Behavior and Social Issues

Delay discounting has been used as a measure of both self control and of value for a particular commodity. Two hundred sixty five college psychology students who self identified as being either a Democrat or a Republican completed a delay-discounting task involving five different commodities (two monetary values, retirement income, Federal legislation, and medical treatment). Analyzing the area under the discounting curve, results showed that Democrats discounted all commodities to a greater extent than did Republicans. These results may suggest that Democrats are more apt than Republicans to prefer immediate results or that they value these commodities to a lesser degree than Republicans. Members of both parties, however, displayed similar changes in discounting across commodities, indicating a similar pattern of relative values.

Việc cung cấp hướng dẫn đọc hiệu quả cho cha mẹ có trình độ văn hóa thấp là điều cần thiết do những hệ lụy quan trọng của khả năng đọc đối với trẻ em và gia đình của chúng. Các chương trình giáo dục người lớn dạy đọc đóng vai trò quan trọng trong việc cải thiện kết quả văn hóa cho các bậc phụ huynh cần hỗ trợ. Nghiên cứu hiện tại đánh giá tác động của một gói đào tạo kỹ năng hành vi (BST) đối với việc đào tạo giáo viên dạy văn hóa người lớn thực hiện các bước của BST khi dạy cha mẹ. Bốn giáo viên dạy văn hóa người lớn đã tham gia nghiên cứu cùng với một cha mẹ có trình độ văn hóa thấp. Biến phụ thuộc chính là tỷ lệ phần trăm các bước của gói BST được thực hiện đúng trong các phép đo tập huấn giáo viên. Các phép đo thứ cấp được thực hiện đối với hiệu suất của cha mẹ ở mỗi bước của các hoạt động văn hóa mà họ được đào tạo. Sau phiên BST, hiệu suất của giáo viên được cải thiện khi thực hiện các bước của gói BST với cha mẹ và các cộng sự cha mẹ trong các phép đo duy trì. Các biện pháp chấp nhận điều trị cho thấy sự đồng thuận cao đối với gói đào tạo. Các kết quả và những cân nhắc thực tiễn khi đào tạo giáo viên giáo dục người lớn được thảo luận.

Consumer behavior is impacting Earth’s climate, and solving the climate change crisis will necessarily involve influencing the anthropogenic causes of behavior. The present study evaluated relational frames involving comparative climate relations on consumer choices in a simulated purchasing task. In baseline, participants selected among common household commodities that differed along three dimensions: color, an unfamiliar symbol (Y and Z), and price. Price was sequentially increased for the product with the Z symbol. All participants showed maximum sensitivity to price in baseline, where any increase for Z led to selection of Y across commodities. Relational training involved selecting among climate related stimuli in the presence of the symbols Y and Z, where correct responding occurred when participants selected the more harmful stimulus in the presence of Y and the less harmful stimulus in the presence on Z. A generalization test showed that correct responding transferred to novel stimulus arrangements based on climate impact. In the post-training purchasing phase, six of the seven participants showed reduced sensitivity to increases in price, where price and symbol appeared to interact to influence purchasing. These results have implications for a science of consumer behavior related to climate change from an RFT account.

Early readers who have learned letter–sound correspondences do not always learn to read words through best practice reading instruction. This suggests a missing stimulus control for textual responses and the literature lacks an intervention to address this problem. Five kindergarten students who did not learn textual responses from reading instruction participated in this study. We used a combined pre- and posttest and multiple probe design to test the effects of a composite-to-component vocal phoneme segmentation (CtCVPS) intervention on the number of correct untaught (a) textual responses, (b) dictated written spelling responses, (c) vocal phoneme blends, (d) abstracted vocal phoneme segmentations, as well as (e) cumulative correct textual responses during reading instruction before and after the intervention. During the CtCVPS intervention participants were taught to listen to a set of composite words and vocalize the component phonemes. Correct responses emerged across all variables for all participants as a function of the intervention and all participants learned new textual responses from reading instruction after the CtCVPS intervention. These findings demonstrated that acquiring a generalized vocal phoneme segmentation repertoire through the CtCVPS intervention established necessary stimulus control for textual responding. Implications on the role of acquiring composite-to-component responses through the vocal phoneme segmentation intervention in learning to read and write are discussed.

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The need to bring behavior analysis to scale is no more obvious or urgent than now. Collaboration between behavior analysts and healthcare workers, educators, policymakers, mental health clinicians, social workers, and so many other professionals is critical to reaching under-resourced and traditionally marginalized populations. First, however, interprofessional collaboration must be adopted widely and reinforced within the behavior analytic community. Disciplinary centrism and hubris pose barriers to effective interprofessional collaboration, leading one to assume the position that practitioners of the same discipline are better trained and smarter than those of a different field. However, cultural humility (Wright, Behavior Analysis in Practice, 12(4), 805–809, 2019) is an alternative to disciplinary centrism that allows professionals to retain identities born of cultural histories and training (Pecukonis, Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 40(3), 211–220, 2020). Furthermore, cultural reciprocity is a process of self-observation and collaborative inquiry that involves questioning one’s own assumptions and forces individuals (and professions) to confront the contradictions between their values and their practices (Kalyanpur & Harry, 1999). In this paper, we revisit the call for Humble Behaviorism first made by Alan Neuringer in 1991 and the recommendations of fellow behavior analysts since. Specifically, we introduce a framework of cultural reciprocity to guide humble behaviorists as they acquire behaviors necessary to establish and maintain productive interprofessional relationships. We encourage them to act on their ethical and moral duties to address social problems of global concern and bring behavior analysis to scale.

One of the main arguments in favor of the metacontingency as a model for explaining social phenomena is that it embraces another “kind” of selection (cultural selection) beyond natural and operant selection. Despite being “emergent” on operant processes, it would not be “reducible” to operant selection. Consequently, cultural selection would demand a conceptual framework of its own, hence the metacontingency. Assuming the existence of another “kind” of selection is an ontological premise, and that this new process requires its own conceptual framework, because contingency analysis is insufficient to explain it, can be considered an epistemological premise. Our goal in this paper is to argue that the epistemological premise present in the metacontingency literature is wrong. To do so, we present pragmatic reductionism as a model to discuss the possibility of reductive explanations of selection and maintenance of cultural practices from metacontingency to contingency analysis. Based on this framework, we provide examples of pragmatic reductive interpretations, thought experiments, and an analysis of experimental data in which we try to explain away the metacontingency. We conclude that it is possible to pragmatically reduce metacontingency explanations to contingency explanations. That does not, however, invalidate the ontological premise about the existence of different processes related to cultural evolution and selection whatever those might be. It only shows that, if they exist at all, they are not the ones being studied in metacontingency research.