A self-interpretive behavior analysis.

Although it rejects self-awareness as psychological bedrock, behavior-analytic theory can be stated self-inclusively, keeping the theorist within view. Its principles of discrimination and generalization have been elaborated to include concepts and higher order conditionalities, including those of logic and of awareness. Its violating a cultural bias that is called the "fundamental attribution error" may be a primary source of controversies. Its other disagreements with mainstream psychologies hinge more on contiguous versus remote causation than on mentalism versus antimentalism, which Skinner emphasized. The nonmediational, Skinnerian theorist is a participation in the world rather than an isolated self.     

Attitude-behavior congruity, mindfulness, and self-focused attention: A behavior-analytic reconstruction

Social psychologists have responded to research reporting low agreement between attitude measures and related behavior with attempts to explain the incongruities and enhance agreement. This article examines attitude-behavior incongruity from a behavior-analytic point of view. Traditional and behavior-analytic views of attitudes and behaviors are compared. In the behavior-analytic view, answering an attitude scale should be considered as behavior displayed by a person under rather unusual social conditions, not as a reflection of an enduring personal disposition. Reasons why questionnaire-answering behavior will not resemble behavior in other functionally different social conditions are reviewed. Special attention is extended to two representative lines of attitude-behavior research: mindfulness and self-focused attention. Discriminative stimuli in both areas of study have produced more predictable agreement between questionnaire-answering behavior and behavior in other settings.     

Behavior analysis and farm animal welfare

This article demonstrates that there is a role for behavior-analytic techniques in the area of farm animal welfare and provides examples of the kinds of work that can be done. Behavior-analytic procedures, specifically those used in the study of psychophysics, preference, and demand, can provide answers to three questions people concerned with the welfare of farm animals are likely to ask: What can the animals detect? What do they like and dislike? What will they work to attain or preserve? Such information certainly is necessary for making reasonable decisions about animal welfare, although it is not sufficient in and of itself.     

Interesting times: practice, science, and professional associations in behavior analysis

Neither practitioners nor scientists appear to be fully satisfied with the world's largest behavior-analytic membership organization. Each community appears to believe that initiatives that serve the other will undermine the association's capacity to serve their own needs. Historical examples suggest that such discord is predicted when practitioners and scientists cohabit the same association. This is true because all professional associations exist to address guild interests, and practice and science are different professions with different guild interests. No association, therefore, can succeed in being all things to all people. The solution is to assure that practice and science communities are well served by separate professional associations. I comment briefly on how this outcome might be promoted.     

Skinner's verbal behavior, Chomsky's review, and mentalism.

Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) is a comprehensive treatise that deals with most aspects of verbal behavior. However, its treatment of the learning of grammatical behavior has been challenged repeatedly (e.g., Chomsky, 1959). The present paper will attempt to show that the learning of grammar and syntax can be dealt with adequately within a behavior-analytic framework. There is no need to adopt mentalist (or cognitivist) positions or to add mentalist elements to behaviorist theories.     

Thinking about thinking and feeling about feeling

Traditional clinical psychology generally posits "mental" events that differ from "behavioral" events. Mental events are not publicly observable, take place in a different dimension from overt behavior, and are the topic of primary concern. For example, mental events are often taken to be causes of troublesome overt behavior. In addition, the mental events themselves may be regarded as troublesome, independent of their relation to any specific overt behavior. Therapy is usually aimed at fixing these troublesome mental events, under an assumption that improvement in the client's status will follow in due course. Behavior analysis has its own position on the relations among clinical matters, overt behavior, and such private events as thinking and feeling. In a behavior-analytic view, private events are behavioral phenomena rather than mental phenomena. They are not initiating causes of behavior; rather, they are themselves caused by antecedent conditions, but they may contribute to discriminative control over subsequent behavior, both verbal and nonverbal. Verbal processes are viewed as vitally important in understanding troublesome behavior. However, the circumstances that cause both the troublesome private events and the troublesome behavior in the first place still need to be addressed. Finally, clinical behavior analysis will need to market its insights into diagnosis and treatment very adroitly, because it rejects the mentalism upon which most traditional forms of therapy are predicated and the mentalism that most consumers expect to encounter.     

A behavior-analytic critique of Bandura's self-efficacy theory

A behavior-analytic critique of self-efficacy theory is presented. Self-efficacy theory asserts that efficacy expectations determine approach behavior and physiological arousal of phobics as well as numerous other clinically important behaviors. Evidence which is purported to support this assertion is reviewed. The evidence consists of correlations between self-efficacy ratings and other behaviors. Such response-response relationships do not unequivocally establish that one response causes another. A behavior-analytic alternative to self-efficacy theory explains these relationships in terms of environmental events. Correlations between self-efficacy rating behavior and other behavior may be due to the contingencies of reinforcement that establish a correspondence between such verbal predictions and the behavior to which they refer. Such a behavior-analytic account does not deny any of the empirical relationships presented in support of self-efficacy theory, but it points to environmental variables that could account for those relationships and that could be manipulated in the interest of developing more effective treatment procedures.     

Escalation research: providing new frontiers for applying behavior analysis to organizational behavior

Decision fiascoes such as escalation of commitment, the tendency of decision makers to "throw good money after bad," can have serious consequences for organizations and are therefore of great interest in applied research. This paper discusses the use of behavior analysis in organizational behavior research on escalation. Among the most significant aspects of behavior-analytic research on escalation is that it has indicated that both the patterns of outcomes that decision makers have experienced for past decisions and the patterns of responses that they make are critical for understanding escalation. This research has also stimulated the refinement of methods by researchers to better assess decision making and the role reinforcement plays in it. Finally, behavior-analytic escalation research has not only indicated the utility of reinforcement principles for predicting more complex human behavior but has also suggested some additional areas for future exploration of decision making using behavior analysis.     

A contextual approach to research on AIDS prevention

The acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a disease that is transmitted almost entirely through behavioral factors. In the absence of a cure or vaccine, the modification of AIDS-risk behavior presents a unique challenge to behavioral scientists and should be taken as a clear imperative by behavior analysts. This paper discusses the currently dominant social-cognitive theories (the health belief model, the theory of reasoned action, and self-efficacy theory) that have been widely used to predict and understand AIDS-risk behavior. Although these theories have generated a voluminous literature on the cognitive, attitudinal, and demographic correlates of AIDS-risk behavior, they have not resulted in specific intervention strategies to influence risky behavior, most likely because they fail to specify manipulable variables. As an alternative to social-cognitive theories, this paper evaluates the usefulness of a behavior-analytic approach to stem the spread of HIV infection. It examines some of the philosophical differences underlying cognitive and behavioral approaches that are embedded in mechanistic versus functional contextualistic principles. It explores the theoretical and practical implications of adopting either predicting and explaining behavior or predicting and influencing behavior as the goals of science. To illustrate the value of adopting the goal of prediction and influence, behavior-analytic research on the social context of risky sexual behavior in adolescents is described. The paper argues that in order to alter the future course of the AIDS epidemic, the behavioral sciences must move beyond describing cognitive and attitudinal correlates of risky behavior and focus on the social context of the behavior of individuals. In addition, population-wide changes in AIDS-risk behavior can be accomplished only if research focuses on how to influence larger social systems, including the media, school systems, and community organizations.     

Effects of daily probing on acquisition of instructive feedback responses

This study evaluated the effects of daily probes of instructive feedback stimuli on students' acquisition of two types of instructive feedback responses. Four students, two with disabilities, participated and were taught four sets of behaviors, two sets received daily probes and two sets did not. A modification of the multiple probe design across behaviors was used. The findings indicate that students acquired their target behaviors rapidly and maintained correct responding during subsequent probe conditions. Students also acquired both types of instructive feedback and maintained it across subsequent probe conditions. The daily probes of the instructive feedback stimuli did not appear to enhance acquisition or maintenance of the instructive feedback responses, but students appeared to acquire the instructive feedback responses while learning their target behaviors. The implications of this study for understanding how students learn instructive feedback responses and for practice are discussed.     

Evaluating treatment effects in single-subject behavioral experiments using quality-control charts

Quality-control charts can be particularly useful in identifying treatment effects and patterns of behaviors in single-subject behavior-analytic experiments that cannot be determined by visual inspection of their graphs. Using an example from the behavior analysis literature the quality-control charts identified the presence of treatment effects across phases as well as the presence of trends within and between phases. The ease of their calculations suggest use of them by behavior analysts whenever the effects of particular interventions are questionable.     

Some ethical issues in feminist-oriented therapeutic groups for women

Review of the origins of group psychotherapy reveals concerns with social as well as with personal "psychopathology." Thus, group processes have been mobilized for curative or change purposes for ideological as well as individual therapeutic goals. Psychopolitical as well as personal change are the goals for some groups. The ethical problem stems from a persistent assumption that the group's processes are inherently benign and curative and beneficial to individual participants. A more sophisticated understanding takes into account their essential neutrality and their potential use (or abuse) for purposes of ideological persuasion that may or may not be personally therapeutic. As in other ethically implicated issues in the psychotherapies, the question becomes one of treatment versus exploitation, or therapy for the individual versus recruitment on behalf of a cause.     

The response-stimulus contingency and reinforcement learning as a context for considering two non-behavior-analytic views of contingency learning

This paper introduces a special section on the contingency. Bower and Watson were invited to present their views of contingency learning in human infants from outside the context of behavior analysis, and Cigales, Marr, and Lattal and Shahan provided commentaries that point out some of the more interesting and controversial aspects of those views from a behavior-analytic perspective. The debate turns on how to conceptualize the response-stimulus contingency of operant learning. The present paper introduces the contingency concept and contingency detection by subjects, as well as research practices in behavior analysis, in a context in which the dependency between infant responding and the presentation of environmental consequences may be disrupted through procedures in which ordinarily consequent events occur before the response or in its absence. These points can relate to and serve as an introduction to the Bower and Watson papers on infant contingency learning as well as to the three commentaries that follow.     

BEHAVIORAL CUSPS: A DEVELOPMENTAL AND PRAGMATIC CONCEPT FOR BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

Most concepts of development explain certain behavior changes as products or markers of the invariable succession of emerging periods, stages, refinements, or achievements that define and order much of an individual's life. A different but comparable concept can be derived from the most basic mechanisms of behavior analysis, which are its environmental contingencies, and from its most basic strategy, which is to study behavior as its subject matter. From a behavior-analytic perspective, the most fundamental developmental questions are (a) whether these contingencies vary in any systematic way across the life span, and thus make behavior change in a correspondingly systematic way; and (b) whether some of these contingencies and their changes have more far-reaching consequences than others, in terms of the importance to the organism and others, of the behavior classes they change. Certain behavior changes open the door to especially broad or especially important further behavior change, leading to the concept of the behavioral cusp. A behavioral cusp, then, is any behavior change that brings the organism's behavior into contact with new contingencies that have even more far-reaching consequences. Of all the environmental contingencies that change or maintain behavior, those that accomplish cusps are developmental. Behavior change remains the fundamental phenomenon of development for a behavior-analytic view; a cusp is a special instance of behavior change, a change crucial to what can come next.     

Some comments on the distinction between intention and intentionality

The topic of intention has recently received attention from behavior analysts (Hineline, 2003; Neuman, 2004). From a behavior-analytic perspective, it is important to identify the circumstances in which people utter such terms, and to identify the potential circumstances that maintain such utterances. It follows that from a behavior-analytic perspective, the focus is primarily on those who observe behavior and attribute intentions to that behavior. However, there has not been a distinction between intention and intentionality. The current analysis stresses the distinction between the two terms, both from a traditional point of view (psychologist and layperson) and from a behavior-analytic point of view. From a behavior analyst's perspective, the distinction is important because observers may be responding to distinct functional relations when they attribute intention or intentionality to behavior.     

Why behavior analysts should study emotion: the example of anxiety.

Historically, anxiety has been a dominant subject in mainstream psychology but an incidental or even insignificant one in behavior analysis. We discuss several reasons for this discrepancy. We follow with a behavior-analytic conceptualization of anxiety that could just as easily be applied to emotion in general. Its primary points are (a) that language-able humans have an extraordinary capacity to derive relations between events and that it is a simple matter to show that neutral stimuli can acquire discriminative functions indirectly with no direct training; (b) that private events can readily acquire discriminative functions; (c) that anxiety disorders seem to occur with little apparent direct learning or that the amount of direct learning is extraordinarily out of proportion with the amount of responding; and (d) that the primary function of anxious behavior is experiential avoidance. We conclude that the most interesting aspects of anxiety disorders may occur as a function of derived rather than direct relations between public events and overt and private responses with avoidance functions. Implicit in this conclusion and explicit in the paper is the assertion that anxiety is a suitable subject for behavior-analytic study.     

Inquiry and Analysis: Dewey and Russell on Philosophy

In an environment characterized by the emergence of new and diverse (and often opposed) philosophical efforts, there is a need for a conception of philosophy that will promote the exchange and critical consideration of divergent insights. Depending upon the operative conception, philosophical efforts can be viewed as significant, insightful and instructive, or unimportant, misguided and not real philosophy. This paper develops John Dewey's conception of philosophy as a mode of inquiry in contrast with Bertrand Russell's conception of philosophy as a mode of analysis. I argue that while Russell's analytic conception of philosophy justifies the dismissal of non-analytic philosophies, Dewey's conception of philosophy provides a theoretical framework for the comparison, evaluation and interaction of alternatives.