Stimulus control in the context of "Behaviorists"

Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, deriving from Skinner's two levels of selection (phylogeny and ontogeny), they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism views internal mental states as explanations for observable behavior.

Behaviorism emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally. It was derived from earlier research in the late nineteenth century, such as when Edward Thorndike pioneered the law of effect, a procedure that involved the use of consequences to strengthen or weaken behavior.

Contingency management (CM) is the application of the three-term contingency (or operant conditioning), which uses stimulus control and consequences to change behavior. CM originally derived from the science of applied behavior analysis (ABA), but it is sometimes implemented from a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) framework as well.

Incentive-based contingency management is well-established when used as a clinical behavior analysis (CBA) treatment for substance use disorders, which entails that patients earn money (vouchers) or other incentives (i.e., prizes) as a reward to reinforce drug abstinence (and, less often, punishment if they fail to adhere to program rules and regulations or their treatment plan). Another popular approach based on CM for alcoholism is the community reinforcement approach and family training (CRAFT) model, which uses self-management and shaping techniques.