Association for Behavior Analysis International

In the technical vocabulary of behavior analysis, we discuss discrimination in the context of specifying conditions under which organisms come to behave one way given some stimuli and a different way given others. But in everyday talk, we more often discuss discrimination in the context of concerns about how people treat each other, as when we ask whether individuals are discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity or gender. Have we missed some political and social implications of our technical vocabulary? The varied usages have an underlying commonality. Whether pigeons respond differently to green and red keys or law enforcement officers to members of the public depending on their looks, the issue is how discriminated responding is brought about by contingencies and what can be done when those contingencies produce problematic behavior. If a member of some racial or ethnic group is mistreated by members of another group, that individual will come to discriminate on the basis of group membership as surely as a rat between a stimulus during which lever pressing produces shock and one during which it does not. However much we may wish it otherwise, contingencies maintain discriminations involving neighborhoods in which people travel and individuals with whom they interact. Existing social and political environments make such discriminations sometimes inevitable, but we know some things about behavior that may help us to cope with them constructively. This presentation therefore addresses these issues in terms of such behavior analytic categories as differential attention to stimuli, formation and abolition of discriminations, and conditional discrimination.