Reward and Consent ™

A Pro-Life Pro-Choice Behavioral Compromise

2012-02-13T20:55:00.000-05:00

Picture source: wikimedia

The philosophy of reward and consent offers a compromise solution to the debate that rages between pro-life and pro-choice advocates.

If I were a woman I would not have an abortion. I would feel like I was taking away something precious. On the other hand, if I had a wife and she became pregnant, I would not want to see her punished if she decided to have an abortion. However, I would not be content unless society had a plan that prevented the demand for abortion.

I would want to see maximized the positive reinforcement of the alternatives to unwanted pregnancy and abortion. Abstinence should be encouraged with a stress that contraception does not always work. Apparently condoms can tear, for example. Abstinence-only should not be taught, because it imposes an unrealistic expectation and people uneducated about birth control are probably less likely to use it in the event of an urgent sexual encounter. We can encourage kissing and cuddling in bed with no other exchange of body fluids for those who seek intimacy and safer sex. Health educators should teach the proper use of contraception, including condoms, to cover those who have the irresistible need to undergo intercourse. Universal health insurance can provide it at no cost to males or females, which would eliminate a financial barrier to the prevention of unwanted pregnancy. We should encourage adoption and make it shameless, inexpensive, and readily available. Society should also provide an adequate economical safety net to prevent poverty and sickness so that babies are not unwanted due a lack of hope for a future of happiness for the family.

As in other solutions advocated in this blog of a world without serious man-made punishment, it would take time to phase in an effective long-term strategy, but it can be done, through the intelligent design of culture, as advocated by B.F. Skinner, the most influential behavioral scientist of the twentieth century.

The Double Starbucks Boycott BUYcott

2012-02-06T20:02:00.008-05:00

Picture source: Wikicommons

Gun victims are boycotting Starbucks because it "thinks it's okay to carry (a) gun into their stores" (gunvictimsaction.org). Gun lobbyists are BUYcotting Starbucks because gun victims are boycotting them (responsiblecitizensofcalifornia.org).

A Christian pastor called for a boycott of Starbucks because it favors marriage equality for gays (huffingtonpost.com). The only missing piece is for gay-friendly people to BUYcott Starbucks for its support of gay marriage. So, to even up the score, I'm calling for one now. Let's BUYcott Starbucks because it is gay-friendly. Yippee!

Who will be sipping espresso? Gun-carrying homosexuals.Who will stay away? The homophobic gun control lobby. Anti-gay gun-lovers will not know what to do when they want a cup of coffee.

All kidding aside, in one sense the method is more important than the mission. If homophobic marriage equality opponents could find anti-gay businesses to support instead of boycotting gay-friendly businesses, then more people would be making more friends and less enemies. If gun victims could BUYcott businesses that supported gun control, then they would make more friends and allies than they do by confronting the pro-gun corporations. Overall, there would be more goodwill floating around, regardless of what everyone is arguing about, because positive reinforcement is friendly and punishment is not.

Newark Mayor Booker Responds Well to "Gay Marriage Referendum"

2012-01-29T21:37:00.029-05:00

Mayor Booker sounded like a constitutional scholar speaking from his heart in a recent press conference. A few years ago I was sitting in the public viewing gallery in the statehouse in Trenton and witnessed first-hand New Jersey's Assembly as they debated their vote against gay marriage. Booker reminds me of one Democrat who spoke so eloquently that day about James Madison's call for the protection of minorities against the tyranny of the majority. (Madison wrote the first draft of the U.S. Constitution.) We weren't allowed to clap, but I stood up on my feet as he gave the speech. Newark's Mayor echoed the sentiment as he spoke out against the cries for a referendum which would let the public decide whether or not gays can marry in New Jersey.

Behavioral Politics with Positive Reinforcement

2012-01-08T22:26:00.003-05:00

Picture source: Wikimedia

B.F. Skinner advocated positive reinforcement as the method of first choice for modifying the behavior of others. I believe the same holds true for the modification of politicians' behaviors. Internet activists such as moveon.org depend upon negative reinforcement too much and do not take enough advantage of the benefits that would accrue from rewarding politicians who do the right thing.

Positive reinforcement occurs when a pleasant stimulus is presented to a person soon after they emit a behavior, which makes the behavior more likely to occur in the future. Rewarding a politician is a good way to make a friend in office.

Negative reinforcement is not the same thing as punishment. Under negative reinforcement, when an unpleasant stimulus is removed, behavior strength increases. People avoid or retaliate against people who rely upon aversive stimuli to bring about a behavior When internet activists send massive emails and phone calls to representatives' offices, they are applying pressure, a negative stimulus, which they remove as soon as they comply with their demands. It is rare to see them sending massive emails and phone calls to thank a politician after they do the right thing. We all like a good pat on the back for good behavior and politicians are people too.

Punishment is the worst strategy. It involves an unpleasant stimulus added after a behavior occurs. Mild or moderate punishment suppresses the behavior through time while the threat of more punishment looms, but it does not have much long-term control over the behavior. People do not like it. Its use increases the likelihood you'll make an enemy of the person you are punishing. Punish a politician and watch him or her turn to the side of your opposition, especially if your opposition is more reinforcing.

There are alternatives to punishment such as the reinforcement of incompatible behaviors. A good vote is incompatible with a bad vote on the same issue. Reinforce them for voting in your favor and it is not necessary to focus on the punishment of those who vote against you. Abstainers are more likely to come to your side if they see they will be appreciated.

I should add that all political internet groups are not unaware of this strategy. The best action alert I have seen online involved "Moms Clean Air Force." In one instance they used positive reinforcement of senators after they had previously rallied their members to pressure the Senate to vote in their favor on an issue they felt strongly about. They sent an email to their followers saying:

Thank you! By raising your voice in opposition, Moms and Dads across the country secured a victory for clean air and our children's health late last week. The Senate voted down a dangerous bill introduced by Sen. Rand Paul that would have permanently blocked the life-saving Cross State Air Pollution Rule, a vitally needed standard that will save up to 34,000 lives every year. How did your senators vote? Click here to find out and then either thank them for supporting children's health or urge them to stand on the side of clean air in the future.

That link brought them to a page where members entered their addresses and the website said, "Once you have entered your zip code, we will match you with your senators to thank them for voting against this bill or remind them how important it is that they stand up for our children's clean air."

I commend momscleanairforce.org for the best use of positive reinforcement I have ever witnessed among political internet organizations who use action alerts to advocate their causes.

Volkswagen's Fun Theory

2012-01-04T03:18:00.002-05:00

Here's a corporation emitting some socially responsible behavior. (All of them are not always bad. Lol. I also like Subway.) Volkswagen initiated thefuntheory.com contest with a cash award for the best invention for getting people to do good things with fun as the reward. Along the same lines, they also say they make their environmental cars more fun to drive. Visit the website to watch videos on how they got children to wear seat belts with an entertainment center that only works when the buckle is clicked, how instead of taking the escalator, they got more people to take the "piano staircase" with a different note for each step, they got more people to drive the speed limit with a speed camera lottery, backed up by a cash payment to people driving the speed limit, as funded by fines on the speeders, got more people to recycle bottles with the bottle bank arcade with its flashing lights and points, and more to throw rubbish into the "world's deepest bin" instead of on the ground.

About ten years ago the police near my home town stood between cars at a busy traffic light and gave away coupons to people they "caught" wearing their seat belts. I was thrilled.

Here's a video of the award winner.

Computer-Based Instruction Generalizes to a Regular Work Setting

2012-01-01T16:01:00.008-05:00

Picture source: Wikimedia

Ingvarsson and Hanley (2006) wanted to know if learning that takes place during computer-based instruction can generalize into the regular work setting of preschool student-teachers. The variable they investigated was the teachers' morning greeting of their students' parents by name. The results of their study showed that they would use their names more often in the classroom after being trained on a computer to identify the parents' pictures by their names.

They explained that some recent studies of computer-based instruction have taught computer skills to normal healthy adults, and there have been many other studies demonstrating the effectiveness of computer-based training on other kinds of subjects, but little has been done to show if the learning that takes place on the computer is transferable to other settings beyond the computer.

They argued that the computer is well suited to the kind of programmed instruction taught by B.F. Skinner (1968). This entailed breaking down a complex skill to its basic sub-components and minimizing errors during training by prompting the subject with the correct answer and gradually fading away the answer-cues until responses occurred without prompts.

In this experiment, they taught the teachers to memorize parents' names in three steps. The computer displayed a picture of the parent along with the name. Teachers then typed the name of the parent in order to advance to the next frame. Then the computer showed the picture and spelled the first half of the name of the parent and the teachers entered the full name and moved on. In the third level, the picture appeared without a prompt and they needed to type the name completely from memory. (This was a behavioral study, so the authors did not employ the terms "memory" or "to memorize.")

As it turned out, during the baseline at the beginning of the study, teachers infrequently used the names of the parents in the morning as they dropped off their children despite being directed to do so, but after the computer training, the rate of using the parents' names increased substantially in three of the four subjects.

Ingvarsson and Hanley (2006) argued that "stimulus generalization" contributed to the results, that the resemblance of the parents' pictures to their actual faces allowed the actual faces to set the occasion for the naming response in the regular setting, after the pictures had already gained some control over the naming response in the computer program. They also said that "response induction" took place, that the response of typing the name into the computer transferred to a response with a different topography. Typing a name and saying a name are different, but related activities.

Despite being directed to do so, teachers generally did not address the parents by name until after the training. This study not only showed what did work, a behavioral intervention, but perhaps a greater value of the study lies in its demonstration of what did not work, a basic instruction by a supervisor with no supplemental training. A supervisor needs to do something empirical with evidence-based results, a technique that an experiment can demonstrate as effective. The more traditional style of supervision of simply giving an order without a data-based evaluation of the approach may be completely ineffective.

Teachers signed consent forms granting the experimenters their permission to study them, and the experimenter informed them that they were collecting data on their performance, but they didn't specifically mention that they were recording their naming skills. I see nothing unethical in this approach. While they did not completely inform them of all the specifics, they did not misrepresent the fact that their performance was under review. Telling them which competency they were analyzing could have introduced a confounding variable into the study. The teachers might have performed differently knowing that name-use was under scrutiny. By not informing them of this, the results may have more closely resembled their performance in an ordinary situation where no experiment was taking place.

Ingvarsson and Hanley (2006) used the computer as a tool to develop a memory skill. They also could have trained them with mnemonic memory tricks and paper and pencil. A similar generalization to the classroom setting could have occurred had they employed different name memorization techniques. It would be good to see other skills besides memorization taught on the computer and generalized to another setting.

For the work in my blog, Reward and Consent, I am looking at behavioral studies of normal healthy adults to see if the principles of behavior modification as discovered with animals do apply in the real world to regular people. Once again we are witnessing the control of the behavior of healthy adults through changes in their environment without appealing to an inner causal agent such as a free will. My previous report, Prompting for Food Bank Donations, showed how an environmental intervention can modify the behavior of normal adults in a community setting when they do not know they are under evaluation.

References

Ingvarsson, E. T. & Hanley, G. P. (2006). An evaluation of computer-based programmed instruction for promoting teachers' greetings of parents by name. [Electronic version]. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 39, 203-214. Retrieved January 1, 2012 from U.S. National Institutes of Health PubMed Central database Web site: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1479777/pdf/jaba-39-02-203.pdf

Skinner, B. F. (1968). The technology of teaching. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Prompting for Food Bank Donations

2011-12-27T16:23:00.008-05:00

Photo source: Wikimedia

There are more people going hungry in this bad economy and the demand for food donations has risen. Google "food pantry demand" and you can see all the reports on the need for food.

Farrimond and Leland (2006) addressed this problem in the Summer 2006 issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. They capitalized on a previous study that showed that point of sale signs can increase sales. They placed signs on the shelves by non-perishable food items in a supermarket in New Zealand. They said, "How about buying one for the food bank bin" and directed them to the location of the bins at the exit of the store.

They performed an ABAB design. During the baseline (A), the staff did not post any signs on the shelves, but the bin was still available to receive donations. During the intervention (B), they posted the signs on the shelves. They started with the baseline, moved to the intervention, and repeated (ABAB). The results showed that as much as five times as much food was donated when the prompts were posted, as opposed to the baseline condition with no prompts.

The authors said, "The current study demonstrated that (point of sale) signs were a cost-effective method for increasing donations to a food-bank bin (p. 251)."

Behaviorally speaking, this is a study on the effectiveness of prompts. Prompts are stimuli occurring before a person emits a behavior, antecedents to behavior, which is then followed by consequences. The donations increased either because of added positive reinforcers for making a donation, (perhaps someone smiles, or there's an increased feeling of doing some good), or a reduction in negative reinforcers (less guilt) for making a donation. The prompts gained some control over the behavior due to the consequences which would follow or due to reinforcing consequences for making donations in the past, which increased the probability that donations would be made in the future.

Consent is not a problem in this study. Shoppers voluntarily participated, perhaps anonymously. Presumably nobody received a negative consequence for not participating. The venue was a public location with normally-occurring, publicly exhibited behavior in a community setting, with no collection of personal data besides the count and the value of the donated items, so informed consent was not necessary. This study can be rated high on an ethical scale because of the degree of anonymous and voluntary participation without punishers and without intrusion into the lives of the participants. The subjects may not have been informed about the collection of data, but there was no harm done.

I chose this article because this blog advocates behavior modification of people with more power, probably in this instance, normal healthy adults. I began this blog with a question. Can human behavior be modified using the behavioral techniques discovered with animals? This study gives us some evidence to support the claim that the behavior of normal, healthy adults can indeed be modified scientifically. The ABAB design used here shows that the intervention worked, and when it was removed, the low rate of donations reverted to its normal, low level of responding. It took an applied experimental evaluation of human behavior to demonstrate with a degree of confidence one specific technique to help people who are going hungry.

Reference

Farrimond, S. J. & Leland, L. S. (2006). Increasing donations to supermarket food-bank bins using proximal prompts. [Electronic version]. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 39, 249-51. Retrieved December 27, 2011 from U.S. National Institutes of Health PubMed Central database Web site: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1479784/pdf/jaba-39-02-249.pdf

Doggie Shops for His Own Toys

2011-11-13T16:49:00.007-05:00

Photo source: Wikimedia.

I noticed a lot of people walking their dogs around a nearby shopping mall. The plaza has no grass or dirt, just cement and tar, so I wondered, "Why so many dogs?" They were going into PetSmart. The store had an animal hotel and pet grooming, so I thought they might be dropping them off for that, but I asked my friend Nate, "Do you think the dogs are picking their own products?" I told him I would report back to him. So before I went in, I told myself what behavior to look out for in order to make the claim that the dogs themselves were shopping. I said they must voluntarily manipulate or play with the goods for a sustained period and the doggie selections must be purchased by the owner. If they pointed to a toy, that would have been more of an indication that they were shopping.

Sure enough, in the toy aisle, a young boy was taking the toys off the racks and giving them to his dog to see if he would play with them. The little dog was jumping up and down and poking his nose into the different toys that the store had laid out at his eye level. A squeeze bone, a rubber ball, a stuffed animal with jingle bells. You get the idea. There was a toy in the family shopping cart that the dog had presumably selected. The older girl said, "He likes everything." I didn't linger in the aisle watching the family, but it looked like they were about to buy a toy that Snoopy had selected.

What has this got to do with a blog about reward and consent? See my blog post on how a baby can consent to a behavioral intervention. It includes a passage on animal consent. Here at Petsmart, when reinforcers are offered, an animal participates in choice behavior. In other words, the animal is consenting to the shopping experience.

Was B.F. Skinner, the famous behavioral psychologist, right to draw so many parallels between animal and human behavior? He taught pigeons to read simple commands, to play ping pong, and to play the piano. Here we see dogs acting like people in the pet store. Isn't that amusing?

Paul Zack on Oxytocin Trust Chemical

2011-11-05T14:43:00.005-04:00

Source of picture: Wikimedia

Paul Zak discovered a chemical that's associated with trust and morality. It's called Oxytocin and it occurs naturally in the human body. He also isolated it and placed it inside a nasal spray. He talks about his experiments with trust in skydiving, weddings, and natives of New Guinea. He concludes with his prescription for happiness: eight hugs a day.

You can watch him explain it here: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html

Credit Unions and Community Banks See Spike in New Accounts

2011-10-29T20:55:00.002-04:00

Photo Source: Wikimedia

This current article from Yahoo news says, "Chase and Wells Fargo are joining the list of banks that won't be charging customers to use their debit cards, as the backlash over Bank of America's planned $5 monthly fee continues.... Credit unions and community banks nationwide are reporting huge spikes in new accounts as consumers seek no-fee options. People are literally walking into branches and cutting up their Bank of America cards," Kirk Kordeleski, CEO of Bethpage Federal Credit Union in Long Island, N.Y., said last week.... On Friday, Bank of America bent. A source at the bank, who asked not to be identified because the policy is still evolving, said it likely it will offer ways for its customers to avoid debit card fees through using direct deposit, maintaining minimum balances or using Bank of America credit cards."

It's a successful BUYcott/boycott! Chalk up a victory for the Occupy Movement.

For more on the tactic, read my blog post, BUYcott Good Businesses While Boycotting the Bad.

P.S. I posted this news at the Occupy Wall Street Forum and one person commented: "Move your money anyway. Just because BoA is letting you get out of a fee if they can get your money a different way (higher minimums, etc.) is no reason to stay with them."

BUYcott Some Healthier Packaged Foods

2011-10-28T02:47:00.002-04:00

The more we demand the healthy foods, the more the venders will offer, the lower our health bills, and the more savings to Medicaid, Medicare, and the federal budget.

Carrotmob Rains Money on Responsible Business

2011-10-23T16:22:00.001-04:00

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

carrotmob.org
twitter.com/carrotmob
facebook.com/carrotmob

Carrotmob Cartoon

2011-10-23T15:52:00.003-04:00

How Organized Consumer Purchasing Can Change Business from carrotmob on Vimeo.

carrotmob.org
twitter.com/carrotmob
facebook.com/carrotmob

President Obama Didn't Answer the Telephone

2011-10-21T19:36:00.008-04:00

Photo source: Wikimedia

I called President Obama at his house yesterday but he didn't pick up the phone, so I left a message with his receptionist. I told her I voted for him in the last election, but he needs to move to the left so I can vote for him again. Today he announced that the war in Iraq is over. I'm glad he listened to me, but I wish he wouldn't screen my calls.

Of course I'm just kidding. This blog calls for positive reinforcement of politicians when they do the right thing. President Obama said he is fulfilling his campaign promise to bring the troops home. Now is the time to call the White House and thank him, and the sooner the better. Positive reinforcement is more effective when it happens soon after somebody demonstrates a behavior. It makes it more likely to reoccur.

The White House number is (202) 456-1111. You might reach him personally if he has time to take your call.

Bankster Punishment out of Control and the BUYcott Alternative to Force

2011-10-17T21:27:00.002-04:00

This is a recent video of police officers arresting a Citibank customer by forcing her back inside the bank after she stepped outside to walk away. They were trapping and arresting other peaceful customers who were still inside the bank. They were merely attempting to close their accounts.

Punishment is contagious and addictive. It feeds upon itself. It elicits more punishment. It causes a bad scene to escalate out of control. It goes haywire if left unchecked. It is subject to abuse by people with more power.

When people sense they are being punished, they often retaliate with more punishment. Withdrawing money from Citibank is a form of punishment. It can be called penalty. Taking away reinforcement penalizes the perceived offender. It was entirely within their rights as bank customers to withdraw their money, but the banksters saw this as a threat, so they retaliated with an unchecked use of force.

Occupy Wall Street protesters can use more positive reinforcement of the businesses who do get it right. What if a YouTube video of consumers opening new accounts in credit unions and local community banks went viral on the internet? The message would be more positive. Let's call for a BUYcott of the good guys while we're boycotting the bad guys.

Consumers boycott and BUYcott for good causes

2011-10-14T19:31:00.000-04:00

Picture source: Wiki Commons

On October 4, 2011 Cone Communications, A Public Relations and Marketing Agency, released the Global Corporate Responsiblity Opportunity Study. It says,

"Consumers across the globe want to shop with a conscience. Most say, if given the opportunity, they would buy a product that has an environmental benefit (94%) or one that is attached to a cause (93%). And a staggering number (76% and 65%, respectively) report they have actually done just that in the past 12 months.... Companies in both developed and developing countries are recognizing the competitive differentiation in not only behaving more responsibly, but also in communicating those positive business practices to consumers.... Just as many people (93%) are prepared to boycott a company for irresponsibility. More than half (56%) report they already have."

Are corporations doing enough? Which ones are the most responsible? I welcome your comments. For more on the BUYcott/boycott, see my previous blog post.

BUYcott Good Businesses While Boycotting the Bad

2011-10-05T22:57:00.018-04:00

Picture source: Wiki Commons

Followers of Occupy Wall Street are saying, "boycott the irresponsible corporations." That's ok, but many people want to know where to buy needed products and services while we're boycotting a business. When practical, we can substitute every boycott with a corresponding BUYcott.

You've heard the expression "buy local"? It's the same idea, an active campaign to buy the products and services of businesses and governments we want to support. It has a name, the BUYcott. Google it and you can see how it's been done.

The word was used in the mid 1990s when a gay organization in Tampa Florida published a BUYcott directory of gay-friendly local businesses. Then in 1996 there was a BUYcott Directory of gay-friendly businesses by the New Jersey Lesbian and Gay Coalition. (I was a co-founder of that project, so I remember some of the history of the word. The Coalition gave me the Achievement Award in 2001 in recognition of the BUYcott and another campaign I started, a big coffeehouse gathering to help gay people get away from the bars.) Then there was a BUYcott of Disney and the CEO of Napster used the word for his company. Now there's a BUYcott of Israel to counter a boycott of Israel. There's also a BUYcott of Arizona to counter a boycott of Arizona. There's also a call for a BUYcott of Gibson guitars.

By adopting the word "BUYcott" into our campaigns, it gives people something to latch on to. When people see there's an organized campaign, I believe they'll be more likely to join the cause.

An occupier of Wall Street tweeted the following recommendation. Take your money out of Bank of America and put it in a credit union. That would be a boycott of the bank and a matching BUYcott of the credit unions.

We can boycott McDonald's for its unhealthy menu and BUYcott Subway for its wide selection of fresh vegetables. We can boycott Walmart and BUYcott local family businesses. We can boycott Georgia peaches for their execution of a man who may have been innocent and we can buy peaches from Michigan, which is one of twelve states without the death penalty. For attempting to buy the T-Mobile phone company, we can boycott ATnT and BUYcott Sprint for its smaller size. We can boycott Brawny paper towels, which is owned by the Koch brothers, and we can BUYcott companies that sell recycled paper. We can Boycott Fox News and BUYcott MSNBC and democracynow.org.

With an organized boycott/BUYcott, we can influence corporations with our buying power. We can reinforce constructive change. We can make them become more responsible in their social and environmental policies. Positive reinforcement tells them what they should be doing to get our support. It also strengthens their socially responsible behavior. It causes it to happen more often in the future. It increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. By rewarding responsibility, we cause it to happen more often. It's a win/win for consumers and good businesses alike. We also stimulate the economy when we have a place to spend our money instead of merely withholding it without an acceptable alternative.

Who else can we boycott/BUYcott? I welcome your comments.
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/RewardConsent

Update: I just stumbled upon a Facebook organization called the Carrotmob. They're advocating a more positive brand of a BUYcott. They say, "In a boycott, everyone loses. In a Carrotmob, everyone wins." Check them out at http://www.facebook.com/carrotmob. People are dressed up in the market with carrot costumes!

See the following report in this blog of a study that found that most consumers do indeed BUYcott and boycott for a good cause.

Sent to the Principal for Being Good

2011-10-04T11:22:00.000-04:00

This article from the Selma News describes an elementary school that manages classrooms with positive behavior support. Teachers send kids to the principal to receive praise for what they did right. Can you imagine them going home to tell their parents? I think it's terrific!

http://theselmanews.com/behavior-improves-with-new-program-at-selma-elementary-p2065-74.htm

Live Stream from occupywallstreet.org

2011-10-03T19:56:00.048-04:00

Below is the live stream from Occupy Wall Street. You can actually witness the governance of their General Assembly by way of modified consensus. It's fascinating to watch how they manage the "blocking" of consensus by individuals who have ethical concerns about the opinion of the majority.

See my previous blog post "Hippies Offer Free Hugs" While Wall Street Occupiers Govern by Consensus.

I don't own a television. I save fifty dollars a month without it. By exploring the internet I can watch all the videos I need. When I watch cable TV at my mother's house, all I ever do is flip channels. I usually don't find anything that suits my interests. I get my daily news from www.democracynow.org. I watch hour long educational videos for free at http://video.pbs.org. I hope you enjoy the stream.

In behavioral terms, the internet reinforces behavior that is incompatible with watching TV. It provides differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior, a DRI. We cannot focus our eyes on our computers and our television sets at the same time. Therefore, web surfing is incompatible with watching the set.

Wall Street Occupiers Govern by Consensus

2011-10-03T00:49:00.014-04:00

http://rewardandconsent.blogspot.com/2011/10/live-stream-from-occupywallstreetcom.htmlWatch this video to see MSNBC's eye witness account of "Occupy Wall Street's" government by consensus. In pure consensus everyone gives consent since anyone can block the consensus. The reporter says he's never seen anything like it. He also says he's just received a free hug from a hippie. The video begins with a comical spoof of the NYPD pepper-spraying cop.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

You can watch a live stream of Occupy Wall Street in the following post.

Teething Puppy Consents to Stimulus Control Without Behavior Blocking

2011-09-26T19:26:00.057-04:00

Source: Wikipedia

Last week a puppy in my neighborhood was ripping at a cotton cord attached to the cushion on a swing in her backyard deck. She had a rough time climbing up high enough to bite it, but she stood on her hind legs, put her front paws on the seat, and stretched out her neck for the cord. The swing would rock her back and forth and she would lose her balance and stumble, but she eventually got it and tore at the furniture.

When the neighbors discovered what was happening, they said in Spanish, "Sienta te," or "Sit yourself down."

Today I saw her gnawing at a rubber bone, attacking it, clutching it with her jaw, and flinging her head around. She was happily playing alone, ignoring the swing. With the new toy on the deck, she could bite at something without that darned swing pushing her around anymore and without damaging the furniture.

My neighbors may have just solved a behavior problem by presenting an alternative stimulus. The swing can be called a discriminative stimulus. It set the occasion for climbing up and the biting the cloth, which was the reinforcer.

Behavior analysts sometimes block or interrupt a chain of behavior before it reaches its target reinforcer. By knocking her off balance, the swing partially impeded her attempt to rip at the cord, but her teething behavior was more powerful than losing her balance, so she persisted and grabbed the cord.

The bone allowed her to teethe without an impediment. Was it replacing the swing as a new stimulus with fresh control over her behavior? Did they successfully modify her behavior and solve the behavior problem by introducing the bone? Will she stop destroying the furniture? Only time will tell.

Since they intervened without punishment, the dog was consenting to an ethical program. How can an animal consent? You can read all about the consent of the subject of behavior research and therapy in a previous post in this blog.

Good Nomenclature for Mental Health "Consumers" and "Schizophrenics"

2011-09-24T13:50:00.027-04:00

Source of Photo: WikiCommons

A person with a mental health problem can see a psychiatrist, a social worker, a behavior analyst, or a psychologist for treatment. They often call him a "patient" or a "client." The freedom movement of psychiatric survivors has another term for themselves, "consumers" of mental health services. That means they can shop around for a doctor. It puts them on an equal footing. Consumers can hire and fire the people who treat them just as much as they can decide not to accept them into their practice. Calling someone a patient or a client when he wants to be called a consumer ranks him as less important than his therapist and it is disrespectful. It is ethical to call someone what he wants to be called because it follows the golden rule of ethics: do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.

The derivation of "schizophrenia" is "split mind." It commonly means "split personality." Psychiatry took a word that meant split mind and mis-characterized an entire group of people. They used it to describe individuals who can might have delusions, paranoia, disorganization, and hallucinations.

The newer, medical meaning of schizophrenia has nothing to do with split personality. Because of psychiatry, the general population has the wrong idea. When they hear that someone has schizophrenia they commonly believe he has more than one personality. You can't blame them for their misunderstanding since the word does have the old meaning of split mind. Psychiatry, however, is responsible for misusing the word in their DSM-IV, their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Psychiatry needs to find a better label. They should ask the leaders of the consumer movement what term they would accept instead of inventing a new word without consulting the people affected. They persist with this misnomer in manual after manual yet they ought to know it's a mistake. DSM-V, when it arrives, should reflect this position.

Moveon.org Reinforces and Shapes Obama's Behavior

2011-09-09T17:31:00.078-04:00

I have been encouraging internet activists such as moveon.org to use more positive reinforcement and less aversive approaches to improve the behavior of politicians. The list of organizations I have contacted includes advocates for a cleaner environment, media watchdogs, and free speech coalitions. I still haven't received an answer from any of them. The leadership at moveon.org doesn't take email suggestions. You can only find a suggestion box to an unknown recipient.

These groups are addicted to negative reinforcement. They lay on the pressure as thick as they can make it by prompting their exhaustive list of contacts to bombard legislative offices with mass emails, phone calls, petitions, protest marches, and vigils. If they get what they want, it seems like you don't hear another peep about the issue in question. You barely hear the words thank you directed at politicians, let alone cries for financial contributions and emails in large-scale demonstration of appreciation to the representatives who vote to grant their wishes.

They should borrow a few pages from the annals of applied behavior analysis. Human science teaches how negative reinforcement occurs when you remove an aversive stimulus as soon as somebody emits a behavior. The behavior is more likely to occur under similar circumstances in the future. Behavior strength increases. So a public issue emerges, the activists pressurize the politicians, and if they respond the right way, they call off the hounds. That's the end of it until the next issue arises and they do it again.

Positive reinforcement happens when you present a pleasant stimulus after a behavior occurs and you make that behavior more likely to occur in the future. Behavior strength also increases, but in a good way. Positive reinforcement is by far the method of first choice when the behaviorists try to influence behavior. We could be thanking our representatives big time when they head in the right direction, but we miss the opportunities. We could be making many more friends in politics. Politicians are people too. They are as subject to the principles of behavior modification as any of us. They appreciate a pat on the back for a job done well and they avoid anyone who attacks them.

Today I see a glimmer of hope. I just received a bulk email from moveon.org with a link to page that let's you send a thank you note to President Obama. They said, "Last night, President Obama laid out the beginnings of a plan to create jobs, repair our infrastructure, and start putting America back to work. On its own, it won't be enough to get our country back on its feet, but it's a big step in the right direction." It appears they are praising his latest speech.

Unfortunately, the next line couches the praise in criticism. They said, "Too many times, we've seen the White House back down in the face of Republican opposition, and this time has to be different." You can see how hard it is to get them to be positive.

But any move in the right direction by moveon.org is a good thing, so I commend them for this call of support of the new Obama jobs initiative. Shaping happens when you reinforce successive approximations toward a target behavior. So here's to shaping President Obama and moveon.org at the same time! Nice job. It's hard to be positive in the cut throat world of politics.

Here is the link from moveon.org that let's you pledge your support of the Obama jobs initiative: http://civ.moveon.org/job_speech_response/?id=30800-9402186-mNguwXx&t=6

Alexandra Rutherford's Beyond the Box

2011-09-09T11:04:00.127-04:00

Beyond the Box at Amazon.com

B.F. Skinner discovered a form of learning he called operant conditioning by training hungry rats in experimental chambers to press a lever for food (See Skinner, 1938). He promoted the need for human operant learning with some best-selling books in the twentieth century, Beyond Freedom and Dignity being one of them.

Alexandra Rutherford's (2009) Beyond the Box is the first systematic "full-length study of the ways in which Skinner's ideas left the laboratory to become part of the ... public's everyday lives" (front page). She gives a history of the early human applications of the science that came to be called applied behavior analysis. She consistently puts the work in the context of its interplay with society, gauging the public's reaction throughout.

She orders the chapters in wider degrees of distance the field had ventured from the highly controlled settings with people, to a mobile classroom used as a lab, to the education of the public at large. Her topics include "management programs for juvenile delinquents ... as well as (behaviorism's) influence on the self-help industry with popular books on how to quit smoking, lose weight, and be more assertive," plus chimpanzee experiments and two intentional communities founded on Skinner's Utopian novel, Walden II (Rutherford, front page).

It covers some of the ethical controversies surrounding the science, including the rise of the token economy in prisons and state psychiatric hospitals and how challenges from the public led to its decline. She looks at mixed reviews in the mass media of Skinner's baby tender, a temperature and humidity controlled crib where his daughter wore "only a diaper and had no need of blankets" (Rutherford, p. 23). She also investigates the role of behaviorism in the creation of the U.S. Belmont Report on the Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, which led to some regulations of the profession.

There are twenty pages of references at the end of the book. She visited the Skinner archives at Harvard University and conducted many of her own interviews.

I recommend it to anyone who wants a sociological context of the first human applications of the science. It does not cover the many early experiments done to normal, healthy adults, but it gives a good account of early applications with people in public institutions.

If you buy it, I don't receive any compensation, but you can find it at Amazon.com.

P. S. See my related blog post, Some History of Applied Behavior Analysis: Normal Adult Operant Conditioning Experiments.)

References

Rutherford, A. (2009). Beyond the box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behavior. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis (1991 ed.). Cambridge, MA: B. F. Skinner Foundation.

Behavioral Ethics: The Consent of the Subject of Behavior Research and Therapy

2011-08-20T02:14:03.735-04:00

Permission to publish this photo comes from Wikimedia commons.

Abstract

This paper argues that the consent of an infant, child, or disabled adult in a behavioral intervention is just as critical as the consent of a parent or guardian. First it explains the four basic behavioral contingencies. Then it defines consent in the language of verbal behavior and discusses the ramifications of a behavioral definition of consent. The third section addresses the objection that consent is a rational process that can only be done by independent, fully-cognizant adults and not by a baby. It argues that an autonomous mental ability is an unnecessary prerequisite to the learning of new and improved behaviors. It provides a pragmatic defense of B.F. Skinner’s deterministic assumption of environmental causes of behavior. It appeals to the golden rule of ethics, do to others as you’d have them do to you. We expect respect, so we should respect others by seeking their permission to perform an act upon them, by granting almost all subjects, no matter how young or disabled, the opportunity to consent to behavioral operations. It adds that more ethics in the practice of behaviorism and more behaviorism in the practice of ethics can improve the state of the world.

Introduction

Can a baby grant his consent to a procedure that's designed to modify his behavior? Given the time to elaborate, I would venture to say, "Yes, indeed." Board Certified Behavior Analysts can obtain the consent of the young or disabled subjects of their research and therapy programs. Below I describe how they can do it and why they should be doing it. My thesis is that behaviorism can become more ethical and ethics can become more practical by defining consent as a form of verbal behavior.

Some Background Fundamentals of Applied Behavior Analysis

In behavioral science there are four basic contingencies of consequences to behavior that influence the probability of future occurrences of a particular behavior. Pleasant or aversive stimuli can be added or removed after an organism emits a behavior.

Reinforcement increases the probability of future occurrences of a behavior and punishment decreases it or suppresses it temporarily.

1) In positive reinforcement a payout at the slot machine causes us to gamble more often. We call it "positive" because we add a stimulus and "reinforcement" because we strengthen the rate of future occurrences of behavior. 2) In negative reinforcement, we remove a punisher to increase behavior strength. So getting away from the rain by raising an umbrella causes us to raise the umbrella more often when it's raining. We call it "negative" because we remove a stimulus, the rain on our heads, but "reinforcement" because we increase the rate of behavior, umbrella-raising. 3) In positive punishment we add an aversive stimulus to decrease or suppress the frequency of future incidents of a behavior, so a slap on the paw of a rat while it's pressing a lever suppresses its rate of lever presses while the threat of a slap is in effect. It is "positive" because we add a stimulus and "punishment" because we reduce behavior strength, either temporarily or in the long run. 4) In negative punishment, we remove a reinforcing stimulus to decrease behavior, so docking the pay of an employee when he's late for work causes him to avoid being late in the future.

In the mid-twentieth century B.F. Skinner discovered the form of learning he called "operant conditioning." During the four basic contingencies, the organism operates on the environment and the environment in turn modifies the probability of future occurrences of the organism's behavior. So when a child asks his mother for food, the mother and the food she brings are the reinforcers of food seeking behavior. The child is operating on the mother who operates on the food. Her delivery of the food influences how often he will ask for food in the future.

Behaviorism works. To see how behavior scientists have demonstrated their ability to change people’s behavior, all you need to do is to read through the articles in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior or the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis which are freely accessible on the internet. Behaviorism is a science. It has many detractors, but I believe an argument against behaviorism is like an argument against pharmaceutical chemistry. It’s like saying that medicine is a bad thing. Medicine is meant to help, but it can also make you sick. As in any technology behaviorism can benefit or harm an individual, but we cannot let the risk of ill effects get in the way of ethical applications of its knowledge base.

So how can we do behavior in an ethical way? I suggest we can modify the book of consent in the pages of bioethics and adapt it to fit the field of applied behavior analysis.

Consent as a Form of Verbal Behavior

If we can define consent with the external terminology of behaviorism, then we can explain it without appealing to inner causes of behavior. Below I will explain why a dependence on inner explanations of behavior can be counterproductive. I ask you to withhold judgment for now on which locus of control, the inner or the outer, gives us a better picture of the causes of human behavior. First let's examine speech as a form of behavior.

According to Skinner (1957), verbal behavior is an interaction between a speaker and a listener. If a speaker asks for a favor and a listener does the favor, then the request is the behavior and the favor is the reinforcement. Verbal behavior does not have to be spoken; it can also be expressed in body language. When a lover reaches out his hand, and his partner takes hold, then reaching out is reinforced by the holding of his hand. Remember that reinforcement strengthens behavior, so their asking for a favor and reaching out a hand will probably reoccur.

I haven't read anything Skinner ever said about “consent” as a form of verbal behavior, but he did write about "permission." He said, "When the listener is already inclined to act in a given way, but is restrained by, for example, a threat, the (speech) which cancels the threat is commonly called permission. Go ahead. (1957, p. 40)."

So let's follow his example and define consent as speech that grants the listener permission to perform an operation on the speaker by canceling any threat that restrains the listener from acting. The speaker is telling the listener that he will not try to escape or avoid the act she is inclined to perform upon him. He is promising not to punish her for engaging in the procedure.

(To help us make some parallel distinctions among personal pronouns, in all of our illustrations of consent as a class of behavior, let’s say the speaker is male, the one who says he consents, and the listener is female. To clarify further, the interpretations that follow use items such as food and warm clothing as examples of reinforcers. These are general examples. Some people don't like certain foods. Sushi can be a powerful reinforcer or a powerful punisher, depending on the appetite of a particular individual. Most people like pizza, however, when they haven't had a meal in two days. Out of the need for self-reliance, somebody might turn down the offer of a warm coat even though he is cold, but most people will take one if they are cold and coatless.)

So if an employer is paying a man to work, he is consenting to an agreement, work for pay under the terms of a contract. He allows her to modify his work behavior when he accepts her paycheck. If nothing unfavorable happens to the nature of the agreement, when he signs the contract he is promising not to avoid, escape, or punish her by terminating the contract too soon, striking, damaging property, slowing down, etc.

When a patient signs a consent form at the doctor's office he grants her permission to examine him, treat him, or operate on his body. He is promising not to press charges against her for acting on him without his permission.

There is little dispute about the importance of obtaining consent from a normal, healthy adult, but can a baby grant his mother permission to feed him some baby food? She wants him to be healthy and to eat the meal she intends to give him, but she needs him to cooperate when he takes in the food. When the spoon approaches, he cancels any threat of resistance. He consents by opening his mouth and ingesting the mashed potatoes. He has given his mother permission to continue with the feeding. He avoids the food, which becomes an aversive stimulus, when he's eaten enough and his stomach is full. When he shuts his mouth and turns away as the mother brings him a spoonful, then he is withdrawing his consent. If she tries to persuade him to eat too much when he is no longer hungry, he dissents even further by messing up his face and his bib.

Even animals can grant consent. A horse pulls away from his trainer when she is doing something aversive. He dissents. When she gives him an apple for letting her lead him around in a circle, he consents when he turns and takes the apple without resistance.

Generally we consent to positive reinforcement and we dissent from punishment. Consent is often automatic when a behavioral procedure uses positive reinforcement. When we are hungry, we don't threaten the person who offers us some food. We go to her house and let her entertain us. When we are cold, we don't resist a person who offers us a warm winter coat. She sees the twinkle in our smiling eyes when she shows us the coat. When we are poor, we don't resist the advice of an experienced employment agent. We pay her a fee if she finds us a job. When we permit an instructor to teach us how to do a math problem, consent is automatic when she tells us we have correctly computed a problem. We don't punish a teacher because her feedback tells us we got the right answer. We continue working.

In addition, dissent is often automatic under punishment, which can cause a man to retaliate, escape, or withhold reinforcement. He fights back. He reacts with a black eye for a black eye and a bloody tooth for a bloody tooth. Insults bring about counter insults. A boy can run away from the parents who hit him. An authoritarian teacher generates passive pupils. A man in his house hangs up the phone on an annoying telemarketer. These reactions are signs of dissent. They tell the punishing person that she does not have his permission to hit him, to insult him, to give him detention, or to invade his privacy.

When consent is informed, we approve procedures that bring us higher amounts of long-term benefit even if we might suffer some punishment in the short run. For example, see my blog post about three adults who consented to the electric shock of smoking (or see Powell and Azrin, 1968). Perhaps these smokers expected a longer, happier life if they could quit the habit and prevent emphysema and lung cancer. When dissent is informed, we may reject activities that bring us higher amounts of long-term harm and forgo some short-term reinforcement. When we refuse a snort of cocaine, we escape the temporary ecstasy because we know an addiction to cocaine will wreak havoc in our lives.

Deprivation of a reinforcer strengthens its reinforcing effect. Satiation weakens it. Food does not reinforce when an organism has been satiated by a recent feeding. Skinner deprived his pigeons of food. When their body weight was less than normal, he was ready to reinforce their button-pecking with pieces of food. In general, people don't voluntarily consent to the deprivation of basic needs such as shelter, warmth, social interaction, and food. Therefore, reinforcing a student's study behavior with popcorn as dessert after a meal is more consensual than reinforcing him with sips of milk just before mealtime. Remember the golden rule of ethics: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Would you consent to food deprivation in order to make food more reinforcing? Withholding a treat until reinforcement time might be somewhat aversive, but it's not unethical. It wouldn't involve the deprivation of a physiological need such as water or food. Some parents teach their children not to expect a gift, but to appreciate one as special when it arrives.

By itself, the consent of a parent or guardian is not enough to rate a behavioral treatment as completely consensual. Parents do not always look after the interests of their children and they can make poor decisions when their intentions are good. The child or disabled adult also needs to consent. The subject himself is best qualified to sense that something is wrong. After all, it's being done to him, not to his parents. Only he knows exactly how it feels. Granting a child the ability to consent helps to protect him from undesirable consequences and it respects him as a person. By seeking his permission, the therapist allows him to participate in the approval of a procedure. Under ordinary circumstances, we should not force him to accept something he doesn't appreciate. A child can dissent even though he is uninformed. He can still say "leave me alone" even though he cannot predict the potential ramifications of the behavior in question. The consent of the child should be informed as much as possible. Basic explanations are necessary. He ought to know what is going on. When a child consents to a procedure that is intended to change his behavior, he is more likely to go along with the plan. If he is not allowed to consent, he is more likely to resist the intervention.

Also by itself, the consent of a child is not enough to rate a behavior modification program as completely consensual. Children make mistakes. The parent's consent is also necessary. Fully cognizant, healthy adults are better qualified to make informed decisions for the benefit of their children. When long-term gain outweighs short-term discomfort, the parent is a better judge than the inexperienced child.

What happens when there is a disagreement between the child and the adult? Not only applied behavior analysis, but all related health fields should be concerned about dual consent. For example, a young child may dissent from his immunity vaccines by crying, screaming, and pulling his arm away from the nurse. The parent consents because he believes that taking the short-term pain of the needle will prevent the long-term suffering of disease. However, the job of the pharmaceutical company is not finished. If they could discover a way to deliver the vaccine with a patch on the skin instead of a shot, the child would be more likely to consent. In this case, the informed consent of the parent trumps the uninformed dissent of the child, but the outcome is unsatisfactory and incomplete until they develop a painless alternative.

Many Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBA's) are also Ph.D. psychologists. The Code of Conduct of the American Psychological Association (2010) says, "For persons who are legally incapable of giving informed consent, psychologists nevertheless (1) provide an appropriate explanation, (2) seek the individual's assent, (3) consider such persons' preferences and best interests, and (4) obtain appropriate permission from a legally authorized person, if such substitute consent is permitted or required by law." That's good, but it's not enough. What they call "assent," I call "uninformed consent." Calling it assent gives it a secondary connotation. Under this code, psychologists are obtaining the consent of the authorized person, but when they seek the assent of the less capable subject, they do not have to "obtain" his" permission." They only try. If they don't get it, they can proceed without it.

When I was a special education teacher, child study teams of teachers, parents, administrators, and therapists convened to approve individual education plans for students with disabilities. Parents participated in the meetings, but children were almost always absent, even if they were teenagers. The consent of the child rarely existed.

Fortunately, behaviorists can gain the consent of the consumers of their services even when they are trying to reduce the occurence of unwanted behaviors. Three alternatives to punishment are the DRI, the DRL, and the DRO.

DRI stands for differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior. Give a child a guitar (which contains its own reinforcement) and he cannot hit his classmates at the same time he is playing it. When the Policeman's Benevolent Association runs a basketball program for inner-city youth, they are reinforcing incompatible behaviors. Teenagers cannot spray graffiti and play basketball at the same time. For a discussion on the reinforcement of incompatible behavior, see my blog post on Slouching Punished by Noise. I said it's better to reinforce good posture with music than to punish bad posture with noise.

The DRL is the differential reinforcement of low rates of responding. For example, an autistic child might flap his hands against a surface and cause his finger tips to bleed. If a therapist wants to reduce the frequency of this kind of stimming, then she can record the amount of time he's been doing it, and reinforce him for less frequent self-stimulation.

The third alternative is the differential reinforcement of other behaviors, the DRO, which theoretically reinforces everything but the problem behavior. In other words, the autistic boy's teaching staff can reward him for not flapping his hands. If he's been stimming his hands during story time, then a teaching assistant can read to him when he's not self-stimulating. She can pause the story when the hands start flapping and continue when they rest. They would know he automatically consented to his special time alone with the staff if the data revealed a reduction in the rate of hand flapping while they read him the story.

I am not saying that a BCBA must always obtain the consent of the recipients of their interventions. In a case where a client is hurting himself or others, by head-banging, for instance, then punishment might be her only solution. She should use the gentlest form of punishment that works to diminish or eliminate the condition. Unfortunately, a residential school in Massachusetts run by people who claim to be behaviorists uses electric shock as the method of first choice to control their students. (See Gonnerman, 2007). A milder form of punishment might involve spraying cold water in the face, doing a time-out from reinforcement, or dropping lemon juice in the mouth. If they believe punishment is the only way to prevent severe injury, then they can proceed, but they need to go back to the drawing board, do some more research, and find the least coercive or most reinforcing alternative as soon as possible. In dangerous cases, the informed consent of a parent trumps the dissent of a child, but only until a better solution can be found and the child is able to consent to a reinforcing procedure.

Philosophers frequently talk about ethical dilemmas. When is it appropriate to force a child to stop harming himself when he doesn't agree with the method of force? Fortunately, however, dilemmas in behavior modification don't occur every day. I'd like to know why people do the wrong thing when there is no conflict of values. A more common problem occurs when an adult uses force against a harmless behavior she deems to be "inappropriate." For example, a parent might scold a child for sloppy eating. It would be better to praise him for holding his fork in a proper manner. If a child is satisfied flapping his hands and it causes him no injury, why should they force him to stop? Society should learn to welcome different kinds of responses. Unnecessary coercion is a bigger problem than an atypical ethical dilemma, such as what to do with a head-banging adolescent. So let's separate the forest from the uncommon species of trees. Let's not allow an exception to eliminate the rule. We should almost always seek the consent of the child or the disabled adult even though, in unusual circumstances, it is sometimes necessary to look out for his interest without his approval.

Furthermore, by defining consent as an objective form of verbal behavior, we can reinforce the consent-seeking behavior of the BCBA's we hire to "fix" the behaviors of autistic children and people with other disabilities, such as attention deficit disorder (ADD), intellectual disabilities, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, or schizophrenia. Without a behavioral definition, how do we know what we're trying to modify? With one, we can make sure they obtain the dual consent of the child and the parent. School superintendents can hire BCBA's who promise to exhaust the positive techniques before ever considering the use of punishment. We can actually improve the behaviors of individuals whose job is to improve the behaviors of others. We can help them become more ethical.

On the Locus of Control, Autonomous Thinking Versus Factors in the Environment

A reader of an earlier draft of the first section of this paper said a baby cannot consent because his mind cannot reason. He doesn't possess a free and autonomous ability to decide what's best for himself. I couldn’t rebut her with a few sentences. Thankfully, her objection led me to develop the current section. It offers a reconciliation between ethics and behaviorism. I'll start with some abstractions, then follow with some illustrations.

We don't need to examine thinking when we analyze behavior. A belief in autonomy is not necessary. We can study behavior in its natural surrounding. By accepting the possibility of determinism, we can engage the principles of behavior modification without appealing to inner causes of behavior.

Behaviorists know how to change behavior and ethicists can help us decide which behaviors we should alter. If the two fields could unite, they could sift out the harmful behaviors and fill the hourglass of time with the sands of constructive responses. Somehow it looks like the paradigm of behavioral control conflicts with the ethicists' bedrock principle of freedom. How can we reconcile the difference?

The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979) published the Belmont Report of Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. It called for the consent of subjects in behavioral interventions and based its recommendation on "respect for persons" as "autonomous" human beings. The Oxford Dictionaries Online defines autonomy as "freedom from external control or influence." An autonomous person is someone who generates his own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without being influenced by any external environmental factors. The language in the report said "Respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection.... Respect for persons requires that subjects, to the degree that they are capable, be given the opportunity to choose what shall and shall not happen to them. This opportunity is provided when adequate standards for informed consent are satisfied."

To the contrary, B.F. Skinner claimed that human behavior is determined by our genetic endowments, our previous experiences, and the stimuli in the current environment. In 1947 he said, "To have a science of psychology at all, we must adopt the fundamental postulate that human behavior is a lawful datum, that it is undisturbed by the capricious act of any free agent - in other words, that it is completely determined. (Skinner, 1999, p. 345.)"

So who is right, the commission or Skinner? Are we free and autonomous thinkers or not?

Skinner wasn't sure that human behavior is completely determined. He said we must adopt the "postulate" of determinism. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines a postulate as "a hypothesis advanced as an essential presupposition, condition, or premise of a train of reasoning." His doctrine was only an assumption. By 1947 he had only put animals in his experimental chambers. The operant conditioning of human subjects was off in the future.

Regarding animals, however, the evidence supported his argument. He discovered predictable patterns of response by manipulating reinforcement techniques. For example, when he withheld food from a rat after continuous reinforcement of one hundred lever presses, the cumulative record of its rate of response typically showed an extinction burst. After smoothing out for fluctuations and irregularities, Skinner drew an extinction curve showing that responses per hour initially increase, leveled off, and then diminished to its original, unconditioned low rate of response. Since lever pressing was predictable, he said it was controlled by the food, the box where he placed them, its apparati, and the emotional effect of the failure to reinforce (1938, p. 74-78). I provide a rough sketch of a typical extinction curve in my blog post, Rat Behavior Extinguished.

I once asked a chemist whether or not we are free. He said we will never know for sure. He said we would need a computer bigger than the universe to account for all the possible locations of a random scattering of a group of electrons around and about the universe. Behaviorism looks for variables in the environment that change the probability of future occurrences of behavior, but an infinite number of variables can affect infinite combinations of behavior chains. We cannot possibly account for them all. In order to know if we are completely determined, we would need to know all the relevant variables, to measure their accumulated affects, and be able predict with complete accuracy what a person is about to do. Skinner never claimed in his groundbreaking book, The Behavior of Organisms (1938), that he could predict the exact size of the reserve of total responses elicited in an extinction burst. He also could not account for the irregularities in the hourly rate of response curve.

But Skinner was a pragmatist. He seemed to be saying, "We don't know with absolute certainty that we are determined, but it's useful to proceed as though we are." With determinism as our assumption, we can try to discover the laws of human behavior, if in fact they exist. When we assume determinism, we can search the environment for factors that can remedy behavior problems. He argued that man-made problems such as nuclear weapons, climate change, extreme wealth in the face of extreme poverty, and overpopulation in a world of limited resources demand that we learn how to modify behavior to improve the odds for the long-term survival of our species.

The cognitive approach to psychology is ineffective, he added, when we are trying to find solutions. When people assume that human behavior is generated by an inner, autonomous, thoughtful free will, then the investigation stops there and the true environmental causes of behavior remain undiscovered (see Skinner, 1974).

So let's present some hypothetical questions and contrast the differences between the internal cognitivists and the external behaviorists. For example, we might ask, "Why did that man go to that particular store instead of this other store?"

The cognitive psychologist might answer, "He thought it was a good idea to go to the store, he wanted to go, he liked it, he felt like going, or he was exercising his freedom to choose."

Mentalism is an assumption that a self-powered mind generates action independent of external causes, but we can't see his thoughts, so how do we know we’ve changed his mind? We can’t count them, we can’t measure them, and we can’t draw a line on a piece of graph paper that shows an increased rate of abstract ideas. According to Skinner, having an autonomous mind is an imaginary explanation. He said Freud's representation of the psychic energy flowing between "the ego, superego, and id as inhabitants of a psychic or mental world subdivided into regions of conscious, co-conscious, and unconscious mind," is "an elaborate set of explanatory fictions (1953, p. 375)."

On the other hand, a behaviorist might say, "He went to the store because he was reinforced by fresh produce every time he shopped there in the past. If the food was rotten, he wouldn't have returned. If the produce manager wants him to come back, she should care more about the quality of her fruit and less about his thinking. She can't read his mind and she can't change a mind she doesn't see, but she can chuck the bad apples to keep him coming back."

So the internal explanation doesn't tell us what to do. Only the external explanation of behavior provides a real solution to the problem of how to generate revenue in a produce market.

To take another example, we also might ask, "Why does a particular child on the playground hit his classmates while they are playing?"

A cognitive or a psychoanalytic therapist might answer, "He hits because he is an angry child, he has an aggressive tendency, he is a bully, he doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, he is a bad boy, he is undisciplined, or his id predominates over his superego."

"So what?" Skinner would say. These explanations only lead to further questions. "Why is he undisciplined, why is he aggressive, or why is he a bully?" Once they label him a bully, the investigation stops there. We have no idea how to keep him from hitting. They're not looking in the environment for potential solutions.

Alternatively, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) can perform a functional analysis by observing the child in the playground. The BCBA can record the "ABC's" of the situation, the "Antecedent" stimuli, the rate of hitting "Behavior," and the "Consequences" of the behavior. She might notice the teacher reprimanding the boy when he's hitting, but she's not removing him from the scene. Perhaps the teacher doesn't know that attention is a powerful reinforcer to an attention-starved child, even if it's criticism. The analyst might guess that the teacher is unwittingly reinforcing his aggression. She can test her hypothesis by instructing her to talk to him when he's doesn't hit and to tell him to go sit down on a bench away from the playground when he does. If the hitting response diminishes, they've nailed the problem.

So the explanation by way of inner causes doesn't solve anything. Only the analysis of behavior provides a solution.

Skinner (1953, p. 31) said it well:

When we say that a man eats because he is hungry, smokes a great deal because he has the tobacco habit, fights because of the instinct of pugnacity, behaves brilliantly because of his intelligence, or plays the piano well because of his musical ability, we seem to be referring to causes. But on analysis these phrases prove to be merely redundant descriptions. A single set of facts is described by the two statements: "He eats" and "He is hungry." A single set of facts is described by the two statements: "He smokes a great deal" and "He has the smoking habit." A single set of facts is described by the two statements: "He plays well" and "He has musical ability." The practice of explaining one statement in terms of the other is dangerous because it suggests that we have found the cause and therefore need search no further. Moreover, such terms as "hunger," "habit," and "intelligence" convert what are essentially the properties of a process or relation into what appear to be things. Thus we are unprepared for the properties eventually to be discovered in the behavior itself and continue to look for something which may not exist.

He did not deny the existence of thought. He called it a private event taking place under the skin, unobserved by everyone but the thinker himself. Yet that's not a problem for a behaviorist. It's not necessary to know what someone is thinking if our goal is to alter her behavior. He once said, given that A causes B and B causes C, we can conclude that A causes C without knowing anything about B. In other words, if a change in the environment causes a change in thinking, and a change in thinking causes a change in behavior, then we can conclude that a change in the environment causes a change in behavior. We don't need to know anything about the thought process involved.

So according to Skinner, it's useful to assume that human behavior is lawful because the principles we discover allow us to explain, predict, and control it through manipulations of the environment.

I agree with him that it's a good idea to proceed as though an independent mind was not the cause of our behavior. Cognitive psychology in the therapist's office might help lift us out of depression, but how can it stop the arms race? Behaviorism is more hopeful today than cognitive psychology and neurology if we want to solve our man-made international predicaments.

I cannot comprehend how a nonphysical idea can physically cause a person to stand up and walk to the store, but if neuropsychology could demonstrate that thinking was just an electrochemical activity in the brain, I could accept its role in a causal chain of events. Skinner said that someday we might have the technology to observe what's happening inside the box. Today we are imaging the brain, but it's too soon to see if it will do us much good. Knowing the location of a thought in the brain doesn't solve the problem of warmongering politicians. We on the other hand as a people united through positive reinforcement with mass emails, demonstrations, contributions, and phone calls can get together en masse to diminish their aggressive behavior.

So I'm agnostic on the question of free will versus determinism, but I rejoice in the optimism of science and its ongoing discovery of relevant factors that allow us to explain, predict, and influence human behavior - but only if it's ethical. It must be rewarding and consensual.

Now here's the problem with the internal explanation of behavior as it relates to the overriding theme of this essay. In the end, parents and therapists use the autonomous, rational explanation of consent as an excuse to avoid seeking the consent of the child or the incapacitated disabled adult to a behavioral intervention. They don't have enough capacity to reason, the argument goes, so they cannot make good decisions. They are immature, inexperienced, and not yet emancipated. They shouldn't be given the right to determine their fates until they are free, independent, and grown up. I have explained why the inner justification of behavior is unnecessary and impractical. I reasoned why children and disabled adults should be able to say, "Leave me alone." Viewing consent as an internal process blocks the people with less power from exercising their right to self-determination. Consent as a form of verbal behavior empowers them with a more ethical rationale to give them a voice in decisions that affect their lives.

An External Justification of Consent

Remember that the Belmont Report said that "respect for persons" is fundamental to behavioral research if its scientists are going to be ethical. They implied that people have value because they are free and autonomous beings. They are free to choose what will happen to them, so an investigation should not proceed without consent. Give them all the information they need to make autonomous, self-generated decisions and then they respects them as persons and have fulfilled their obligation to follow the consent procedure.

I agree with the commission that we should respect an individual and obtain his consent, but as I said before and I reiterate now, we don't need a belief in autonomy as our reason for granting consent. We don't need to assume a nebulous psychic ability of free will hidden deep inside a person that enables him to choose a behavior through an independent channeling of thought.

Instead we can appeal to the survival of the species to justify why we should respect our fellow human beings. In this era of diminishing resources and global threats to humanity it is crucial to respect one another. It's self-evident to me.

In conclusion, if we harbor any doubts, we can apply the golden rule of ethics. Everyone tends to consent to reinforcers and dissent from aversive stimuli. Even a baby can tell us if we are causing him some harm. Within reason, shouldn't we grant everyone the right to consent? Isn't that how we like it done to us?

People have told me they are afraid of behaviorism. When behaviorism becomes more ethical, then the public will accept it and use it more often. Behaviorists are everyday people. The world affects them as much as the rest of us. When we reinforce them for actively seeking the consent of the disabled children whose behavior they modify, behaviorism improves. When ethics adopts behaviorism, then philosophers can strengthen the behaviors they recommend. Politicians are people too. We can motivated them with money and a pat on the back for doing a good job. With internet technology, ethical proscriptions, judicious use of human science, and the concerted activities of massive amounts of people, together we can improve the behaviors of the people we elect. We can inhabit a much better world.

References

American Psychological Association (2010). Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. [Electronic version]. Retrieved September 20, 2011 from the American Psychological Association Web site: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx

Gonnerman, J. (2007). School of shock. [Electronic version]. Mother Jones. August 20, 2007, pp. 1-6. Retrieved September 17, 2011 from the Mother Jones Web site: http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/school-shock

National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (1979). The Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. Retrieved August 19, 2011 from http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.html#xinform

Powell, J. & Azrin, N. (1968) The effects of shock as a punisher for cigarette smoking. [Electronic version]. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1, 63-71. Retrieved July 15, 2011 from U.S. National Institutes of Health PubMed Central database Web site: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1310976/pdf/jaba00083-0063.pdf

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis (1991 ed.). Cambridge, MA: B.F. Skinner Foundation.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior (2005 internet ed.). Cambridge, MA: B.F. Skinner Foundation. [Electronic version]. Retrieved September 19, 2011 from the B. F. Skinner Foundation Web site: http://www.bfskinner.org/BFSkinner/PDFBooksSHB_files/Science_and_Human_Behavior_2.pdf

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior (1992 ed.). Cambridge, MA: B.F. Skinner Foundation.

Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism (1976 ed.). New York: Vintage.

Skinner, B.F. (1999). Current trends in experimental psychology. In V. G. Laties and A. C. Catania (Eds.), Cumulative record (Definitive ed.) (pp. 341-59). Acton, MA: Copley Publishing Group. (Original work published 1947.)