La visión Skinneriana sobre las alucinaciones. Vigencia y revisión

Resumen: El presente trabajo expone brevemente la visión que B.F. Skinner mantenía sobre las alucinaciones como fenómenos psicológicos, y defiende su vigencia y relevancia hoy en día. Para ello se parte de la concepción skinneriana sobre las conductas de percibir, imaginar y soñar. Se insiste en que, según el genial psicólogo americano, las diferencias entre la percepción por un lado y la imaginación o el sueño por otro, se centran en qué tipo de variables controlan el comportamiento en cuestión. Así el percibir estaría controlado principalmente por la estimulación circundante a la persona, mientras que la imaginación o el sueño lo estarían por variables que se hallan “debajo de la piel” del sujeto y, por lo tanto, son privadas e inaccesibles a la comunidad verbal de forma directa. Partiendo de ello, Skinner viene a entender las alucinaciones como conductas perceptivas que se realizan en ausencia del estímulo percibido, similares a las conductas de imaginar o soñar, pero que la persona, por diversas razones, no reconoce como controladas fundamentalmente por la estimulación privada. Finalmente se realizan algunas consideraciones críticas que atañen a la falta en Skinner de una teoría radical sobre la persona. Skinner’s view on hallucinations. Validity and revision Abstract: This work outlines the vision that B.F. Skinner held on hallucinations as psychological phenomena, and defends its validity and relevance nowadays. Our thesis starts with the Skinner’s conception on the behaviors of perceiving, imagining and dreaming. It is highlighted that, in Skinner’s point of view, the differences between perception on one hand and imagination or dreaming in the other, focus on what kind of variables control the behavior in question. Thus, the perceptive behavior would be controlled primarily by stimulus surrounding the person, while the imagination or dreaming would be by variables that are “under the skin” of the subject and, therefore, are private and directly inaccessible to the verbal community. On this basis, Skinner comes to an understanding of hallucinations as perceptual behaviors that occur in the absence of a perceived stimulus, similar to the behavior of imagining or dreaming, but, when hallucinating, the person, for various reasons, does not recognize his / her behaviour as controlled mainly by private stimulation. Finally we made some critical remarks regarding the lack in Skinner’s psychology of a radical theory on the human person.

Identifying Crosscultural Differences in the Effectiveness of an Information and Free Child Seat Rental Program

Porirua (a suburb in Wellington, New Zealand) is a problem area for child restraint use and has been targeted by a variety of government-initiated, and largely ineffective, traffic safety campaigns in recent years (e.g., Gouldsbury, 1999). The present study attempted to increase child restraint use in cars at two Porirua Kindergartens, one predominantly Pacific Nations (Kindergarten A), and the other predominantly New Zealand European (Kindergarten B), by providing parents with information packages and vouchers for free child seat rental. An increase in correct child seat use was not observed at either kindergarten, although all unrestrained children observed during baseline at the predominantly New Zealand European kindergarten changed to wearing seat belts after the intervention. This finding suggests that income limitations per se are not the primary factor maintaining child seat non-use. Discussion focuses on the contradictory findings provided by both previous survey and observational research on the effect of ethnicity and income on child seat use. Potential crosscultural differences in the existence and salience of verbal community effects that may maintain child seat use through the avoidance of social punishment contingencies from other parents within the kindergarten are considered as one possible explanation for the present findings.

B. F. Skinner's Radical Behaviorism: Historical Misconstructions and Grounds for Feminist Reconstructions

Feminist critiques of traditional psychological approaches have generated feminist revisions, most notably in psychoanalytic and developmental theory. Although behaviorism has attracted strong objections from feminist critics, claims of its antithetical positioning vis-à-vis feminist theory construction have generally remained unchallenged. A preliminary step in formulating grounds for a synthesis is to clarify multiple meanings of behaviorism. Specifically, the fusion of Watson's methodological behaviorism and Skinner's radical behaviorism in the literature must be disentangled in order to address the latter's potential as a conceptual framework for constructing feminist theory. Key conceptual features of radical behaviorism that suggest its potential as a vehicle for building a feminist epistemology include: radical behaviorism's contextualistic world view, its interpretation of agency, its treatment of private experience and self knowledge, and its understanding of the pivotal functions of the verbal community.

“Knowing” the World within the Skin: A Remark on Skinner's Behavioral Theory of Knowledge

Skinner argues that we know our private world less accurately than we know the world around us because the verbal community cannot directly reinforce knowledge (or discriminations) about private events. This paper examined Skinner's argument and suggests that it is true by necessity and that the argument is, probably, a case of verbal behavior in the forms of tacting and guessing.

An operant analysis of problem solving

Behavior that solves a problem is distinguished by the fact that it changes another part of the solver's behavior and is strengthened when it does so. Problem solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli. Verbal responses produce especially useful stimuli, because they affect other people. As a culture formulates maxims, laws, grammar, and science, its members behave more effectively without direct or prolonged contact with the contingencies thus formulated. The culture solves problems for its members, and does so by transmitting the verbal discriminative stimuli called rules. Induction, deduction, and the construction of models are ways of producing rules. Behavior that solves a problem may result from direct shaping by contingencies or from rules constructed either by the problem solver or by others. Because different controlling variables are involved, contingency-shaped behavior is never exactly like rule-governed behavior. The distinction must take account of (1) a system which establishes certain contingencies of reinforcement, such as some part of the natural environment, a piece of equipment, or a verbal community; (2) the behavior shaped and maintained by these contingencies; (3) rules, derived from the contingencies, which specify discriminative stimuli, responses, and consequences, and (4) the behavior occasioned by the rules.

The operational analysis of psychological terms

The major contributions of operationism have been negative, largely because operationists failed to distinguish logical theories of reference from empirical accounts of language. Behaviorism never finished an adequate formulation of verbal reports and therefore could not convincingly embrace subjective terms. But verbal responses to private stimuli can arise as social products through the contingencies of reinforcement arranged by verbal communities.In analyzing traditional psychological terms, we need to know their stimulus conditions (“finding the referent”), and why each response is controlled by that condition. Consistent reinforcement of verbal responses in the presence of stimuli presupposes stimuli acting upon both the speaker and the reinforcing community, but subjective terms, which apparently are responses to private stimuli, lack this characteristic. Private stimuli are physical, but we cannot account for these verbal responses by pointing to controlling stimuli, and we have not shown how verbal communities can establish and maintain the necessary consistency of reinforcement contingencies.Verbal responses to private stimuli may be maintained through appropriate reinforcement based on public accompaniments, or through reinforcements accorded responses made to public stimuli, with private cases then occurring by generalization. These contingencies help us understand why private terms have never formed a stable and uniform vocabulary: It is impossible to establish rigorous vocabularies of private stimuli for public use, because differential reinforcement cannot be made contingent upon the property of privacy. The language of private events is anchored in the public practices of the verbal community, which make individuals aware only by differentially reinforcing their verbal responses with respect to their own bodies. The treatment of verbal behavior in terms of such functional relations between verbal responses and stimuli provides a radical behaviorist alternative to the operationism of methodological behaviorists.