus, not my monkeys” a lot. It helps her ignore her instinct to get involved in things that aren’t her business, and it also makes her remember that people have all sorts of reasons for the things they do, many of which she’ll never understand. It’s useful for both behavior modification and acceptance.

Whatever behavior modifications you require from me are a trivial price to pay for have you as my partner

The accelerating pace of zoonotic transmission of novel viruses into humans is attributable to anthropogenic epidemiologic factors. Only behavior modification or medical management of this future health burden will minimize the risks of future zoonoses for human populations.

Psychosynthesis is interested in the whole building. We try to build an elevator which will allow a person access to every level of his personality. After all, a building with only a basement is very limited. We want to open up the terrace where you can sun-bathe or look at the stars. Our concern is the synthesis of all areas of the personality. That means psychosynthesis is holistic, global and inclusive. It is not against psychoanalysis or even behavior modification but it insists that the needs for meaning, for higher values, for a spiritual life, are as real as biological or social needs. We deny that there are any isolated human problems.

Success created more success. Not policing. Not incarceration. Not fear. Not hopelessness. Not punishment. Not behavior modification.

Some persons claim they are against behavior modification. The fact is, everyone continually modifies others.

The life of a woman of God is indeed one of becoming like the Proverbs 31 woman, except the becoming happens because of heart transformation, not behavior modification.

Sin is not a habit issue. It's a heart issue. Sin is not about behavior modification but desire modification.

Let beloved idiots ruin their own lives, if that’s what they’re dead set on doing, with no attempt whatsoever at control or behavior modification from you.

Behavior modification without interior examination eventually leads to spiritual desolation.

the virus responsible for Korean hemorrhagic fever broadcasts itself in the urine of mice. For modification of a host’s behavior, nothing matches rabies virus, which not only gets into the saliva of an infected dog but drives the dog into a frenzy of biting and thus infecting many new victims.

Silence is not always complacency. It is contemplation and forethought taking place in the minds of those who would be careful with their words and actions, unwilling to contribute to negativity that is fed by rashly-spoken comments. Quiet contemplation is a powerful tool for change because those thoughts, though silent, become actions built on conscientious pondering. Those actions then become examples. And quiet example is the greatest teacher, the most effective behavior modification tool of all. I am not listening to what you say half as closely as I am watching what you do. Think about that.

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down. The unplanned nature of the transformation from advertising to direct behavior modification caused an explosive amplification of negativity in human affairs.

Without the Gospel, I am only projecting behavioral modification. Changes of the heart must trump mere change of behavior. Therefore, the goodness of God through the gospel must trump all other philosophies in the home.

Oh my God.” She waited for the chastising sting of the mark, which acted like a behavioral-modification dog collar. When the burn didn’t come after taking the Lord’s name in vain, she found some of the fog in her brain lifting.

Vatican II, however, moved beyond behavior modification to motivation and inspiration, and for that reason conscience, a subject that like holiness was never mentioned in previous councils, emerged as an important theme at Vatican II.

In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).

Laws are designed by corporate governments to control the behaviors of their mass populations.

When it comes to our habits, there are many ways to intervene. In most cases, we have to be aware of them first.

Mental illness is an underreported epidemic today as social media addiction and less than optimal mental states quietly go hand in hand.

Making subtle modifications in your way of communication doesn’t mean you throw your character overboard. The goal of learning about other people’s algorithms is not 100% about adjusting our behavior. If you’re changing your whole character based on the people around you, people have no idea who you are. If you try to please everybody, nobody will be pleased.

Based on its clear energetic signature as new technologies are breathlessly rolled out following a blatantly prewritten script, the current era might best be described as that of ‘Technotranshumanism.

When conflict is inescapable and it has been learned that making a "wrong" decision can have severe emotionally or physically painful consequences, then we have the makings of stress, anxiety, and aggression.

I learned that Jesus was inviting us not primarily into correct beliefs, an eternal destination, or behavior modification but rather into participation in a living, eternally present reality. Through Christ, we get to join the redemption and restoration of all things. God has not given up on the world. Instead, God invites every one of us—in the way of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit—into the divine conspiracy of overcoming evil with good.

the kingdom of God. I learned that Jesus was inviting us not primarily into correct beliefs, an eternal destination, or behavior modification but rather into participation in a living, eternally present reality. Through Christ, we get to join the redemption and restoration of all things. God has not given up on the world. Instead, God invites every one of us—in the way of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit—into the divine conspiracy of overcoming evil with good.

In today’s mesmerizing digital landscape, our attention is madly sought after. Algorithms are ingeniously designed to keep us hooked like addicts by feeding us mainlines tailored to hold us captive—in mind and perhaps eventually even in body.

Punishment always has “fallout.” That is you may punish a behaviour you didn’t intend to decrease, or you may promote aggression because of missed associations. Your dog may become distrustful of you. Punishment can contribute to arousal and anxiety levels, pushing them ever higher.

Always bear in mind that the only person whose judgement matters is yourself. If you can learn to transform self-judgment into good judgment, a.k.a. wise circumspection, you’ve clearly shaken off some of the Dragon’s spell and already have one foot halfway out the door of this construct.

When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of "adjusting" people, making people "happy," or training out of them by simple behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety. How hard for human kind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!-to see that "success" and "applause" are the bitch goddesses we always secretly knew they were. To see that the purpose of human existence in a man like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free adjustment.

Most churches that have fallen into dead orthodoxy are filled with nice, pleasant, and loyal people. Some even grow in size. Yet, eventually the degenerating dynamic of dead orthodoxy diminishes the power and message of the gospel, mutating into what Dallas Willard has called the gospel of sin management. Willard noted that in some churches, this meant behavior modification, avoiding obvious sins through a kind of religious willpower. In other more left-leaning churches, Willard observed another kind of behavior modification at play—the public affirming of the right social justice causes of the day. Yet these shallow and public forms of Christianized behavior

In California, there was Atascadero State Hospital, constructed in 1954 at the cost to taxpayers of over $10 million (almost $110 million in today’s money). Atascadero was a maximum-security psychiatric prison on the central coast where mentally disordered male lawbreakers [including homosexuals] from all over California were incarcerated. Inmates were treated at Atascadero by a variety of methods, including electroconvulsive therapy; lobotomy; sterilization, and hormone injections. Anectine was used often for ‘behavior modification.’ It was a muscle relaxant, which gave the person to whom it was administered the sensation of choking or drowning, while he received the message from the doctor that if he didn’t change his behavior he would die (10).

Facebook’s own North American marketing director, Michelle Klein, who told an audience in 2016 that while the average adult checks his or her phone 30 times a day, the average millennial, she enthusiastically reported, checks more than 157 times daily. Generation Z, we now know, exceeds this pace. Klein described Facebook’s engineering feat: “a sensory experience of communication that helps us connect to others, without having to look away,” noting with satisfaction that this condition is a boon to marketers. She underscored the design characteristics that produce this mesmerizing effect: design is narrative, engrossing, immediate, expressive, immersive, adaptive, and dynamic.11 If you are over the age of thirty, you know that Klein is not describing your adolescence, or that of your parents, and certainly not that of your grandparents. Adolescence and emerging adulthood in the hive are a human first, meticulously crafted by the science of behavioral engineering; institutionalized in the vast and complex architectures of computer-mediated means of behavior modification; overseen by Big Other; directed toward economies of scale, scope, and action in the capture of behavioral surplus; and funded by the surveillance capital that accrues from unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. Our children endeavor to come of age in a hive that is owned and operated by the applied utopianists of surveillance capitalism and is continuously monitored and shaped by the gathering force of instrumentarian power. Is this the life that we want for the most open, pliable, eager, self-conscious, and promising members of our society?

We have already seen that when positive authority suggests a change in behavior, the recipient will accept it provided he is capable of doing so and provided it does not require drastic modification of belief or frustrate important needs. By carrying out the suggestion, one can simultaneously reduce dissonance and preserve intact one's relation to positive authority. But what can reasonably be expected when the suggestion to change is beyond the recipient's capability or frustrates his deep needs or predispositions? In such a situation, a conflict arises between his desire to comply with authority and the abilities or needs which make compliance impossible. One way to resolve such a conflict situation (or to reduce the dissonance) is to change one's conception of authority. If a suggestion emanating from positive authority is unacceptable, the conflict may be removed by becoming disaffected with the authority and transforming it either into a negative authority or into a nonexistent one. This is exactly what Leon and Joseph did.

Next, we discussed the relationship between the tabula rasa (blank slate) and preconfigured brain models. In the empiricist outside-in model, the brain starts out as blank paper onto which new information is cumulatively written. Modification of brain circuits scales with the amount of newly learned knowledge by juxtaposition and superposition. A contrasting view is that the brain is a dictionary with preexisting internal dynamics and syntactical rules but filled with initially nonsense neuronal words. A large reservoir of unique neuronal patterns has the potential to acquire significance for the animal through exploratory action and represents a distinct event or situation. In this alternative model, the diversity of brain components, such as firing rates, synaptic connection strengths, and the magnitude of collective behavior of neurons, leads to wide distributions. The two tails of this distribution offer complementary advantages: the “good-enough” brain can generalize and act fast; the “precision” brain is slow but careful and offers needed details in many situations.

More vigorous yet is the strategy practiced by the influenza, common cold, and pertussis (whooping cough) microbes, which induce the victim to cough or sneeze, thereby launching a cloud of microbes toward prospective new hosts. Similarly, the cholera bacterium induces in its victim a massive diarrhea that delivers bacteria into the water supplies of potential new victims, while the virus responsible for Korean hemorrhagic fever broadcasts itself in the urine of mice. For modification of a host’s behavior, nothing matches rabies virus, which not only gets into the saliva of an infected dog but drives the dog into a frenzy of biting and thus infecting many new victims. But for physical effort on the bug’s own part, the prize still goes to worms such as hookworms and schistosomes, which actively burrow through a host’s skin from the water or soil into which their larvae had been excreted in a previous victim’s feces. Thus, from our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are “symptoms of disease.” From a germ’s point of view, they’re clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast the germ.

Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually. When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer, as probably happened to you when you encountered the multiplication problem 17 × 24. You can also feel a surge of conscious attention whenever you are surprised. System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains. In that world, lamps do not jump, cats do not bark, and gorillas do not cross basketball courts. The gorilla experiment demonstrates that some attention is needed for the surprising stimulus to be detected. Surprise then activates and orients your attention: you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the surprising event. System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own behavior—the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are driving at night. System 2 is mobilized to increased effort when it detects an error about to be made. Remember a time when you almost blurted out an offensive remark and note how hard you worked to restore control. In summary, most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word.

As a parent, I would also love to “staple on fruit” to my kids. But these virtues must flow from our union with Christ, not from our own behavior modification. We might get our kids’ behavior or our own to improve, but we will not be able to create Christlikeness apart from the Spirit’s work. We all need new hearts. Regenerate people have the power to naturally, holistically, and gradually bear fruit.

Behaviorism has dealt credibly with the modification and channeling of behavior patterns as a function of learning, but it has not dealt effectively with the nature of the innate sources of behavioral variation that are susceptible to modification via the reinforcement contingencies of the environment. The various cognitive sciences are beginning to address the complexities of the human mind, but until recently they chose to ignore the evolutionary antecedents, such as the neural systems for the passions, upon which our vast cortical potentials are built and to which those potentials may still be subservient.

Change must take place at the heart level. That, not behavior modification, is the message of Christianity.

What makes it through the filter is determined by the part of the brain called the reticular activating system, or RAS for short. The RAS is responsible for a number of functions, including sleep and behavior modification. It also acts as the gatekeeper of information through a process called habituation, which allows the brain to ignore meaningless and repetitive stimuli and remain sensitive to other inputs.

Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage.

The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. Behavior modification entails methodical techniques that change behavioral patterns in animals and people. It can be used to treat addictions, but it can also be used to create them.

but there is a broad similarity between the directions in the psalm and the contemporary movement known as “behavior modification”—which in a rough-and-ready way means that you can act yourself into a new way of being.

There is compelling evidence to argue that cells can sense and respond to the stiffness of their ECM and that they transmit these cues to the nucleus to alter their shape and modify their chromatin accessibility either directly or indirectly by modulating cellular metabolism. What has yet to be determined is whether these tension-induced changes in chromatin modification and chromosomal localization are accompanied by specific differences in gene expression and whether altering the metabolic state of the cell could modify these phenotypes. Moreover, whether similar effect occur in fibrotic, stiffened tumor tissues and if this influences gene expression to drive a tumor-like behavior in the cells and tissue remain unclear.

It is possible to identify numerous ways that students with disabilities are controlled and taught their place: (1) labeling; (2) symbols (e.g., white lab coats, “Handicapped Room” signs); (3) structure (pull-out programs, segregated classrooms, “special” schools, inaccessible areas); (4) curricula especially designed for students with disabilities (behavior modification for emotionally disturbed kids, training skills without knowledge instruction for significantly mentally retarded students and students with autistic behavior) or having significant implications for these students; (5) testing and evaluation biased toward the functional needs of the dominant culture (Stanford-Binet and Wexler tests); (6) body language and disposition of school culture (teachers almost never look into the eyes of students with disabilities and practice even greater patterns of superiority and paternalism than they do with other students); and (7) discipline (physical restraints, isolation/time-out rooms with locked doors, use of Haldol and other sedatives).11

Selling professionally requires modification of your behavior and the altering of preconceived ideas that have been ingrained in the minds of both salespeople and prospects for centuries.

Any skilled con artist knows the key to deceiving your mark is to get them to believe your scheme was their idea. Translation: The key to getting people to follow you is to convince them they aren't following anyone at all. With the rise of social media empires and their spooky digital algorithms, these powerful forces now have direct access to our flows of consciousness every time we slide our thumbs across our phones. What we are led to believe are just ads, news links, retweets, and random digital flotsam are, in reality, mass behavior modification techniques intentionally designed to influence how we think, feel, believe, shop, vote, and live.

Medication is not going to “solve” your ADHD. Medication can be a potent tool in your arsenal, but you get maximum efficacy when you pair that with appropriate behavioral modification and self-care.

It is because I can’t stop being late or confusing times in my work and personal life that I was trying to change via “step work.” (The steps, FYI, are kind of like a Catholic confession but with peer support, hazy spiritual-type language, behavior modification, and understanding laffs.) After I missed the third appointment we had made, Bernice decided that my admitted poor time management not only wasted her time but also hurt her feelings. Therefore, a seventy-five-year-old Glendale woman who had spent several hours of her final years on earth listening to me and my bunk was compelled to break up with me by text.

Allison seemed oblivious to the fact that she was causing the very problem that was bothering her. If she’d tried to design a behavior modification program to make sure that her husband would never share his feelings with her, she couldn’t have done a better job. She punished him every time he tried to express his feelings, and she’d been doing this to him for decades. The impact of her behavior wasn’t exactly subtle. At the same time, she had no interest whatsoever in examining her role in the problem. She made it clear that this topic was strictly off-limits. Perhaps the pain of self-examination was more than she could endure.

Becoming a magician, implies continual change, modification of identity, entering different paradigms of belief and behavior, learning new skills, and shedding life-patterns which have outworn their usefulness. There is thus a shift from a core ‘Ego’ which is based on maintaining differences the self-other divide, to that of ‘Exo,’ the self in a continual process of dynamic engagement.

Pardon the analogy, but that is a bit like training a dog by shocking it when it leaves the yard. Such a view of the Christian life turns the whole process of spiritual growth into a kind of behavior modification program with rewards and punishments to coerce us into good behavior.

And here’s another reason we want to focus on connection over behavior modification: if we don’t build a sturdy foundation with our kids—one based in trust, understanding, and curiosity—then we have nothing keeping them attached to us.

If we define technology as a modification of the environment, then we must recognize the complementary principle of technique: how that modification is used in performance. New objects change behavior, but not always as inventors and manufacturers imagine. And changes in behavior of people, as of bears and dogs, inspire new hardware, which in turn engenders more innovations.4

effort.While people involved in religious forms of the flesh may believe they are taking sin seriously by persistently reminding people to stop doing it, they are actually trivializing sin by depicting it as something that can be overcome through behavior modification.

Persson did not create Minecraft because he wanted to create a billion-dollar company; he loved video games and kept his day job while developing it. When the game soared in popularity, he started a company, Mojang, with some of the profits, but kept it small, with just 12 employees. Even with zero dollars spent on marketing and no user instructions, Minecraft grew exponentially, flying past the 100 million registered user mark in 2014 based largely on word of mouth.2 Players shared user-generated extras like modifications (“mods”) and custom maps with each other, and the game caught on not only with children but their parents and even educators. Still, Persson avoided the valuation game, refusing an investment offer from former Facebook president Sean Parker. Finally, he and his co-founders sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, a fortune built on one man’s focus on creating something that people loved.3 On the other end of the spectrum is Zynga, one of the fastest startups ever to reach a $1 billion valuation.4 The social game developer had its first hit in 2009 with FarmVille. Next came Zynga’s partnership with Facebook that turned into a growth engine. The company began trading on the NASDAQ in December 2011 and had 253 million active users per month as late as the first quarter of 2013.5 Then the relationship with Facebook ended and the wheels started coming off. Flush with IPO cash, Zynga started exhibiting all the symptoms of ego-driven, grow-at-any-cost syndrome. They moved into a $228 million headquarters in San Francisco. They began hastily acquiring companies like NaturalMotion, Newtoy, and Area/Code. They infuriated customers by launching new games without sufficient testing and filling them with scripts that signed players up for unwanted subscriptions and services. When customer outrage went viral, instead of focusing on building better products, Zynga hired a behavioral psychologist to try to trick customers into loving its games.6 In a 2009 speech at Startup@Berkeley, CEO Mark Pincus said, “I funded [Zynga] myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which . . . I downloaded it once — I couldn’t get rid of it. We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.”7 By the spring of 2016, Zynga had laid off about 18 percent of its workforce and its share price had declined from $14.50 in 2012 to about $2.50.

According to the Shuos,” Jedao said, “games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.

We are tampered with, our opinions manufactured for us, all without our permission. What was the purpose of these behavior modifications? It was to bring about forced changes to our way of life, without our agreement and without even being aware of what was taking place.

Assertive behaviors are often associated with "dominant" dogs but are, in fact, often used by dogs who are extremely insecure or under-socialized.

Stress is like an allergic person's reaction to the environment. If you have hay fever, you will probably be able to tolerate some allergens. When you really have trouble is when you are exposed to several allergens over too short a period of time. This is a classic case of "the straw that broke the camel's back". Given a number of stressors in a short time, just about any dog may behave aggressively.

When all is said and done, successful change depends at least as much (if not more) on the effectiveness of leadership and behavioral modification than on the technical and economic merits of the solution.

Imagine if diabetologists had perceived the ravenous hunger that accompanies uncontrolled diabetes as a behavioral disorder, to be treated by years of psychotherapy or behavioral modification rather than injections of insulin. These researchers simply never confronted the possibility that the nutrient composition of the diet might have a fundamental effect on eating behavior and energy expenditure, and thus on the long-term regulation of weight.

God is reaching out to us, wanting us to see we need him. But since he is God, we think he wants some song and dance from us—in other words, behavior modification. He actually just wants us. He longs to set us free. And yes, to accomplish all that, he wants us entirely. God is home to us. He is where we were made to be. He is what we were made for. We just forget all that while we are trying to be good and independent.

Dogs in prey mode will silently and quickly approach their target. One fierce, very hard, full-mouth bite accompanied by shaking the selected target is a common indicator of predatory behaviour. The

• There will be no warning vocalizations before the dog leaps on grabs and shakes the “prey.

The use of behavior modification and cognitive therapy techniques that were designed to replace Christ and the Scriptures with human wisdom (Prov. 16:25) cannot produce in an angry child the fruit of the Spirit. That

God is not grieved because of “all the homosexuals.” Not in the very least. That’s religious people you’re thinking of. If God is grieved it’s because the beautiful, incomparable message of redemption and grace, the sweet peace of a loving relationship, has been truncated, rerouted into a message of behavior-modification and sin-management. For

Obesity, eating disorders, and chemical dependency on food are three distinct and very different diseases -- and demonstrate different behaviors around food. We can categorize the corresponding behaviours of these conditions as problems that occur within the normal eating, emotional eating, and food addiction spectrums. Obesity is entirely a physical problem: a result of eating too many calories while expending too few... Normal eaters simply eat too much... Normal eaters represent a large proportion of the obese. They can regulate their obesity by learning how to change the circumstances that foster poor willpower: better sleep, stress management, improving social skills, and changing a toxic good environment are only a few of the modifications that can be made... Certainly, people suffering from eating disorders and food addiction can also be obese, but their primary condition is not obesity. In their cases, obesity is just another symptom of their emotional disturbance or their food addiction. The underlying emotional trauma that drives the bulimic to stuff himself needs to be addressed first before the physical aspects of obesity can be seriously addressed; likewise, the sugar that is propelling the addictive overeater needs to be removed first before tackling any weight issues.

We have observed two common yet flawed views that unfortunately impact a church's likelihood to make disciples that are transformed: equating information with discipleship and viewing discipleship merely as behavioral modification. Discipleship is much more than information and much deeper than behavioral modification.

learned to imitate. The much-maligned techniques of behavior modification — rewards and more rarely penalties — eventually provided her adequate motivation. Characteristically, the reinforcers were not food or praise but numbers, a rising tally on a golf counter. Every new skill made life easier for us and richer for her, as her repertoire of activities expanded.

the whale’s food was withheld for behavioral reasons—that is, to make sure the whales performed to SeaWorld’s expectations. The deprivation I am referring to is vindictive and more insidious. In accordance with SeaWorld policies, trainers have reduced the amount of fish that a whale needs to eat daily—sometimes by more than two-thirds—to remind the orca who provides sustenance at the marine park. It is not done often and it has a mixed record of effectiveness. But it has been one of the trainer’s options for making sure a whale understands that it is best to cooperate. Because SeaWorld meticulously documents the lives, health and constantly shifting psychology of the orcas, the company has kept records of depriving whales of fish to make them behave or perform to the standards set by the trainers. But because such a form of “behavior modification” would sound barbarous to human audiences, the practice has been kept secret. It would not be good for business to say that the stars of the show were not given food in order to make them perform. But it has happened. I have been part of inflicting the policy myself at the request of a supervisor.

Far too many of us assume that discipleship is merely the transfer of information leading to behavior modification. But discipleship, at heart, involves transformation at the deepest levels of our understanding, affection, and will by the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God and in relationship with the people of God.

The curious reality is that while our civilization values intellect, education, and experience, we still fall for crude body parameters that have no bearing on these qualities. We look down on the brute force that we believe underpins the natural order, proud to have left “might is right” behind, yet we remain stubbornly sensitive to our species’s sexual dimorphism in height, muscularity, and voice. Turning this situation around will require more than a GenderTimer and a few new debate rules. A good start would be to appreciate the evolutionary roots of these biases. But while our fellow primates offer ample clues, we should also consider our species’s potential for behavioral modification.

Here’s a message you probably won’t hear at church this morning--the Gospel isn’t an offer of what could be, but rather a pronouncement of what already is. All are saved, or all are not. Faith is merely awakening to the wholeness you already possess, and the God of Love who authored it. Therefore, the Christian life is not a test--it’s a rest. It’s not about becoming someone tomorrow who you aren’t today, through behavioral modification and sin management. Rather, it’s simply the journey of our actions effortlessly catching up to our identities in Christ, as we rest in Grace. In fact, as a finished work of the cross, there is nothing to improve in you--only everything to believe. You lack no spiritual blessing, as wholeness and holiness are completely yours already--not because of your performance, but because of His. You are the delight of the Father, and nothing less than the beauty of His face. Now believe it, and live it. Throw aside the shackles of guilt, condemnation, and shame that imprison you. Turn off the voices of insecurity, inferiority, and self-criticism that haunt you. Be free. Do you. Live a life shining your truth in ways that reflect Grace. Grace is brave. Be brave.

The term “engagement” is part of the familiar, sanitized language that hides how stupid a machine we have built. We must start using terms like “addiction” and “behavior modification.” Here’s another example of sanitized language: We still call the customers of social media companies “advertisers”—and, to be fair, many of them are. They want you to buy a particular brand of soap or something. But they might also be nasty, hidden creeps who want to undermine democracy. So I prefer to call this class of person a manipulator.

the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.

As noted on Page 90 of the MKULTRA inspired KUBARK interrogation manual, 'sustained long enough, a strong fear of anything vague or unknown induces regression'. Whether that fear represents the possibility of being unemployed, being harassed daily for not complying, or a mutating virus, amongst other things, if 'sustained long enough' it begins to wear people down psychologically..

one cannot begin to understand mind control without realizing the power of behavior modification techniques, as well as the influences of conformity and obedience to authority.

Today, often when someone dies, we tend to look for the analogue to the fatal illness in their behavior: lung cancer results from smoking, heart disease from a lack of exercise, colon cancer from not eating enough fiber, etc. By linking death to a specific behavior, we deontologize it; we make it seem as if death is only one possibility for life, a possibility that we ourselves—or someone, someday—might manage to escape. The same thinking applies to aging as well: all the formulas for the conquest of aging (skin creme, the baldness pill, plastic surgery, low fat diets) implicitly view aging itself as just one option among many. When we view death as a “case” or an “option,” we reject its necessity as a limit. Death no longer indicates a moment of transcendence that we must encounter. According to Baudrillard, “We are dealing with an attempt to construct an entirely positive world, a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion, of every sort of evil and negativity, exempt from death itself.” In the society of enjoyment, death becomes an increasingly horrific—and at the same time, an increasingly hidden—event. Not only does death imply the cessation of one’s being, but it also indicates a failure of enjoyment. Death is above all a limit to one’s enjoyment: to accept one’s mortality means simultaneously to accept a limit on enjoyment. This is why it is not at all coincidental that with the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy we would see an increase in efforts to eliminate the necessity of death. Today, human cell researchers are working toward the day when death will exist only as an “accident,” through the modification of the way in which cells regulate their division and creating cells that can divide limitlessly. As Gregg Easterbrook points out, the introduction of such cells into the human body would not create eternal life, but it would make death something no longer necessary: “Therapeutic use of ‘immortal’ cells would not confer unending life (even people who don’t age could die in accidents, by violence and so on) but might dramatically extend the life-span.” The point isn’t that death would be entirely eliminated, but that we might eliminate its necessary status as a barrier to or a limit on enjoyment. This potential elimination of death as a necessary limit to enjoyment follows directly from the logic of the society of enjoyment. As long as death remains necessary, it stands, as Heidegger recognizes, as a fundamental barrier to the proliferation of enjoyment. If subjects know that they must die, they also know that they lack—and lack becomes intolerable in face of a command to enjoy oneself. But without the idea of a necessary death, every experience of lack loses the quality of necessity. Subjects view lack not as something to be endured for the sake of a future enjoyment, but as an intolerable burden. In the society of enjoyment, subjects refuse to tolerate lack precisely because lack, like death, has now lost its veneer of necessity.

Most of us try to get more of what we want from our partners by complaining when they don’t get it right. That’s got to be about the worst behavioral modification program I’ve ever heard of.

The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification.

I guess this place is where your intellect changes. I guess it's no behavior-modification place. but a history tutor said Harvard used to be . . . worried as much about the students' morality, their character, as . . . exams.

The locked-down structure of the supermax contains within it yet further mechanisms of control. Elaborate strategies are put in place in order to restrict the movements and behaviors of prisoners. Just as often as these tactics are implemented, they fail, requiring new strategies of control or a never-ending modification of existing ones.

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

Now everyone who is on social media is getting individualized, continuously adjusted stimuli, without a break, so long as they use their smartphones. What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.

Back in its earliest days, online advertising really was just advertising. But before long, advances in computing happened to coincide with ridiculously perverse financial incentives, as will be explained in the next argument. What started as advertising morphed into what would better be called “empires of behavior modification for rent.” That transformation has often attracted new kinds of customers/manipulators, and they aren’t pretty.

When we use methods of behavior modification, we can—temporarily—change behavior. I won’t deny that. I also won’t deny that it can take time to do the deeper work, which is a privilege we don’t always have. There are some situations where we need to correct a child’s behavior and do it quickly, and others where we simply can’t dedicate our limited resources to doing the additional work—where we’re already stretched too thin between work and family and the many demands of being a parent and a person in the world. But without attending to what’s under the surface, we cannot change the dynamics that motivate a child’s behavior. It’s like putting duct tape on a leak in the ceiling instead of wondering about the source of the leak. When we address the behavior first, we miss the opportunity to help our children build skills, and beyond this, we miss the opportunity to see our kids as people rather than a collection of behaviors.

How is the greater good determined when surveillance capitalism owns the machines and the means of behavioral modification? “Goodness” arrives already oriented toward the interests of the owners of the means of behavioral modification and the clients whose guaranteed outcomes they seek to achieve. The greater good is someone’s, but it may not be ours.

we have sent them into the raw heart of a rogue capitalism that amassed its fortune and power through behavioral dispossession parlayed into behavior modification in the service of others’ guaranteed outcomes.

One of his favorite tools for habit tracking and behavioral modification Way of Life app.

Clinicians must go even deeper when working with individuals dealing with addiction, and that focus needs to be on unresolved childhood pain points. By focusing on behavior modification to deal with addiction, too many counselors are neglecting to ensure we are not cleansing only a client’s damaging behavior but also his soul.