Research

Research

Three questions run through the work, and all three are old. I have spent twenty years approaching them from whichever direction seemed most likely to produce an answer.

The first is what makes human minds distinctive. Much of my early research concerned relational learning, the capacity to relate anything to anything else, which is rare among animals and which appears to underwrite language, reasoning, and a substantial part of what we measure as intelligence. That question now extends to machines, and to what they can and cannot do in the same territory.

The second is what makes a life good in terms that do not depend on the person living it. This is the character and virtue work: whether practical wisdom can be measured, what it predicts, and what follows for schools and clinicians who act on the answer.

The third is what makes a life satisfying to the person living it. Wellbeing is not the same question as the one above, and the two do not always answer the same way.

Most of what I find interesting happens where these three meet.

What makes human minds distinctive

Relational learning, intelligence, and the technologies now working the same ground.

  • 2026

    Practical wisdom, emerging technologies, and AI

    Journal of Moral Education

  • 2022

    Relational operant skills training increases standardised matrices scores in adolescents: a stratified active-controlled trial

    Journal of Behavioral Education

  • 2022

    The impact of the SMART programme on cognitive and academic skills: a systematic review and meta-analysis

    British Journal of Educational Technology

  • 2021

    Non-verbal IQ gains from relational operant training explain variance in educational attainment

    Journal of Cognitive Enhancement

  • 2020

    Convergence of multiple fields on a relational reasoning approach to cognition

    Intelligence

  • 2019

    Technical notation as a tool for basic research in relational frame theory

    The Psychological Record

  • 2018

    Piloting a brief relational operant training program: response latencies and intelligence test performance

    European Journal of Behavior Analysis

  • 2016

    Empirical advances in studying relational networks

    Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science

Living well, objectively

Character and virtue: what can be measured, what it predicts, and what schools should do about it.

Living well, subjectively

Wellbeing, therapy, and what values-based clinical work can settle on its own.

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