When Nathan Azrin was appointed director of treatment development at Anna State Hospital in Illinois in 1958, a majority of the patients he was expected to treat were schizophrenic, emotionally withdrawn and in many cases mute after years in institutions. Few bothered getting dressed; most spent their days in hospital gowns.

Getting his patients to dress, Dr. Azrin decided, would be his first treatment.

The system that he and a colleague developed for doing that — a bartering process that they described as “token economics” — not only persuaded Anna State’s residents to get dressed every day, but also changed the way psychologists approached behavior-changing techniques across a wide spectrum of human experience. It has been used in treatments for autism, couples therapy, military training, employee supervision, prisoner management, special education, athletic coaching and consumer marketing.

Dr. Azrin, who died on March 29 in Pompano Beach, Fla., at 82, did not invent the principles that he and the colleague, Teodoro Ayllon, applied in their work at Anna State, in Anna, Ill. The ideas were developed by Dr. Azrin’s mentor at Harvard, the behavioral pioneer B. F. Skinner, working mainly with rats. But he was among the first psychologists to show that human behavior could be changed in much the same way as Skinner had changed that of rats.

Dr. Azrin and Dr. Ayllon laid out their evidence in 1968 in “The Token Economy,” which is considered one of behavioral psychology’s foundational texts.