Rethinking motivating operations: A reply to commentaries on Edwards, Lotfizadeh, and Poling (2019)

Abstract

As we acknowledged in our initial article (Edwards, Lotfizadeh, & Poling, 2019), the MO concept as popularized by Michael and his supporters, which we hereafter call the “current” concept, has served behavior analysts rather well. For that reason, the revisions of the concept that we proposed in our initial article, no matter how slight, should be challenged. We are grateful to the commentators, most of whom trained with Michael, for exploring the limits of our reconceptualization and for raising issues that we failed to consider. Herein we address what we view as their primary concerns. It is not our goal to argue that they are wrong and we are right, but rather to further discourse in the hope that it helps behavior analysts better understand some of the factors that modulate certain aspects of behavior.