Extending B. F. Skinner's Selection by Consequences to Personality Change, Implicit Theories of Intelligence, Skill Learning, and Language

In a rooftop office, above a Minneapolis flour mill in 1943, B. F. Skinner discovered “shaping” by training a pigeon to send a small wooden ball down a miniature alley to hit a set of toy pins. Skinner recalled that the day was one of great illumination and emboldened his later suggestions that human behaviors may arise from behavior–environment interactions that are relatively malleable (selectionism) rather than arising from hypothetical inner constructs that are relatively fixed (essentialism). The present article extends selectionism to 4 current topics in psychology (personality change, implicit theories of intelligence, skill learning, and language) and highlights the advantages of selectionism, in contrast to essentialism.

Motivation from the Perspective of Contextual Cognitive Behavioral Approaches and the Psychological Flexibility Model

In everyday uses, the term motivation may imply a kind of mechanistic, “inside” the person, type of process. Contextual approaches, on the other hand, adopt an evolutionary perspective on motivation that emphasizes the selection of behavior patterns through the joint actions of historical consequences and verbal or cognitive processes, themselves considered the product of the same contextual processes of selection by consequences. The contextual focus on building, maintaining, and elaborating behavior patterns from directly manipulable contextual features enables a focus on variables that are able to serve the purpose of prediction and influence over behavior. Current studies of these processes apply the psychological flexibility model, including its processes of values-based and committed action. Laboratory studies of these processes demonstrate their potential importance in healthy functioning in relation to chronic pain. Treatment studies, including studies of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), also demonstrate that enhancing these motivation-related processes has clinical utility.

BEHAVIORAL SELECTION BY CONSEQUENCES

Selection as a process consists of (a) variation of traits, (b) differential interaction with the environment on the basis of the variation of traits, and (c) differential replication of beneficial, adaptive traits in the form of their transmission to and expression in future generations of a population. Behavior analysts suggest selection applies to the analysis of an organism’s behavior just as much as to an analysis of its morphology and the origin of species. The three levels at which behavior analysts apply the principle of selection are (a) phylogenic, for the development of an innate repertoire in a species; (b) ontogenic, for the development of an operant repertoire in the lifetime of an individual organism; and (c) cultural, for the development of cultural practices in a social group. Much of traditional psychology is committed to postulating antecedent causes of behavior, particularly where those causes are assumed to be mental. This article argues that a science of behavior is well-served by setting aside concerns with antecedent mental causes in favor of selection by consequences as a causal mode. Key words: B. F. Skinner, behavior analysis, Charles Darwin, evolution, selection by consequences.

Automatization and Sound Change

This chapter reviews research on automatization, both in the domain of action execution and in the domain of perception / comprehension. In comprehension, automatization is argued to lead to inability to direct conscious attention towards frequently used intermediate steps on the way from sound to meaning (leading to findings such as the missing letter effect). As a result, the cues we use to access meaning may be the cues we are least aware of. Chain and hierarchical representations of action sequences are compared. The chain model is argued to be under-appreciated as an execution-level representation for well-practiced sequences. Automatization of a sequence repeated in a fixed order is argued to turn a hierarchy into a chain. Execution-level representations for familiar words are argued to be networks of interlinked chains (connected through propagation filters) rather than hierarchies. Much of sound change is argued to be the result of automatization of word execution, throughout life, tempered by reinforcement learning (selection by consequences).

DO SISTEMA TEÓRICO DE B. F. SKINNER À METACONTINGÊNCIA: OBSERVAÇÃO, EXPERIMENTAÇÃO E INTERPRETAÇÃO

A multideterminação do comportamento humano via três fontes de controle – filogenética, ontogenética e cultural – integra os princípios da ciência comportamental iniciada por B. F. Skinner nos anos 1930, tendo posteriormente, o artigo seminal Selection by Consequences (Skinner, 1981/1987a). A unidade de análise, a contingência de três termos, envolve a descrição de relações entre eventos ambientais antecedentes e subsequentes e a alteração da probabilidade futura de uma resposta alvo. A replicação fortalece análises funcionais em condições experimentais, assim como interpretações de eventos ocorridos no ambiente natural (i.e., análise funcional descritiva). Esse movimento é identificado também no terceiro nível de seleção, o nível cultural. Uma das possibilidades analíticas é oferecida pela descrição de macrocomportamentos em macrocontingências à seleção de linhagens culturo-comportamentais e produções agregadas em metacontingências. Nestas, há recorrência de contingências comportamentais entrelaçadas e seus respectivos produtos agregados [CCEsàPAs], as quais podem envolver diferentes sistemas como a família, igreja e Estado. O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar uma revisão mostrando a evolução de estudos de práticas culturais, com a criação de novas unidades de análise, a partir do modelo de seleção por consequências. Destaca-se que o desenvolvimento desta área conjuga observação, experimentação, com interpretações de variáveis presentes em análogos experimentais, e no ambiente natural.Palavras-chave: análise do comportamento, análise experimental do comportamento, contingência, metacontingência, macrocontingência.

Two challenges of a selectionist analogy to the theory of selection by consequences

The explanatory system developed by Skinner culminated in the formulation of an explanatory mechanism that should address the behavior as an analogy between natural selection of Darwin and operant conditioning. Skinner believed that this analogy would be enough to sort the behavioral disciplines into three explanatory levels: phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural. However, before Darwin’s theory became a universal paradigm for biology, it was necessary to find a substrate on which selection could act in order to test the limits and scope given by Darwinian formulation, i.e., Mendel’s discoveries about genetic transmission of hereditary characters. Beyond neodarwinist synthesis, the Experimental Analysis of Behavior still does not have a biological basis for the test of the Skinner hypothesis about the selection of operant behavior as an analogue of natural selection. In addition, there is not a mathematical model to predict the distribution of variability of individual repertoire in an analogue of Hardy-Weinberg Law. What is the impact of these inconsistencies on the theory of selection by consequences? Before accepting the analogy between operant conditioning and natural selection, it is necessary to understand the laws of variation and retention of behavior and to explain how this sensitivity occurs and how it affects behavior.