Environment And Behavior

Donald M. Baer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367009755
• eBook ISBN: 9780429721137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

We propose this book as a celebration of the outstanding research and teaching career of Professor Barbara Coleman Etzel. The editors and authors are her students and her worldwide colleagues. She directed us toward the issues of antecedent control at a time when we thought altering consequences could solve all problems. She developed a model of how a preschool teaching and research laboratory should be run by creating the very environmental controls evident in her work. This book is testimony to her influence on our professional careers and to our affection for her. Analysis of the way the environment influences behavior is essential to our understanding of human development. This volume collects original, never-published work that describes how people conceptualize, think, and behave. Environment and Behavior presents empirical studies that test theoretical assumptions and illustrate how to integrate environmental awareness into professional practice and design. The ability to categorize—to think in larger and more inclusive classifications and, at the same time, in smaller and more exclusive subdivisions—is a hallmark of conceptual development, It is the kind of development that makes humans distinctly rational, symbolic, and logical. This book presents a new way of viewing the conceptual development of normal and developmentally disabled children and the conceptual reorganization of adults. Individual conceptual ability is demonstrated across an impressive range of issues: private events, language development and function, child abuse, sexual abuse, drug abuse, autism, aging, professional practice, and environmental and cultural design. Additional commentary for each section is provided by the editors. Those working or studying in the areas of psychology, education, human development, social work, and disability will find this book to be a current and thorough introduction to the subject.

Part One
The Basic Principles

The first four chapters of this book state the basic principles of behavioral science on which the rest of the book depends. Such definition of terms is a duty of any authors of texts written for readers whose previous education is likely to be diverse. Duty, especially in the form of stating behavioral science principles yet again, is usually a dry exercise, and readers who already know those principles want to see the next level of understanding and application.

Fortunately, these chapters were written differently. Sigrid Glenn has restated the basis principles, not just in terms of how responses relate to the environment, but also in terms of how our behavior relates to the livability and survivability of our world.

Most behavioral science emphasizes the power of the environment; it sees environment as constantly controlling behavior, and it sees behavior as constantly affecting the environment. Indeed, the point of most behavior is to affect the environment. Glenn's account helps us to understand these facts in special terms: to remember that when a vast number of us, individually and as a society, respond lawfully to our environment in ways that alter it in the short run, in our numbers we have the power to endanger it in the longer run. To endanger our environment is to endanger ourselves. Fortunately, the same principles that warn us of dangerous problems also show us solutions.

We should reread the principles of behavior in a new light.

To show readers the next level of understanding and application requires focus, and focus requires restricting our examination to less than everything. In the second chapter of this section, therefore, Donald Baer restates basic principles in terms of antecedent environmental control only. Part of antecedent control involves how to understand and, therefore, design environments in which people automatically behave better and encounter more rewards and fewer misfortunes; almost everything in such an environment would support only good behavior and make rewards more probable and misfortunes less probable.

Part of antecedent control is stimulus control: understanding how behavior comes to depend on the environmental events that evoke it, such that without those events, one can hardly use those behaviors. A practical lesson devolves from that understanding: We should make sure our problem-solving behaviors are responsive to all the relevant parts of all the environments in which we might ever need them. We should make sure our skills are not under the control of too few stimuli, such that when a problem emerges in an environment lacking those stimuli, we are helpless to solve the problem. An understanding of stimulus control shows us that our skills do not automatically emerge whenever we have a problem; that happens only if we have arranged it to happen.

We should reread the principles of stimulus control in a new light.

The third chapter of this section also restates some basic principles but this time to show that one must use enough of those principles in thinking about any problem—not just one principle or a few. Martha Peláez-Nogueras and Jacob Gewirtz use examples from infant behavior to remind us that our principles are contextual. We would like to find scientific principles that are always true, everywhere and every time, but contextualism teaches us (among other things) how unlikely it is that such principles exist. Almost every principle we know is true not everywhere, but only in some places, and not every time, but only sometimes. There are places, and times, when some other principle is true instead. That does not mean an absence of lawfulness; it signals instead the operation of another law, one we should learn as well as the first. Thus, when we overstate a principle, such as, "Behavior comes under the control of stimuli that signal its functional consequences," contextualism teaches us to restate it immediately as, "Behavior comes under the control of stimuli that signal its functional consequences, except when it does not." That restatement recognizes reality; it also tells us to find the conditions "when it does not" and then understand why those conditions alter the principle. That will give us a new, larger, and more inclusive principle. That is the most valuable path science can take.

We should reread the principles of behavioral science in a new light—except when we should not.

Finally, Freddy Paniagua offers four cases of the explanatory principles of one special problem, but an exquisitely important, special problem: the stimulus control that what we say can exert over what we do, and the stimulus control that what we do can exert over what we say. That problem is clearly contextual. It could indeed be problematic if we always did what we said we would and always said exactly what we did. The problem is to understand how to create that control when it would be valuable and how to relax it when that would be valuable.

1
Understanding Human Behavior: A Key to Solving Social Problems

Sigrid S. Glenn

For tens of thousands of years, the facts of everyday human existence remained fairly constant. Our ancestors roamed the earth in small groups—hunting animal foods, gathering plant foods, and gradually learning to build simple tools to aid their efforts. They fashioned coverings for their bodies from animal skins, sought shelter in caves, and eventually depicted some of the important features of their life in drawings on the walls of those caves. They did those things in much the same way from place to place, person to person, and year to year. The particulars of their lives were similar from century to century for thousands of years.¹

As the second millennium of the current era draws to a close, the facts of daily human existence vary enormously from place to place, and they typically change rapidly. Many people living today remember a world without space travel, air travel, or even auto travel—a world without electricity, telephones, calculators, or typewriters (to say nothing of computers). Today, people must learn to operate new machines, interact with new software, use new documents or systems, take on new assignments in work, listen to new music, abide by new rules, use new products, and even learn new social interactions to keep up with changes in activities, interests, or emotions of family members, friends, colleagues, or neighbors. In short, the world with which people must interact is changing rapidly, and that means that people's behavior must change accordingly.

Curiously enough, all these changes in the world, and countless others, are the direct result of human behavior. Our world is mostly a world that has been constructed by humans, whose coordinated behavior has resulted in our machines, our laws, our libraries and churches, and even the pattern of our interpersonal relations. Most of us like our modern world, perhaps because the variety it provides is so interesting, and we would not want to trade places with one of our ancestors. But there is a downside. Some of the products of human behavior threaten the future of the human race and perhaps the very existence of the biosphere. The behavior of humans is part of every major social problem we face: overpopulation, child abuse, auto accidents, illiteracy, and overconsumption of natural resources, to name a few.

In short, human behavior is the engine behind most of the changes that occurred on earth during the past 10,000 years, and especially during the past 3,000 years, the period of recorded history. During the past few hundred years, humans learned enough about their world to bring about the rapid changes we now see. Our knowledge about the world is lopsided, however; we know a lot about some things and little about others. It is only during the present century that people have turned their attention to behavior itself: how people learn to behave as they do, what causes behavior change, and what can be done when needed behavior is missing or harmful behavior persists.

Behavior Analysis

Many kinds of knowledge are important in order to have a complete understanding of human behavior. We need to know how the body (including the brain) works, because it is the body that behaves. It is the job of the biological sciences to develop that kind of knowledge. We also need to know how cultural systems work, because human behavior is molded by the culture in which a human Lives. It is the job of cultural anthropology and sociology to develop that kind of knowledge. We also need knowledge of behavioral systems. Behavioral systems are the patterns of relations that exist between activities of human beings and other parts of the world. Behavioral systems are the subject matter studied by behavior analysts, just as central nervous systems are the subject matter of neurophysiologists, cellular systems are the subject matter of cell biologists, and cultural systems are the subject matter of cultural anthropologists. Without scientific knowledge about how behavioral systems become organized and change over time, people are seriously handicapped in solving the many problems that result from human behavior.

At any level of natural phenomena, from atomic through chemical, organic, behavioral, and cultural, explanations may be formulated in one of two ways. One kind of explanation is called reductionistic, because phenomena at one level of organization (e.g., chemical reactions) are explained in terms of lawful events occurring at another, "lower" level (e.g., atomic events). The other kind of explanation seeks to identify causes and effects among events occurring at the same level of observation. In behavior analysis, the second kind of explanation is called functional analysis, because the point is to determine how events in behavioral systems function with respect to one another to bring about changes in those systems. The causal relations within the system are called functional relations; in human behavioral systems, activities of people are functionally related to other events in the world. Although both types of scientific explanation are needed, explaining behavioral systems in terms of functional relations is especially useful if one is interested in taking practical action to solve problems stemming from human behavior. It took scientists hundreds of years to figure out that behavioral systems can be understood at their own level of analysis and did not need to be "reduced" to phenomena at other levels.

Behavior Streams, Principles, and Repertoires

If we observe the behavior of a normal human being going about her everyday business, we see a continuous stream of activity that appears to be integrated almost perfectly with various objects and events of the world. Many of the activities of the person are embedded in the world outside the person. We might see her, for example, arise from bed, walk across the room, push a button on a clock, walk to the kitchen, and make coffee. Other activities are embedded in that part of the world that is circumscribed by the person's body. For example, the person may rub her eyes, stretch her muscles, or push her hair away from her face. Either way, the stream of behavior we observe ordinarily involves a constantly changing flow of activity in which movements of the person are integrated with other parts of the world. Sometimes behavior streams come together temporarily, as when a parent shows a child how to tie his shoe, a group of employees discuss their jobs over lunch, or a team of football players prevents their opponents from gaining yardage on a play. Sometimes behavior streams of two different people come together off and on over a period of years or even decades, as in the case of married people.

Every behavior stream is unique. Each stream is individualized in terms of the particular events and activities that make it up. The uniqueness of a behavior stream is in its content. Record the behavior streams of 100 different people on a Monday morning, and you will see that each person does and says somewhat different things and does similar things in a different order. We can observe a behavior stream for whatever period of time we wish, for example, from birth to death, or from 9:00 a.m. until noon on a particular day, or every morning during breakfast for 3 months.

The behavior stream is the only aspect of behavior that scientists can observe directly. These streams provide the raw data from which behavioral principles are derived. They are also what people in the everyday world are interested in. Will fighting erupt in Bosnia? Will the plumber get the drain unclogged? Will I finish this section of this chapter today? Despite the practical and scientific importance of behavior streams, however, observing them as they occur in the natural environment never leads to a good understanding of behavioral systems. Behavior streams are the surface of behavioral systems. They are the windows through which we peer in order to obtain deeper knowledge.

The deeper knowledge is of two kinds. The first kind is knowledge about lawful relations that exist between human activities and other worldly events. This kind of knowledge is formulated in scientific principles and laws. In formulating principles and laws, scientists begin by observing particular events in their domain of interest: Chemists observe particular chemical events, neurophysiologists observe particular neural events, and behavior analysts observe particular behavioral events. If a scientist's goal is to formulate general principles, however, her attention cannot be focused on the uniqueness of the events she observes; rather, she must look beyond the infinite variety that appears on the surface and find commonalities in the ways the particulars relate to one another. Once such commonalities are discovered and described in scientific laws and principles, other scientists (and the rest of us, as well) can make use of those principles to understand how particular systems in that domain become organized.²

The important thing about scientific principles and laws is that they are content free. For example, laws of gravity describe causal relations between mass and distance. Any object having mass moves in relation to other objects having mass according to their relative mass and the distance they are apart. The principles of gravity remain constant whether they pertain to the relation between an apple and planet earth, between Mars and the sun, or between Jupiter and its moons. Similarly, principles of organic evolution describe causal relations between changes in the frequency of genetic characteristics of organisms in a particular lineage and the survival and reproductive requirements of the world in which those organisms live. The same organic evolutionary principles explain the increasing size of brains in a hominid lineage in a world of predators and the increasing intensity of color in a lineage of flowers that depends on bees for pollination.³

The scientific principles that describe causal relations between human activity and other worldly events (sometimes including other human activity) are also content free. The principles are constant whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES
• PART 2 MANAGING SIMPLE BUT CRUCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL ANTECEDENTS
• PART 3 CLINICAL APPLICATIONS, WITH EMPHASIS ON SUBSTANCE ABUSE AND AUTISM
• PART 4 CONSTRUCTING THE WHOLE ENVIRONMENT
• PART 5 MAKE YOUR OWN ENVIRONMENT!
• About the Book and Editors
• Index