Duke Psychologist John Staddon says there is little evidence that demographic diversity strengthens scientific research.

It is an old but wise truism, says psychologist John Staddon, that the “facts of science cannot provide a set of values by which to live.” But when the motives and values necessary to sustain it are strongly reinforced, science can be a guide for living a moral life.

In violation of the most basic tenets of social science, the proposed sub field of “Stratification Economics” seeks to limit, rather than expand, our understanding of income variation between racial groups.

What a successful model of social science looks like, and how far the social sciences have strayed from that model?

Social justice and cancel culture are the latest iterations of progressivism, a philosophy that sees people as naturally good and society as corrupt. This is what accounts for the desperate desire to remake society, perfect the world, and destroy all perceived obstacles to the forward march of human nature.

Psychobiologist John Staddon finds a major study of behaviorism is littered with inaccuracies and girded by a belief that “behaviorism is a lab experiment propelled by billions of dollars” aimed at the capitalist control of human behavior.

In the first article of our feature critiquing the experts, psychobiologist John Staddon comes to a troubling conclusion. While science earns credibility by submitting evidence to numerous universally recognized tests, the historians of science appear subject to only one: political acceptability.

This chapter examines the peak shift, behavioral contrast, and the relative slopes of excitatory and inhibitory gradients, from the point of view of two simple assumptions. The first is that different activities may be under the control of different stimuli, which may or may not overlap in their effects. The second assumption is that activities tend to compete with each other for the available time. In a constant environment, the "strength" of a behavioral state can be identified with the frequency of behaviors associated with that state. If schedule-induced drinking is taken as a measure of the strength of the interim state, and the frequency of a terminal response such as lever pressing or key pecking measures the strength of the terminal state, then it appears that the relation between terminal and interim states is reciprocal. Such factors as rate of food delivery and food deprivation affect the level of interim and terminal activities similarly.

Racial and ethnic diversity can contribute to greater intellectual diversity, but there is no guarantee especially if one group is easily offended.

Travis Thompson's lengthy review of Staddon's The New Behaviorism requires several corrections and extensions. This response discusses Staddon's analysis of Herrnstein's matching law and concludes that Thompson misinterprets a gentle critique as a paean. The response goes on to defend the utility of models and "internal states" (i.e., postulated processes that are not directly measurable) as "formal representation[s] of the data reduced to a minimal number of terms," a position similar to one of B. F. Skinner's statements. The response ends with a defense of Skinner's empirical brilliance, but a critique of his sweeping societal prescriptions.