View article

The law of effect, which is a central premise of behavioral theory and the basis for much of behavior therapy relates behavior to its reinforcing consequences. Herrnstein's (1970) mathematical statement of this law is: where R is the rate of responding for a behavior, r is the rate of contingent reinforcement for that behavior, k is the maximal rate of responding attainable by the organism, and r «is all (extraneous) reinforcement concurrently delivered to the organism exclusive of r. Also known as the matching law, this model has received widespread support over three decades of animal research (see Davison & McCarthy, 1988) and has more recently attracted interest within applied behavior analysis (see, eg, Martens & Houk, 1989).

Fitting Hermstein's hyperbola to data is a focal part of the methodology in this area of research. It is generally accomplished with Wilkinson's (1961) method. This is a two-step procedure for …