Association for Behavior Analysis International

Periodically, social upheavals challenge well established cultural rules and practices. A sampling of current tensions includes what is observed between those who accept social stratification as inevitable and those who labor for social justice, between conservative, progressive, and libertarian agendas, between those who would grant remarkable power to businesses and those who would limit those powers in favor of public health and climate justice. Culturo-behavior scientists have advanced a number of strategies grounded in evolutionary, prevention, and behavior sciences, Skinner’s philosophy of science, and contemporary approaches to language and cognition. Advances in conceptual and empirical evidence for the planned use of interlocked behavior contingencies suggest that it is not too late to create a sustainable economy in which all humans matter, all voices are heard, and all can access basic goods and services. In this symposium, Giovambattista Presti, Francisco Perez, Thomas Szabo, Yukie Kurumiya, and Dennis Embry discuss these advances. At the end, Tony Biglan will provide commentary.

Board-certified behavior analysts, teachers, and psychologists

Putnam and Garrett in The Upswing document the evolution of the United States from a We to an I culture over the last 125 years. They examined how “economic inequality, political polarization, social fragmentation, cultural narcissism, racism, and gender discrimination” evolved. They concluded that these changes are constructed by “human agency.” Skinner warned us that “great changes must be made in the American way of life to prevent a potential catastrophic future.” He urged us to “use our knowledge about human behavior to create a social environment” so we can live productive lives and not jeopardize the future for those who follow us. We have been asked “why are we still not acting to save the world?.” We propose that positive change can be managed. We now have a matured science of behavior and the technologies to engineer the next steady upswing. We propose that behavior analysis is a truly unifying science. It brings together, with behavior as the thread, evolutionary, social and biological-neurological sciences within the context of selection by consequences. We propose that together, we can ignite a commitment to initiate a behavior-based cultural evolutionary process that will reframe our culture towards the greater good.

Behavior analysts have long done what Putnam (2001) said America does; that is, we have gone “bowling alone.” Our commitment to an inductive, within-subject research tradition perplexes others. They leave us be, so long as we stay clear of social and psychological issues. Yet these troubles have turned up at our own door. We struggle with issues regarding race, gender, neurodiversity, and aversive technologies. If behavior analysis is to withstand these storms, we will need to break our silence on matters all but forgotten in our history. In this talk, I chronicle the climate in which Skinner advanced the experimental analysis of behavior. I discuss the deductive approach to analyzing variability in data and its connection to the British and American eugenicists. If, as eugenicists argued, behavioral variability is intrinsic, there is reason to cease helping those who will never do well. In contrast, if behavioral variability is extrinsic, then environmental experiences can be engineered to assist all those who live. The eugenics movement went underground after WW2, but its impact on science and the helping professions remains. I argue that now is the time to break our silence and show the world that all people matter, that everyone belongs.

In recent years, behavior analysts have focused research attention on professional burnout (Brown, 2021; Daunavi et at., 2019). It seems ironic that behavior change agents that establish nurturing environments for others are not nurtured by their professional environments. One explanation for this phenomenon is that graduate programs teach behavior analysts to engineer behavior change at the level of the individual and the service industry reinforces practice at this same level of analysis. However, decades of studies show that by combining contingency management with both compassionate attention to emotions and the transmission of sustainable cultural practices, service delivery and service environments transform for the good of all. In this presentation, I will discuss training behavior analysts to engineer their service environments into nurturing, collaborative spaces with tools borrowed from culturo-behavior science, evolutionary science, and prevention science, each tethered in a quadrilateral matrix to the overarching philosophy of radical behaviorism. This approach is consistent with Skinner’s view of parallel selection processes that can be yolked together to create an appetitive, sustainable, and evolving professional field of applied behavior practice.