The Englishman: Memoirs of a Psychobiologist by John Staddon is a reflective and often witty autobiography that traces the author' s unconventional journey from wartime London to academic life in the United States. The early chapters recount his childhood adventures, including quirky schooldays and a stint in colonial Africa, all of which shaped his worldview. The memoir then shifts focus to his academic path, detailing his immersion in biology, behavioral psychology, and the influence of ...

Science is undergoing an identity crisis! A renowned psychologist and biologist diagnoses our age of wishful, magical thinking and blasts out a clarion call for a return to reason and the search for objective knowledge and truth. Fans of Matt Ridley and Nicholas Wade will adore this trenchant meditation and call to action.Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost any...

This expanded second edition of Scientific Method shows how science works, fails to work or pretends to work by looking at examples from physics, biomedicine, psychology, sociology and economics.Scientific Method aims to help curious readers understand the idea of science, not by learning a list of techniques but through examples both historical and contemporary. Staddon affirms that if the reader can understand successful studies as well as studies that appear to be scien...

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WALL STREET?And How Do We Fix It?Even after the global financial meltdown of 2008, economists have clung to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory of an always selfregulating market that benefits private and public interests alike. But Duke University professor John Staddon is here to tell that there’s also another, darker force at work on Wall Street—a “Malign Hand” that guides all human interactions, including our finances.Comb...

This ground-breaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, along with a critical analysis of radical behaviorism, its philosophy and its applications to social issues.This third edition is much expanded and includes a new chapter on experimental method as well as longer sections on the philosophy of behaviorism. It offers experimental and theoretical examples of a new approach to behavioral science. It provides an alternative philosophical and empirical foundation for a psy...

This volume presents an international group of researchers who model animal and human behavior--both simple and complex. The models presented focus on such subjects as the pattern of eating in meals and bouts, the energizing and shaping impact of reinforcers on behavior, transitive inferential reasoning, responding to a compound stimulus, avoidance and escape learning, recognition memory, category formation, generalization, the timing of adaptive responses, and chromosomes exchanging infor...

Originally published in 1991, this title was the result of a symposium held at Harvard University. It presents some of the exciting interdisciplinary developments of the time that clarify how animals and people learn to behave adaptively in a rapidly changing environment. The contributors focus on aspects of how recognition learning, reinforcement learning, and motor learning interact to generate adaptive goal-oriented behaviours that can satisfy internal needs – an area of inquiry as impo...