behavioral Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as well ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

, the assumption of generality is the assumption that the results of

experiments An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when ...

involving schedules of reinforcement, conducted on non-human subjects (often pigeons), can be generalized to apply to humans. If the assumption holds, many aspects of daily human life can be understood in terms of these results. The naturalization of sunlight helps our bodies to stay awake and keep motivated. The darkness that comes with night tells our body to slow down for the day and get some rest. The ability to survive comes with generality. Experiments have been done to test inescapability and

insolubility In chemistry, solubility is the ability of a substance, the solute, to form a solution with another substance, the solvent. Insolubility is the opposite property, the inability of the solute to form such a solution. The extent of the solubi ...

. Fergus Lowe has questioned the generality of schedule effects in cases of fixed-interval performance among humans and non-humans.Lowe, F.C. (1979) Determinants of human operant behavior. In M.D. Zeiler & P. Harzem (Eds), ''Reinforcement and the organization of behavior'' (pp. 159–192). New York: John Wiley. The ability to generalize information from one situation to another is a function of several factors: the reliability of the original information; the

paradigm In science and philosophy, a paradigm () is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. Etymology ''Paradigm'' comes f ...

validity Validity or Valid may refer to: Science/mathematics/statistics: * Validity (logic), a property of a logical argument * Scientific: ** Internal validity, the validity of causal inferences within scientific studies, usually based on experiments ** ...

; one's understanding of the paradigm, the true determinants of the behavior, and the relevant details of the situations in question; and the similarity between the original source of the data and the situation to which it is to be applied. There are both similarities and differences between the terms "

stimulus generalization Conditioned taste aversion occurs when an animal acquires an aversion to the taste of a food that was paired with aversive stimuli. The Garcia effect is that the aversion develops more strongly for stimuli that cause nausea than other stimuli. Th ...

" and "generality of a

functional relationship In mathematics, a function from a set to a set assigns to each element of exactly one element of .; the words map, mapping, transformation, correspondence, and operator are often used synonymously. The set is called the domain of the functi ...

." Stimulus generalization is the description of the fact that an

organism In biology, an organism () is any living system that functions as an individual entity. All organisms are composed of cells (cell theory). Organisms are classified by taxonomy into groups such as multicellular animals, plants, and ...

behaves in a similar way to similar

stimuli A stimulus is something that causes a physiological response. It may refer to: *Stimulation **Stimulus (physiology), something external that influences an activity **Stimulus (psychology), a concept in behaviorism and perception *Stimulus (economi ...

, and that the more different the stimuli, the more different the behavior. The generality of a finding refers to the degree to which a functional relationship obtained in one situation is able to predict the obtained relationship in a new situation. "Generality" refers more to functional relationships than individual events. That responses occur to X about the same as to Z is irrelevant; rather, that

distributed practice Distributed practice (also known as ''spaced repetition'', ''the spacing effect'', or ''spaced practice'') is a learning strategy, where practice is broken up into a number of short sessions over a longer period of time. Humans and other animal ...

helps in learning

nonsense syllable A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning in the lexicon. It is a kind of non-lexical vocable. A pseudoword is a specific type of non-word composed of a combina ...

s and in learning other tasks.

References

{{Reflist Experimental psychology Behaviorism Experiments