behavior analysis

Getting Back Up After Failure

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / Leave a comment

Failure is a tough topic to bring up but a necessary one. When we are in it, it’s all we can think about. When we are past it, we often do not want any further reminders of it. Failure, behaviorally, and psychologically, is a part of everything we do as a variable, and factors in to every future strategy we use. It is a part of our past that defines how we interact with the future. In a previous writing I discussed “Overcoming the Fear of Failure”, but this one will be about what to do when it happens to us. How do we move on? How do we grow from it? How to we set our future expectancies to do better? To what do we attribute failure to? All of these and more are necessary to making each failure a stepping stone to a future success, or else we might find ourselves in a loop generating ever worse strategies. Instead, we need to learn to get back up. Let’s talk now about some of the research we have on the topic and how we might navigate failure and find motivation from it.

Mastery Orientation vs. Learned Helplessness

When it comes to deriving motivation from failures, both big and small, the strategies that we develop in childhood have a great deal of influence on our current behavior. You may have heard of the term “learned helplessness” before, which describes a pattern of behavior of low motivation and outputs after repeated failures. The individual receives so little reinforcement following their actions that they simply do not continue to try. Diener and Dweck (1978) popularized these concepts in a study on youths that they split into two groups based on patterns and strategies that they observed without being taught. They found that some children when faced with repeated challenges and varying degrees of failure would either consistently give up, and reduce responding, while others would re-assess and modify their responding based on the inputs of their failure. The researchers were very interested in the cognitive strategies that both of these groups displayed, all without any coaching, and determined that even at a very young age, there were clear distinctions on these two types by their ideas on their loci of control. A locus of control is a belief system that people use to determine whether they have control of outcomes, or if outside forces do. A person with an internal locus of control would see the results of their actions as largely based on their own actions and future control. An individual with an external locus of control would see the results of their actions as largely impacted by an outside force or their environment. Now, there is a part of this study that some consider a little unfair. No matter what answer the children gave to their respective stimuli at the start, they were told they were incorrect. How they responded afterwards largely correlated based on how they viewed their loci of control.

Mastery oriented individuals appeared to generally attribute their failures to a lack of effort or something they’d missed. Even at that age, their first reaction focused on pivoting and reassessing.

Learned helpless individuals tended to attribute the failures to the situation as largely beyond their control (in this case, without knowing it, they were technically right as far as the experiment was concerned).

So what happened?

Mastery oriented individuals kept trying, kept changing their responses based on feedback, and largely kept at the task longer than the other individuals. They showed no decline and became more sophisticated in their strategy use (which was eventually validated).

Learned helpless individuals tended to show a progressive decline in the use of good-problem solving strategies and began to include less sophisticated and poorer problem solving strategies. Ones that would be even less likely to work.

This model of attribution is still used to this day, but has a few caveats. Unlike this study, in the real world, people are not always one or the other. In many cases, and complex problems, it requires using multiple loci of control, but also understanding whether the factors we evaluate and learn from are stable (long term) or unstable (temporary). The stability of an attribution is its relative permanence as a factor. If you know you are good at jumping rope, meaning you have high ability, you have a stable factor to consider your next success with. But, if you attribute jumping rope to how much effort your legs can put out, then the source of success is unstable—effort can vary and has to be renewed on each occasion or else it disappears. We’ll talk a little more about how effort and ability works in a second. The important part is that when it comes to evaluating our part in the grand scheme, the internal locus of control tends to help us perform better.  Let’s look at some examples.

It rained today and we got all wet. We hate that. What if it rains tomorrow and we don’t want to be rained on? Would a belief system around an internal loci of control make sense if we focus purely on ourselves and ignore the sky? Not very well. No matter how many strategies we might attempt based on our own feedback, we are unlikely to change the weather. On the other hand, a person using this internal loci of control might decide to travel away from the storm as a strategy, bring an umbrella, or wear a rain coat, which has some functionality for them but the rain still happens where they once were. Internal loci of control work best when we take into account our solutions but do not ignore the immutable environmental factors.

What about using an external loci of control on task performance? Perhaps we’d like to pick up three items off of our room’s floor within ten minutes. We might begin to generate all the reasons why we cannot, and how far the floor is from our fingers, and how many other factors there are between the items and the trash can, leading to very low performance on this task within a time frame. It’s the room that’s messy. It’s been messy for days now. So messy. So much mess too. What if we just pick up one thing then go back to bed? It’s still messy. Might as well not. Then, we’ve just effectively wasted time generating non-functional thoughts (poor strategy), and nothing was done (poor outcome). That isn’t helpful either.

Generally speaking, when it comes to our own behavior, within our own repertoires of ability, it is wiser to use an internal locus of control to conceptualize our potential impact on tasks and problems. When there are larger systems and unavoidable outcomes from the outside, it does not hurt to consider what lies in an external locus of control. We, as individuals, cannot control everything. But, as we see above, when faced with continual failure feedback, utilizing an internal locus of control early on can help us come up with strategies which mitigate the external circumstances and perhaps land us in a better spot. There is no harm in generating increasingly sophisticated strategies to put ourselves into better conditions and allow the external factors outside of our control to be managed from ever increasing positions of control and strategy on our part. Sometimes when failure comes, it comes after we thought we had a great strategy focusing on our own improvement and it just did not work.

How do we do it? How do we take back some semblance of control when the waves of failures keep coming?

Consider that the concepts of a locus of control, and how our actions impact our goals are called attributions, and have an effect on our future behavior and how we respond to challenges. When we attribute too much to external causes, it can lead us to decrease our attempts. When we attribute too much to internal causes, it can sometimes lead to more sophisticated problem solving, but blind us to other factors might be outside of our control and narrow our perspective too much.

Mediating these attributions not just in the moment of the first failure we come across, but those that follow can help us create a better perspective on our situation. We can also rely on our social circle, relay our experiences, to see if others can help us see what we might have missed and help our future strategies find better success.

  • Evaluate your current attribution and locus of control of the problem.
  • What are some ways we can evaluate our own pattern of responding and improve it? (Internal Locus)
  • What are some environmental factors that impacted our failure that our behavior did not change (External Locus)
  • How do we refine our strategy so that our next attempt can put us in a better position against those environmental variables if they happen again? Can we mitigate what held us back?

Purposive Behaviorism and Re-Training our Attributions

As individuals we can create systems that help us maintain a level of reinforcement to offset failure, and as social creatures, help create an environment of positive interactions that can help us both realize our achievable goals and find strategies to access them. Thankfully, we have concepts and theories at our disposal to explain the hows and whys. Let’s talk Purposive Behaviorism and how we can re-training our Attributional Theories.

If you’ve read my other works on this site, behaviorism itself is familiar to you. Purposive Behaviorism goes beyond the more mechanistic systems of reinforcement and punishment, stimulus and response, that you see in some of the more traditional theories. Yes, reinforcement is important to keep us moving forward. Yes, punishment (failure) can knock us back. But we are human, and complex beings, and a good analysis always takes that into account. From a purposive behavior standpoint, we use goals and work hard to achieve them. That is an intrinsic part of what it is to be human. In older theories by Edward Tolman, the term cognitive map was developed to describe how we do that. Our cognitive map is how we envision our path to our goal. We all have beliefs, unspoken ones, that a specific action on our part will get us closer to an intended consequence or goal. Let’s call these expectancies. They cover both the behavior we intend to do, and the goal we intend to achieve with them. It’s a roadmap. Tolman also believed that we learn from our successes and failures largely through a latent process. There is an automaticity to reinforcement that helps us pick up what has worked and set aside what has not worked, and integrating more cognitive and conscious strategies to what we have learned latently is the best way to move forward. Keep in mind not just what you can remember and consciously recall, but also what might have been learned latently from the experience.

When we map out our actions to meet a goal, we often give ourselves a time frame (hopefully realistic) in which to reach them. By giving our goals, or conceptual map of how we achieve them, a context in time we help judge how to act and what to expect. Generally speaking, acting now is always better than acting later unless you have a more advantageous use of time further along to position towards your goal. With our expectancies in mind, we have our actions, our goals, and our time frame. As adults, we also learn to discriminate effort from ability. Effort can be defined as the amount of energy or resources we must expend to progress towards the goal, while ability may be defined by our existing proficiency or skills that can achieve it. In most situations it is a combination of both effort and ability that help us reach complex goals.

Let’s reintroduce failure here. Let’s say that we mapped out our goal, we made our attempt to the best of our effort and ability, and we find that we simply did not meet success. Perhaps we even see repeated failure. It can be easy to get disheartened, and even travel down that path of learned helplessness, but we should do everything we can to avoid it. Let’s imagine that we did our best to conceptualize our locus/loci of control, and they were as accurate as they could be, but we still missed the mark. We tried, we failed. Let’s say our expectancy, our goal and plan to reach it, is still very important and we do not want to change the goal. How do we use our time most effectively now to get back up and try again? We need to re-train ourselves, and that means re-training our attributions.

Do we have the ability to achieve this next step in our goal? What did our failure show us?

Did we apply the necessary effort to achieve the next step in our goal? What did our failure show us?

Were our attributions on stability based around factors that were stable (ability) or unstable (effort)?

The combination of evaluating our ability and effort and attribute our failure and successes along these variables is key to knowing when something can be achieved alone, if further training, resources, or additional help from others is needed, and how to adjust our plans going forward to include these more sophisticated and evaluated plans that came from the experience. Failure here is a teacher. It’s not always easy to maintain effort after a failed attempt even if the ability was there. To retrain ourselves to analyze our attributions of the failure correctly, we must take some time to evaluate the factors. Use this tool from Dweck (2000), who we saw in that earlier study too, below to take a particular situation you might have been in the past, and see where the attributions fall.

Plug some of your attributions in the grid above and see where they fall. Do you think anyone else evaluating your situation might have a different series of attributions for it?

We tend to get the best results out of ourselves and planning ahead by attributing a reasonable portion our previous successes to internal and stable causes. What went right in the situation within our ability, even if there was an ultimate failure, that we can consistently do again? Example: I might not have won the race, but this was close to my best personal time yet.

When analyzing our failures, we can go wrong in attributing things entirely to unstable and external causes. Things that we see as completely out of our control, and leaves nothing for us to work and grow on. Example: I was going to go in to work today but then the roads were so busy and you know I can’t drive on busy roads…

The take away:

  • Turning failures into successes takes analysis of what happened.
  • Sometimes we analyze the situation well and can think of some improvements for next time focusing on our internal factors.
    • “Stable Dimension” attributions help us reflect on our ability and how to improve it.
    • “Unstable Dimension” attributions help us reflect on our level of effort and if we can improve it next time.
  • If we see many attributions leaning in the unstable or external direction, maybe it could take an extra pair of eyes to help us get a new perspective.
    • Reaching out to a trusted friend, or experienced advisor on the topic.
    • Re-evaluating the attribution by considering internal factors.
  • Learned helplessness can arise from attributing too much to external factors, avoiding evaluation of internal factors, leading to poor problem solving and less sophisticated goal directed behavior.

Getting back up after failure requires analysis of our actions, re-training our attributions to avoid learned helplessness, and consistent effort going forward.

What are some attributions you’ve thought about recently? Have the behaviors you’ve used to reach those goals been effective? Have they been ineffective? How has your belief system on the locus of control impacted the process? Have you utilized others to help you with alternate perspectives?

Comments? Questions? Feedback? Leave them below.

References:

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (1987). Applied Behavior Analysis. Merrill.

Edward Chace Tolman. (2015). Introduction to Theories of Learning, 302–326. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315664965-16

Hoose, N. A.-V. (n.d.). Educational psychology. Lumen. Retrieved November 11, 2021, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/edpsy/chapter/attribution-theory/.

Molden, D. C., & Dweck, C. S. (2000). Meaning and motivation. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation, 131–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-012619070-0/50028-3

Schunk, D. H., Meece, J. L., & Pintrich, P. R. (2014). Motivation in education: Theory, research, and applications. Pearson Education Ltd.

Tolman, E. C. (1967). Purposive behavior in animals and men. Irvington.

Image Citations:

Title image: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Attribution Grid: Christian Sawyer, M.Ed., BCBA

Tabletop Roleplaying with a Behavior Analyst

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / 1 Comment

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There are a vast array of opinions on role playing games. The stereotypes about them are prevalent in the popular culture of movies and televisions shows- mainly depicting the socially inept cliches rolling dice and spouting an incomprehensible language of their own. That type of depiction does get laughs, but it also is unlike anything I’ve seen in reality. I was influenced by those caricatures of role players too. For a long time I did not understand the appeal of piling up in a dark basement, playing a game about pretend people where nothing really mattered and there were so many rules to learn. Where’s the fun in that? It was the wrong outlook, but the right question. There was fun in it. It just took the experience to actually try it out and find it for myself.

Tabletop Role Playing is just a form of collective story telling. If you’ve ever seen a fictional movie and been engrossed in it, or had an idea for a novel, these are the same types of precursor behaviors to putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. There’s a fun to that. Taking on a different personality for a moment, and seeing a viewpoint unlike our own. If we want to get psychological about it, there might be some aspects of Adlerian play theory, or Bandura’s social learning through vicarious reinforcement in there. The gist of it is; one person sets the stage of the story and determines the rules of how the game is played, and the players take on a role and navigate that world for a collective goal (most of the time).

If you’re the type of person who likes making materials like token boards, graphs, or craft projects- this is right in your wheelhouse too.

It’s best to start off as a player before deciding to run your own game. You get to understand group dynamics and how collective story telling works. I was in my 20s when I first started this type of role playing. I started late. I tried a little of everything I could get invited to. Some people like settings with dragons and elves, but that’s not my type of thing exactly. I gravitated towards more realistic settings where interpersonal relationships and psychology was more grounded in humanity. Fictional worlds not too different or fantastic from our own. What I learned quickly is that these games work on Skinnerian principles- many things do, but role playing had a specific feel of reinforcement schedules that was familiar to me. The person who runs the game, sometimes called a referee, sometimes called a DM, sets the scale of what actions are reinforced and what are not.

Sometimes these are fixed reinforcement schedules based on experience: points that are rewarded that can be applied to the characters skills and attributes to make them more proficient, or more hardy to tackle the adventures. A measure of how much the character grows.

Sometimes these reinforcement schedules are variable ratio items: like in-game money, armor for your character, and tools that they can use to tackle different obstacles. A measure of what the character has, or can spend.

The players themselves run into variability by natural consequence; every action they decide to have their character make, if it is a specific skill or difficulty, comes with rolling a die to see if they succeed or fail.

These can be run like any other Skinner box. Compound schedules appear to be the most interesting to players. A fixed ratio that can be expected- perhaps collecting something important for one of the protagonists in a decided location. Or maybe a variable ratio- deciding what foes give up what item or monetary reward for being bested. Some people run their games with combat in mind; every situation is a nail to be beaten down by a well armed adventurer’s hammer. There’s a thrill to that kind of gameplay, but I find that it isn’t compelling enough for me. I prefer to create stories that have the opportunity for danger, but the risk of engaging in combat is sparsely reinforcing and has a greater opportunity for punishment. A live by the sword, die by the sword style of reinforcement schedule. There may be rewards to a quick and brutal choice, but a player can lose their character just as easily. I like using social stories in therapy to develop more adaptive skills. I use that same mindset when designing a game too- why resort to violence when you can talk your way out of trouble?

Say there is a dark concrete room, dim lights, seven enemies outnumber and surround a poorly armed player group. If they choose combat- they would most likely lose. It might work. I would allow it. Let the dice roll and see if they succeed. But more often than not, a clever player can decide to roll their die in a very different way; persuasion. I set the mark much lower for that if they have the right pitch. They make a deal even the most brutal enemy couldn’t refuse. The die is rolled- they win. Now there is one enemy less, and one more temporary friend to the adventure. The other enemies aren’t just going to stick to their hostility- maybe they overheard that, maybe they’re swayed too, maybe this causes division in the enemy group. The player group capitalizes. They play bluff roles. They play intimidation rolls. They play oratory rolls to back their fellow players up with a rousing speech. The tables turn, and now they’re on the side with higher numbers and that piece of the game is won.

That situation is harder to pull off for players. It takes more thought. More coordination. Turn taking. A minute or two to step away from the game, collect their ideas, then bring it back. I’m not trying to run a stressful table here- thinking is allowed. They devise a plan that works better than pulling a sword and pulling a trigger. I reinforce. Experience for “defeating” an entire room. They did after all. “Tangible reinforcers” in game for the characters. They get a bartered deal that they’d never get anywhere else if they’d been violent to these bad guys. Negative reinforcement- they avoid the aversive harm that is revealed to them when they now know- after persuading their enemies- that the enemies outmatched them in hidden weapons. The players used teamwork, not just some haphazard dice throwing about blood and guts. Group bonus. More experience for everyone. Why not? They played the game their way and they played it smart. These were not just four people sitting around a table doing their own random guesses for a quick and easy win, they came together with ideas that I would never have thought up for the story and won it themselves. They changed the story. Now it’s my turn to adjust my ideas to their new role played reality.

Now…It doesn’t always play out that way. Variable reinforcement is a necessity in a game of rolling dice. So is variable punishment. Sometimes the dice roll, and there’s a failure. Or worse- a critical failure! Not only is the prize not won, or the intended action not completed; it was actually a detriment to even try. Players have crashed a car. Blown up a usually harmless household item. Set a pacifist character in the game into a fit of rage and spoiled a whole quest line. That bank vault actually had a skunk in it. It happens. It’s something like a gamble, but when the reinforcement flows heavier than the punishment, it’s all worth it. It evens out. It takes a strong story, it takes a coherent direction and narrative, but the players do all the heavy lifting. They think. They plan. They roll the dice. Everyone has a great time.

You get to see patterns in that. Make it more challenging the next time. More engaging. Take the next story point in a way that you’d never have thought of before.

Let’s not forget that even when the game is done, there’s a friendship there now. People got to know each other a little better. They got to see people they talk to in a different light, more creative to one another, more inventive. Sometimes some playful rivalries come out of it. There’s also a community out there with shared experiences that goes beyond individual play groups and tables. Thousands of other people playing the same game their way. I personally love the community. I have ideas about how to run the game, and run it by others who play the same game but have done it better than me. I adapt. I improve. Sometimes, I even have an idea about how psychosis works in this imaginary world, and reach out to the internet with an interpretation on new rules-….and the creator of the game itself (Maximum Mike Pondsmith) replies.

mm

Talk about fun. Talk about reinforcement. I’ve learned never to underestimate what a good table top roleplaying game can be, or what it can bring to an otherwise ordinary afternoon. If you’ve never tried one? It’s never too late. Groups are out there with every age, every time commitment, and every skill level. Give it a shot. You might just like it.

 

Questions? Comments? Likes? Leave them below.

 

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The Playground Apology

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / 2 Comments

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Let’s paint a common picture. There’s a playground full of children ranging anywhere from 2-6 years of age running across various obstacles and equipment and playing all kinds of games. Then something happens. Maybe it’s physical aggression, or a verbal exchange, but now there is an offended and upset individual. This calls for an apology.

In many cases these are initially mediated by adults, be it parents, teaching staff, or therapy staff. The ability to determine an apology as appropriate is a skill that some children do not necessarily have yet in their repertoires. The adult usually comes over to smooth out the situation by pausing the actions of both children, and prompting the offending child to apologize, or repeat an apology to the other upset child. This is anecdotally seen as a teaching moment to model appropriate skills and teach compassionate and soothing interactions, but also vocalize some responsibility and culpability in some cases. From a behavioral analytic standpoint, we would want to dig a little deeper and look at this as a very specific type of verbal exchange, some kind of operant, that occurs under distinct conditions, for a specialized function. That’s exactly what Toney and Hayes (2017) looked at in their work, which we’ll apply to a situation below.

I was observing a client at a summer camp, and it followed the same recreational activities that most do, like free play outside. The interesting thing here was that this was the start of the camp. A new environment to many of these children, and new peers that they have never met before. Many ranged around two years old to around six years old, and there was diversity in social and play skills. One individual had a game where they would run around, collide with a peer, and then keep going. The camp counselor would come over, have them echo an apology, and then move on. Ten minutes later, this would happen again twice. Similar conditions, same echoic prompted consequence. This was not my client, so interaction and the application of data collection or a functional behavior analysis was out of the question, but based on cursory observation these echoed apologies were only marginally effective at soothing the injured party. It begged the question: Was “sorry” enough?

What do we take from with this model of intervention? Was echoing the camp counselors apology working? If the intention was to have the child decrease their colliding behavior, we did not see any immediate useful effect. If the intention was to teach independent apologies, that was also not very effective from what we saw of these two prompted conditions which followed. It seemed to me to be a momentary pause to the running and colliding activity that had no obvious or immediate punishing, or reinforcing evidence. This is where I remembered Toney and Hayes’ research in the Journal of Behavior and Social Issues (2017) and their interpretation as apologies which are not only under the control of the behavior which preceded them, but also the response of the person who was impacted. In this situation, the children who were impacted (literally), were in various states of being upset, but the child who was apologizing did not seem to have their responses under any control of those stimuli directly. It was not a child to child interaction, there was mediation there that might have actually impeded with those connections. Toney and Hayes explain:

“Perhaps one of the most important understandings provided by a behavioral analysis that contrasts with traditional views is that of the source of control for apologetic responses. It is said that people apologize for what they did and it is believed that one apologizes as a result of his or her aversive behavior. However, at the point of apologizing, the aversive behavior is in the past and therefore cannot exclusively exert control over present behavior (see related discussion in Hayes, 1992, 1998). Instead, it is the victim’s offended response that exerts control over the apologetic response. Given the history of the aversive behavior, the offended response and other stimuli present at the time of conflict now exert control over particular forms of the offender’s verbal behavior that are related to past events. Therefore, the relation that exists between the apology and the aversive behavior is that the apology is the response to the victim’s consequence to the aversive behavior.”- Toney and Hayes (2017)

There are many other factors that Hayes and Toney raise that impact the “victim’s response” including; situational variables, physical pain, nonverbal and paralinguistic features, relationship specific contingencies, behavioral deficits, and frequency. These are all important factors to keep in mind so that we do not oversimplify, but when we frame a situation to be a teaching moment for a child, in hopes that they take on an important skill that will inevitably be useful later in life, why do we focus so much on the words themselves that the “offender” is saying and not the responses and condition of the person effected? Is “sorry” actually enough? Probably not from this behavioral analytic interpretation. Here, the person who was impacted has a role to play. Not just as a background figure who has to be defended by the adult, but as a direct contributor to the contingency.

Perhaps a more comprehensive intervention to teach these skills would have three parts, if we are dealing with school age children or younger who can not resolve these situations themselves:

  1. The Mediator’s Role: A parent, guardian, teacher, staff, therapist, or other responsible individual who is structuring the interaction between the child who was impacted, and the child who engaged in the offending action. Their goal is to facilitate appropriate responses between the two individuals in a way where both can express and learn effectively based on the situational factors above, and the incident.
  2. The Victim’s Role: Facilitated by the mediator to the degree that is necessary for the situation, so that they can express their own response to the action in a meaningful way to the offender. Behaviorally speaking, these should be clear and observable to the offender.
  3. The Offender’s Role: Facilitated by the mediator as well to the degree which is necessary, but one that also includes time for processing the situation, taking in the response(s) of the victim, and then following up with a socially appropriate apology.

Maybe even let those more natural contingencies play out. Let some screaming happen. Let some tears flow. It would not have to be a laboratory setting to get the results that have the lasting effects.

We might infer correctly that “saying sorry” by parroting an adult may not have the same value as an exchange like the one above. It could just be a prompted echoic response that hangs in the air. An S-delta with no effect on future behavior. The other, which weighs heavily on the interaction itself, leads to an actual follow up interaction between the children that may have a greater, or more lasting impact. Now, the offender might not entirely mean it, and the victim may not entirely accept it. Most complex social situations are not cut and dry, but I would argue that we have a better shot at more effective resolution short term, and stronger heuristic outcomes long term than a contrived echoic intervention alone.

What do you think? Thoughts? Comments? Leave them below!

And seriously. Read Toney and Hayes article. It’s fascinating.

References:

Toney, D., & Hayes, L. (2017). A Behavioral Analysis of Apologies, Forgiveness, and Interpersonal Conflict. Behavior and Social Issues, 26, 128.

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Getting a Behavior Analyst House-Call

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / Leave a comment

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Behavior Analysis is different from other psychological therapies. First, it is considered a natural science, meaning that its interventions rely in manipulation of real world variables that can be observed. This removes some of the stereotypical therapeutic long talks on a couch for viable behavior analytic therapy, but don’t sell behavior analysis short just yet.

The best evidence based practices in applied behavior analysis can be found in the natural environment, both studying participants behavior across those environments. It looks at the patterns of either prosocial behavior that can be therapeutically reinforced , and identification and reduction of maladaptive behaviors which get in the way of a fulfilling life.

One of the founding psychologists of behavior analysis, B.F Skinner, wrote in “Science and Human Behavior” (1951) about both the experimental setting for behavior analysis, and the paramount importance of seeing behavior in the environment in which it behaves. Doing tests in a lab may be helpful to get behavior analysts some solid and clinically controlled data sets, but it could never tell them if those skills or patterns would generalize a certain way in the world outside. There’s an importance to that. One of the founding dimensions of behavioral analytic science demands that the products have Generality meaning that the effects of therapy occur across environments and time. The benefits of therapy must outlast the clinical visits. This is helpful to the clients and consumers of behavior analytic therapy (ABA) for obvious reasons; you want the therapy to work in the places you need it most.

ABA practitioners use two broad tools to shape the direction of therapy a Behavior Plan to identify maintaining factors for maladaptive behaviors, and a Skill Acquisition Plan to build up the better patterns, skills, and coping behaviors to replace them. It is all about identifying the problems fast, and implementing actionable change. To that end, they need all the information they can get. Location matters.

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When it comes to the location of services, both for client/consumers, or perhaps the children of client/consumers, age becomes a factor in where this therapy takes place. In many cases this could happen in a school setting, or clinical center setting. This is a practical and commonplace service location for clients of therapy of younger ages. The school setting does have naturalistic opportunities that the clinical setting does not, and having the opportunity to receive therapy in both has its benefits. Clinical settings can focus on the skills that can be practiced with controllable conditions and stimuli that do not have the scheduling drawbacks of an academic setting. School settings have the benefit of natural peer environments, and natural contingencies for task demands if behaviors are dependent on those factors. What is often overlooked, however, is the home setting. I practiced as a School Counselor, and although certain types of therapy worked in the school setting and helped the students, once they walked out the door, the practitioner had no idea. It was all self-report from homes, and those can be misleading.

The benefits of having a house call from a behavior analyst (BCBA), and getting ABA therapy at a residence, is that the practitioner can see the conditions outside of the clinical and academic sphere that may be relevant to either stifling patterns of prosocial behavior, or feeding into the maladaptive behaviors. Sometimes the home environment is rich in information and reinforcement history that an analyst can work with. Routines, schedules, and practice can all be built into a home visit to work on the things that need the most work. Sometimes the privacy and comfort of the home also helps with going through dry runs of new skills without the social pressure of the outside world. When a Behavior Analyst comes in through the front door they are interested in getting to the bottom of the problem behaviors, teach socially relevant alternatives, and most of all, to help. I’ve seen first hand how just a change to familiar scenery can open up dialogue and planning for therapy directions that might be uncomfortable, or even embarrassing elsewhere, so never underestimate the power of an environment change on behavior.

Some Practitioners might not be able to deliver consistent services in the home, but even one occasional house call, one single visit, could open the lens on new conceptualizations on the therapeutic framework. I’ve experienced this countless times. As a practitioner, you think you know what’s going on, and then you’re in the client’s place of residence and a big piece of the puzzle falls into place. This is advice to any behavior analytic practitioner; if you have the opportunity to make that house call, don’t wait. It could change your entire idea of what is going on and save hours on dead end functional analysis hypotheses. House calls can also get the broader family involved with services that they might have otherwise been unfamiliar with. This opens up dialogue, and questions, which could lead to greater support both inside and outside of the home. There is a well known tenant in behavior analysis called dissemination. That means, this natural science works best when people know about it and understand it. Spreading the word, and being correct in the delivery of what ABA therapy is, is important. There is no short supply of misinformation out there. A home visit with the family, willing to participate, can break down the barriers of hesitancy, and show just how effective and useful this therapy can be.

So potential clients and consumers? If you can swing it, call for a home visit.

Behavior Analysts and ABA practitioners? Don’t be afraid of house-calls. You’ll be kicking yourself for not doing it sooner.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Leave them below.

Interest in ABA therapy for resources in getting services, or practicing? Feel free to email the address below.

References:

Cooper, John O, Heron Timothy E.. Heward, William L.. (2018). APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS. S.l.: PEARSON.

Skinner, B. F., & Skinner, B. F. (1951). Science And Human Behavior. Riverside: Free Press

Photo Credits: http://www.Pexels.com

“They’re Just Tired”- The Worst Scapegoat Explanation for Behavior

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / Leave a comment

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Why are they acting that way? “They’re just tired.”.  It’s one of those cliches that never goes away. It’s just so easy to use. You can use it for any situation at all to explain away patterns of maladaptive or cranky behavior. Screaming? Tired. Throwing things? Tired. Hitting their siblings? Tired. It’s the explanation that’s got it all-… Except that it’s not exactly true all the time. Exhaustion does exist, sleeping poorly does affect behavior, but there’s a risk in assuming a cause without looking at the exact conditions surrounding the behavior. It’s more work to do so, but it’s worth it.

In Behavior Analysis, we call that kind of thing an “explanatory fiction”. It’s not directly untruthful, but it avoids reality through ease and circular reasoning. Why do they do that thing we don’t like? Oh! They’re tired. It’s not hard to see the practical ease in that either. Everyone in their life has been cranky or acted miserably when they’ve been stretched too thin. The problem comes from the assumption. That assumption takes away all the curiosity and the need to dig for a more sophisticated answer, and it also leads us to a bias of expectation. We’ll ask around post hoc to confirm the broad theory.  Did they sleep well last night? Oh! Well, there was that one time when ____. Anything we get that conforms to our “theory of tiredness” will close the book. Open and shut case. We miss the real reason. We miss the real point. There’s risk in that. We miss out on catching the patterns that become habits that hurt further down the line. We blind ourselves to teachable moments.

The way to avoid all of these pitfalls and to explore the real reason behind these target behaviors is to begin the search right when we spot it. It would be even better if we could give context to what happened before the behaviors occur. A great psychologist named B.F Skinner called this the Three-Term Contingency, and it is a great way to actually get an idea on the triggers, causes, and/or maintaining factors for behaviors that ought not to happen. These are broken down into three things to study: the Antecedent which occurs before the behavior (“What exactly set this off?”), the Behavior which is the exact thing we are looking at, and the Consequence which happens after the behavior occurs (“What did this behavior get or what did it let them escape?”). Now it’s not just enough to ask the questions. We should probably document it too. Write it down. Take notes. Get numbers. How many times are you seeing this specific behavior? We call that Frequency. How long does that behavior last? We call that Duration. We can use this information to inform our conceptualization on what the behavior’s function is. By finding the function, it can lead to us adapting not only the environment to aid in decreasing the behavior but also aid in helping the learner find a better way to engage for what it is they are after. Even if it is a nap.

Let’s talk Functions of behavior. In Behavior Analysis, there are 4 common categories that make it a simple framework to work with: Attention, Access (to something/someone), Escape (to get away from or avoid), or Automatic Reinforcement (which is internal/invisible and mediated by the self). A pattern of behavior that occurs again and again, regardless of how they slept the night before, might lead us in the direction of one of these. Or more than one. A behavior can also be “multiply maintained”. We can either see this as a complication or as a better truth than a simple off-hand answer. Assuming that fatigue and tiredness are the leading factors only gives us the solution of a nap. That may delay the behavior’s reoccurrence, but if you see, again and again, it’s time to take the step and look deeper. The nap is not the answer, only a temporary respite from the behavior. The contingency and history of reinforcement haven’t gone anywhere. Bottom line: It’s more complicated than that, and probably isn’t going away that easily.

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Trade the Nap for some Differential Reinforcement

Now it’s time to get serious. If we’ve gotten this far, and tracked behavior observably as possible, and ruled out our original assumption of an internal factor like “tiredness”, then we need an answer we can use in the world of the awake. Thankfully, behavior is like dinosaurs, it can undergo extinction (that means go away), or it can get stronger if you feed it (reinforce it). The “bad behaviors”, the maladaptive ones that are not a help to the learner or their situation, can be extinguished by simply avoiding the thing that reinforces it. What is it after? Don’t let it get that. What is it avoiding? Don’t let it avoid that either.

Hard work, right?

But that’s not the end of it. You can’t just take away a behavior and leave a void. You need to replace it. So, when it comes to a maladaptive behavior that aims to get something, and it’s adapted to get that thing, you find a better behavior to replace it. The “bad behavior”? Doesn’t get it. The “good behavior”? That gets it. That’s differential reinforcement; reinforcing the good useful stuff and not reinforcing the other stuff that isn’t helpful or good. Here’s a handful of techniques that follow that principle:

The ol’ DRO (Differential Reinforcement of Other Behaviors): This technique is where you reinforce the “other” behaviors. Everything except the thing you want to go away. If you’re targeting a tantrum, you reinforce every other behavior that is not tantrum related. Some people even fold in some timed intervals (preplanned periods of time) and reward gaps of “other” behaviors so long as the target behavior does not occur. Can they go 5 minutes without a tantrum? Great. How about 10? Progress.

“Not that, this instead!” DRI (Differential Reinforcement of Incompatible Behaviors):  This isn’t a large net like the DRO procedure. This one is where a set of behaviors are picked because they make the target “bad behavior” impossible. Let’s say our learner plays the bagpipes too loudly and is losing friends fast. What’s a good DRI for that? Anything that makes playing the bagpipes impossible. Try the flute. Or jump rope. Or fly a kite. Hold a microphone and sing. It’s all the same just so long as it’s physically impossible to do both the replacement and the original target (bagpipes, etc) that we aim to decrease.

“The right choice” DRA (Differential Reinforcement of Alternative Behavior): This is the laser targeted, surgical precision, version of the DRI. It follows a similar principle: Get a behavior reinforced that is NOT the maladaptive one. Except for DRA, this behavior is a single target, and it’s most often one that is more effective and socially appropriate. DRI doesn’t care if the new behavior and old target behavior share a function or purpose. DRA would, in most cases. You aim an alternative better behavior to take the place of the old maladaptive one.

 

The research on all three are varied, but they are tried and true ways to get one behavior to go away while getting other better ones in their place. Some are easier to use in some situations than others. I invite you to explore the research. It’s fascinating stuff. It’s also a lot more effective long-term than assuming the explanatory fiction and hoping it goes away. Why not take action? Why not take control of real factors that could be used for real good and change?

But not right now. You should take a nap. You look tired.

 

 

Just kidding.

 

References:

Cooper, John O. Heron, Timothy E. Heward, William L. (2007) Applied Behavior Analysis. Upper Saddle River, N.J. Pearson/Merrill-Prentice Hall.

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Behavior Analysis and Personality Psychology

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / Leave a comment

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Applied Behavior Analysis and Personality Psychology at first glance have very little in common. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) comes from the behaviorist tradition of the purely observable, and Personality Psychology features variables that are often seen within the individual and outside of direct measurement. As time moves on in the field of psychology, and the behavioral fields specifically, there is a call for greater breadth and understanding from practitioners across more than one domain. Behaviorism as a field of psychology is alive and well, but sometimes practitioners can pigeonhole themselves (pardon the pun) into the strict traditionalist ideas of the early 20th century, leaving the cognitive revolution and relevant psychological progress aside.

Few people realize, that this is not too a large gulf to bridge.

The topic of personality and temperament in individuals was touched on by B.F Skinner himself in “Science and Human Behavior” (1951) and “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” (1971), but as many would suspect, the meaning of the word personality was operationalized to a series of observable concepts such as “response tendencies”. These tendencies of responding were used to explain how individuals varied in their sensitivity to stimuli. It stands to reason that everyone in their life has come across another individual who was not impacted by a stimulus in the same way as themselves. This is a basic part of humanity. This is the reason we need to clinically perform preference assessments. Individual differences occur regardless of standardized stimuli. No matter how precisely we form a potential reinforcer, no matter how accurate the degree of the amount, or intensity, or even how carefully a schedule is arranged; one person may respond differently to it than another. And that is not including motivating operation factors like deprivation and satiation. Sometimes people are affected by different things in different ways, and they respond to different things in different ways.

Personality Psychology concerns itself with these individual differences. It is a field that is interested in the unique differences of the thinking, behaving, and feeling of individuals. Personality Psychology studies traits or factors based on the similarities and differences of individuals. Some feature traits such as Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism (Eysenck Personality Inventory), Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (The Big Five). Others add in the traits of Honesty and Humility (HEXACO). Although there are many different theories on how these personality traits are formed, are measured, and are predictive; they still aim to explain something that strict observation of antecedent or consequence stimuli appears to miss. Behaviorists and practitioners of Applied Behavior Analysis may look at these things and pump their brakes. After all, it seems like a challenge to align the methods found in Personality Psychology to the dimensions of behavior analysis that Baer, et al. constructed in 1968. How does personality fit into a strictly behavioral framework? What about making personality framework conceptually systematic? Or could an experimenter even demonstrate control in a way to be analytic? Baer, Wolf, and Risley themselves said that a self-reported verbal behavior could not be accepted as measurable unless it was substantiated independently. How do we do it, then?

First, we may want to take a step back and work on defining what we are looking at. Behaviorists and ABA practitioners are used to a functional analytic approach which aims to identify exactly that; functional relationships between the environment and clinically targeted behaviors. Personality Psychology, on the other hand, is a little more topographical in how traits are defined. They look at classifying traits by what they present as, how they appear, and reports of how people act, and think, with less emphasis on that environment link. One of the great researchers to bridge these two ways of studying personalities, tendencies, and behavior, was Jeffrey Gray who looked at the personality inventories and questionnaires of Hans Jürgen Eysenck, and developed a theoretical model which related these personality and temperament factors to behavioral inhibition (behaviors likely to be inhibited where cues of punishment or lack of reinforcement are found), and behavioral activation (behaviors likely to be activated in the presence of possible reinforcement or cues of no punishment). Here, personality traits of extraversion and introversion, for example, were related to dimensions of anxiety or impulsivity which could be easier to define and study behaviorally. Gray (1981) was interested in how these traits could explain “sensitivity” (higher responding) or “hypo-responsiveness” (lower responding) to punishment and reinforcement stimuli.

Would someone who was rated higher in extraversion/low-anxiety respond a certain way to social positive reinforcement?

Would someone who was rated higher in introversion/high-anxiety respond a certain way to social negative reinforcement?

These are some questions that might pique the interest on both sides of the fence, both Behavior Analytic, and Personality Psychology. Take any one of those personality traits above, and you may find similar ways to study it behaviorally. The literature on this type of work is impressive. Gray’s work which began in the 1970s, went on for over 30 years. There is a wealth of literature on the topic of his theoretical models, and the topics of the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) which relates factors that impact a reduction of responding, and Behavioral Activation System (BAS) which relates factors that impact an increase in response activation, from Gray’s work in 1981. In 2000, Gray & McNaughton presented a third theoretical system called FFFS (fight-flight-freeze system) to explain responses to unconditioned aversive stimuli in which emotionally regulated states of “fear and panic” play a role in defensive aggression or avoidance behaviors. These took into account neuropsychology and went even further to suggest links to conflict avoidance in humans in day to day life. The literature on this is absolutely fascinating in how it finds a way to bring behavioral analytic concepts to a new arena.

Could it be possible for one day to see Personality Psychologists talking about reinforcement and punishment sensitivity? How about Behavior Analysts talking about traits when considering consequence strategies? At the very least, it’s a conversation that neither field might have had without knowing. We can only hope to gain from stepping outside of traditional boundaries and broaden our intellectual horizons.

Comments? Questions? Thoughts? Leave them below!

References:

Baer, D. M., Wolf, M. M., & Risley, T. R. (1968). Some
current dimensions of applied behavior anlysis. Journal of
applied behavior analysis, 1(1), 91-97.

Big Five personality traits. (2018, April 19). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Farmer, R. F. (2005). Temperament, reward and punishment sensitivity, and clinical disorders: Implications for behavioral case formulation and therapy. International Journal of Behavioral Consultation and Therapy,1(1), 56-76. doi:10.1037/h0100735
Gray, J. A. (1981). A Critique of Eysenck’s Theory of Personality. A Model for Personality,246-276. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-67783-0_8
Gray, J. A., & McNaughton, N. (2000). The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hans Eysenck. (2018, April 14). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Eysenck

HEXACO model of personality structure. (2018, April 22). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEXACO_model_of_personality_structure

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan.
Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Knopf.
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Beyond Good, Evil, Freedom, and Dignity

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / Leave a comment

BF.NA comparison of concepts from B.F Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”.

 

There was something about these two books that piqued my interest, and it was not until reading them again, together, that I saw that the similarities went beyond the titles. For those who have not been introduced to these individuals and their contributions; Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century philosopher known for dealing with topics of existentialism and nihilism, and Burrhus Frederic (B.F) Skinner was a 20th-century psychologist and behaviorist interested in the natural science of behavior. Aside from the similarities in their names, and the names of the titles of their two works, few parallels have been drawn between these figures. I think there is a great deal of overlap, conceptually, between these two books, and although the conclusions of both authors diverge quite differently, the path and observations on the world and history are strikingly alike.

When it comes to B.F Skinner, I have been interested in the academic and philosophic lineage of his work, and existentialist philosophers have never been a reference or topic I’ve noticed before. Pragmatism, yes, and Roy A. Moxley (2004) did an amazing piece on the influences of Charles Sanders Pierce & John Dewey on Skinner’s conceptualization of the three-term contingency and broader behavioral selectionist theory. No Nietzsche. Not even once as far as I could tell. It raises some questions with me, then, in how these two books are so similarly constructed. Both seem to tackle a very similar topic, broad as it is, the actions of people, and their morality (which comes very close to dignity, in Skinner’s usage, in my estimation). They start with Western history and philosophy and even reference the same ancient Greek precepts as foundations to build their arguments and points from. Both appear to lead up to their current history and take into account their contemporary issues when presenting their philosophical conclusions. I am not a professional book reviewer or a literary scholar, so this process of literature exploration is outside of my wheelhouse, but I would like to lay out some pieces from both of these works to open the door comparatively. Both of these authors picked the right word “Beyond”. Both works present a series of presuppositions in their contemporary times and aim to progress past them rationally.

Skinner and Nietzsche: The Problems of Their Times

Context is important when reading and interpreting both of these authors. They were both big thinkers. Brilliant. Both wildly controversial. That tends to mean they had opinions, unpopular ones, but ones that they put out into the world rigorously supported by the assertions in their work.

Nietzsche was born in 1844, in Germany, and served in the Franco-Prussian war where he received grievous injuries that he never recovered from. “Beyond Good and Evil” was written after that. After the war, he wrote on the contemporary topics that he believed were essential to human progress and critiqued entrenched falsehoods that he believed were subverting people’s potential and lives. Morality was a big subject for him. Unlike other existentialist philosophers of his time, he was not so backseat and uncertain about it. He proposed that morality was separate from the Western religious belief systems and structures that were entrenched in society, and believed that willpower had the power to transcend these societal limitations. Traditional morality (societal and religious), to him, was making people weak. They needed to improve themselves, with their own morality and their own will, to be strong. In “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), Nietzsche suggests that the words “Good” and “Evil” were malleable concepts that change over time, and were not fixed. Fear was a motivator for morality, he proposed, and that there was a mistake in believing that “mass morality” or the moral beliefs of the groups/society had any higher importance than an individual’s personal morality. Hold onto that thought.

Skinner’s work in “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” (1972) came from a very different time historically. In the 1970’s, the Cold War raised probabilities of worldwide escalation and catastrophe. In the first chapter alone, Skinner broached the topics of overpopulation, global starvation, nuclear war, and disease. Skinner did some philosophical work himself, but his main focus was as a psychologist and behaviorist interested in focusing on psychology as a natural science, to see human behavior as measurable and observable, and aim scientific pursuit as a “technology of behavior” to solve the problems of our time. In many ways, it was a utopian idea, and he expands on that vision in his fictional work “Walden Two”. Engineering society with this science was within humanity’s grasp. Skinner looked broadly at the ills of the world, and believed that there were some pieces of cultural and societal misunderstanding that was holding it back. Like Nietzsche, his observations strayed away from metaphysical interpretation. Skinner believed that natural sciences like physics and biology had made the leaps that psychology had not. People were still hung up on antiquated interpretations of human behavior. To Skinner, it was the environment and history of reinforcement/punishment that could be used to describe human action. He believed that mentalistic concepts such as “inner capacities” were circular, and lead to no useful distinction of a phenomenon or process that could benefit scientific discovery. Human behavior could be shaped by environment, and act on the environment as an operant. His work aimed to remove the ideas of absolute human freedom, and dignity in the sense of viewing the human being as the “fully autonomous man”; these were not practical representations of human behavior to Skinner. Full autonomy, free choice, with no input from the environment was nonsensical, which begged the question as to how free will was actually free when it was under the control of environmental stimuli, to begin with. Conceptualizing human behavior under the contingencies that Skinner proposed, including reinforcement and punishment, removes those antiquated and pre-scientific distinctions, and by removing them, people would no longer be under any false illusions and could take control of their behavior.

 

Where They Come Together, and Where They Differ

Both Nietzsche and Skinner’s line of thought come from a disagreement with the broader idea of humanity by contemporary society. For Nietzsche, it was a societal and religious misunderstanding of morality. For Skinner, it was a societal and historical pre-scientific misunderstanding of human behavior. Both “Beyond Good and Evil” and “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” do touch on similar points by their end: human behavior and morality. Both authors hit the same nail in two very different ways, both using historical context to do so and their own interpretation and findings from their own work and lives. There are some interesting divergences too, mainly on the topic of science and empirical materialism. B.F Skinner was very much interested in the material world and observable findings, which nearly 100 years prior, Nietzsche also had to deal with. In Nietzsche’s time, the late 19th century, these concepts were still budding, but rational observation of the world and the field of psychology was relatively recent in the form of psychoanalysis. He describes some of his ideas on the topic of science and the metaphysical soul in “Beyond Good and Evil”:

“Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses—as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as “mortal soul,” and “soul of subjective multiplicity,” and “soul as social structure of the instincts and passions,” want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust—it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT—and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.

Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength—life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. “- Nietzsche (1886)

You can see here that Nietzsche is still strongly proposing that even in the area of science, psychology, and the soul, that willpower is an overlooked and undeniably important factor. I do find an interesting subpoint in there, in the process of invention and discovery by new psychologists, which nearly a century later would include Skinner himself. Although Nietzsche was strongly against the idea of science reducing everything to material reality, and I believe would take strong opposition to Skinner’s ideas on mentalistic representations of “soul” and morality, there is a great deal they share in their ways of tackling broader problems of their time, and interpretations of humanity as open to the future and unfixed. Humanity, to them, was not something that is and always will be the same. For very different reasons, Skinner and Nietzsche had a strange optimism of humanity in the wide and open possibility that either willpower, for Nietzsche, or contingencies for Skinner, could do for humanity as a whole.

B.F Skinner took a look at human morality himself in “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” when exploring the concept of cultural control, or behavioral control from the contingencies of a broader group, which included cultural, or rule-governed behavior and walked the line of evolution in both cultural and biological aspects both effecting one another to form a morality that was also “created” in a sense by evolution and sensitivity to cultural factors of control. Biological evolution making us sensitive to the evolution of cultural contingency. It’s a point that packs a punch.

“The practical question, which we have already considered, is how remote consequences can be made effective. Without help a person acquires very little moral or ethical behaviour under either natural or social contingencies. The group supplies supporting contingencies when it describes its practices in codes or rules which tell the individual how to behave and when it enforces those rules with supplementary contingencies. Maxims, proverbs, and other forms of folk wisdom give a person reasons for obeying rules. Governments and religions formulate the contingencies they maintain somewhat more explicitly, and education imparts rules which make it possible to satisfy both natural and social contingencies without being directly exposed to them.

This is all part of the social environment called a culture, and the main effect, as we have seen, is to bring the individual under the control of the remoter consequences of his behaviour. The effect has had survival value in the process of cultural evolution, since practices evolve because those who practise them are as a result better off. There is a kind of natural morality in both biological and cultural evolution. Biological evolution has made the human species more sensitive to its environment and more skilful in dealing with it. Cultural evolution was made possible by biological evolution, and it has brought the human organism under a much more sweeping control of the environment.”-Skinner (1972)

Two very different views, both denying a common cultural interpretation or framework for psychology, human behavior, and morality, but leaving a wide berth for future change, that in a sense is within humanity’s realm of control. I found those two shades of interpretation to be incredibly interesting, especially in morality. Remember that Nietzsche was well aware of the impact of “group morality”, and advised against its importance over the individual’s morality. Skinner also makes a nod to group forms of morality and seems to believe we are uniquely and biologically sensitive to it. I would love to have heard a conversation between the two of them on that. This is just the tip of the iceberg too. I suggest anyone who found their interest piqued to read both works and come to conclusions of your own.

By Christian Sawyer, M.Ed., BCBA

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Leave them below!

 

References:

Moxley, R. A. (2004). Pragmatic selectionism: The philosophy of behavior analysis. The Behavior Analyst Today, 5(1), 108-125.

Nietzsche, F. N. (2007). Beyond good and evil. Place of publication not identified: Filiquarian Pub.

Ozmon, H. (2012). Philosophical foundations of education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Knopf.

 

Image Credits: Wikipedia

The Subtle Cues of Flirting Behavior

/ Chris Sawyer, M.Ed.,BCBA / 2 Comments

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Flirting is interesting, complicated, exciting, and has had almost everyone guessing at one point in their lives. It’s used to spark interest in new acquaintances, keep flames going in long-term relationships, and has its own unique language. We have touched on some of the body language of attraction before in Love, Psychologically , but here we will go deeper. Looked at from an evolutionary psychology standpoint, researchers Alberts and Trost in 2006 could not find a universal behavior that contained all of the “signals of attraction”  used by every group of peoples, every where on Earth. No one thing contains how everyone does it, but there are patterns to be seen. There seem to be collections of behaviors that seem to aggregate in certain “styles” of flirting when people are attracted and interested. In 2014 two researchers, Hall and Xing, narrowed these down to 5 specific types of “Flirting Styles”. [1], [2]

Hall and Xing were able to compile a list of behavioral indicators of flirting we can look at below. Each style of flirting takes from these indicators on the list and presents them in very unique ways. Here are the common indicators they they had found:

Behavioral Indicators What they look like
Affirmation (nodding) Nodding yes during partner’s interactions.
Arms open An “open posture”:
Asking questions Asking questions about the partner.
Breast presentation Lifting or expanding the presentation of the chest during interactions.
Complimenting Giving compliments to the partner.
Conversational fluency Smooth conversation which is not choppy, short, or overlapping. (1-5 scale).
Disclosure Presenting information about oneself.
Expressiveness Animated or expressive tone or facial movements.
Falling into the chair Leaning or falling back in to the chair during interactions.
Flirtatious glances Eyebrow flashing, half smiles/lowered eyes, winking, sideways looks/smiles during interactions.
Gazing (direct/away) Looking steadily or intently at the other person (1-5 scale).
Joyful smiling/laughter Animated smiling or laughter in response to partner’s interactions.
Leaning forward/back Leaning forward in proximity to the partner, or away.
Leg crossing Legs either open in posture, or crossed (on thigh, at ankle, or at knee).
Lips- self bite, self licking Bringing the lips into the mouth, biting one of the lips, or licking of the lips.
Moving closer Closing proximity to the partner during interactions.
Palming Revealing the inside of the palm and wrist (instinctive vulnerability).
Pitch Raising or lowering of the voice’s pitch during interactions (1-5 scale)
Playing with objects Playing with objects in hand during interactions with partner (1-5 scale)
Self-depreciating comments Presenting information about oneself in self-depreciating way.
Self-touching Running fingers though their own hair, touching of the cheeks/face/neck, during interactions.
Shoulder shrugging Lifting of the shoulders in a shrug during interactions with their partner.
Teasing tone A tone of voice that is teasing or playful during interactions.

Do any of these seem familiar? Many of these were tracked by “count”; the more the behaviors occurred, the more likely they showed a style of active flirtation. You may have also noticed that a few of these behavioral indicators were tracked on a 1-5 scale by the researchers. These were studied within a range of how much of the behavior was exhibited, versus the opposite (leaning in vs. leaning away, etc). To further the example; leaning in may be a sign of attraction, while leaning away may be a sign of disapproval. Playing with an object in hand may be a sign of nervousness or shyness at lower rates, but a sign of disinterest and distraction at higher rates. Almost all flirting styles used the collection of these behaviors. We are going to focus on the differences between these styles below.[2]

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The Five Styles:

The five styles of flirting that Hall and Xing discovered were: The Physical Flirt style, the Traditional Flirt style, the Sincere Flirt style, the Polite Flirt style, and the Playful Flirt style. They discovered that while these styles are good predictors for what behavioral indicators are used together, these styles are not entrenched in stone. A person may use more than one style depending on context. Playful might work in a public situation, while Sincere might work in private. Context, sex, and even culture, matters. Men tended to rely on different behavioral indicators than their female partners during experiments. People, overall, tend to rely on a single style for the most part, but are able to exhibit more than one style when context demands it. Each participant studied reported high physical attraction to the partner prior to interactions. Here is an overview and summary of what they found out about each style. [2]

 

physical-flirt

The Physical Flirts-

The Physical Flirts use their body language to present their “solicitation signals” and attraction to their partner. They let their body do the talking. They rely on physical closeness and touching to get their points across and are more likely to engage in physical touching and closing proximity during interactions. Both males and females had a higher level of conversational fluency with their partners than other styles, and asked fewer questions to their partners during the interactions. Females  used affirmative nods more often at the start of interactions, used breast presentation higher in the beginning and ends of interactions, and exposed their palms more throughout. Males tended to move closer to their partners, complimented their partners less than other Flirt Styles, and used flirtatious glances less than other styles. [2]

 

traditional-flirt

The Traditional Flirts-

The Traditional Flirts tend to follow cultural gender roles for romantic interactions to a high degree. They rely more on male lead presentations of attractions, and female receptiveness to those interactions. These flirts tend to follow a “cultural script” and both have expectations of how the “solicitation signals” and signs of attraction are supposed to take place. Both males and females engaged high rates of affirmation nodding during the start of interactions, and are more likely to expose their palms and hands during the end of the interaction. Females were more likely to expose their palms and hands throughout the entire interaction, and more likely to tease in the beginning of the interaction. Males leaned forward more often for the full duration of their interactions, and raised their voice pitch higher during the first half of their interactions. Males also engaged in higher rates of crossing their legs during the interaction. [2]

sincere-flirt

The Sincere Flirts-

The Sincere Flirts are looking to build an emotional connection first and foremost. Unlike “Physical Flirts”, sexual chemistry through touch is not their first objective. Both males and females were less likely to tease during interactions (especially during the end), and self-touch (hair flip, touching their own face). Their hands were nearer to their partner but were not touching. They also engaged in higher rates of flirtatious gazing than other styles. Females were more likely to exhibit flirtatious gazing across the entire interaction, and exposed their palms and wrists through the entire interaction. Males used a higher pitched voice throughout their interaction and crossed their arms and legs more often. Males also leaned in towards their partners during the end of their interactions. [2]

polite-flirt

The Polite Flirts-

Polite Flirts adhere to strict social and cultural rules during interactions, but unlike Traditional Flirts, these are not strictly sex/gender based. Modesty and manners are held in high regard during exchanges. They appear to be slower to interact during the beginning of interactions, but showed strong conversational fluency throughout. Both males and females engage in less self-touching for the entire interaction, and use lower pitched voices. They also ask fewer questions of their partner in the first half of their interactions. Males used affirmative nodding during the middle of interactions more, and also moved closer during the middle of interactions. They also tended to fall into their chairs, and play with items (briefly) during interactions. Females followed similar patterns, and tended to tease less during the end of interactions. [2]

playful-flirt (2)

The Playful Flirts-

Playful Flirts tend to not seek out interactions for the sake of relationships, but report their interactions are more for self-interest (self esteem boosts, etc), and the fun of it. Both males and females tend to protrude or present their chests during the initial parts of interacting, self-touch less, and both tease and compliment higher during the start of interacting. Females tend to ask fewer questions, but use more flirtatious gazing during the first half of their interactions. Females also shrugged more throughout. Males tended to use an open leg posture (opposite of crossing legs) during interactions. [2]

 

Examining the Flirting Styles and Behavioral Profiles.

What do you think? Do you fall into one of these categories? Have you used any of these behavioral indicators yourself? Hall and Xing (2014) had some more to say on the profiles of the types of people who used each style.

They observed that the people who used the Physical Flirt style were more willing to flirt, had greater abilities in getting their flirting noticed, and showed higher confidence while flirting. They did note some areas that were “conceptually inconsistent” with this behavioral profile. Mainly, why did they compliment and flirtatiously gaze less? It’s a question for further research. [2]

They observed that the people who used the Traditional Flirt style were heavily influenced by a “sexual script”. Men were to be the aggressors, and women should be more passive during the interactions. Opening palms and wrists by females appeared to show greater interest during the interactions and signaled an invitation for courtship that could not be expressed verbally without breaking the social contract that both partners adhered to. [2]

The Sincere Flirt style users tended to focus on genuine interests, high self-discloser on both sides, and judged their interaction based on focused attention from their partners. This was a strong feature of their interactions. They appeared to use one behavioral indicator throughout interactions and stick to it as a sign of interest in their partner. [2]

The Polite Flirt style users were more rule-governed in how they conducted their interactions. Time played a role in how they engaged. They were slow during the start of interactions, used behavioral indicators more during the middle, and less as the interaction was closing. Affirmative nodding was a common behavior for both males and females. Both appear “distant” or “reserved” during their interactions, but they reported high attraction to each other afterwards on disclosure forms. [2]

The Playful Flirt style users often used both direct and indirect behavioral indicators throughout. Both males and females frequently presented their chests and used subtle coy gazes throughout, and contrasted each other during interactions when two Playful Flirts would engage. It was speculated by Hall and Xing that a Playful flirt would start coy to attract another Playful flirt before the more overt behavior indicators were exhibited. [2]

Do these profiles remind you of anything you might have experienced before? Leave questions and comments below!

 

References:

  1. Trost, M. R., & Alberts, J. K. (2006). How men and women communicate attraction: An evolutionary view. In K. Dindia & D. J. Canary (Eds.), Sex differences and similarities in communication (2nd ed., pp. 317–336). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  2. Hall, J. A., & Xing, C. (2014). The Verbal and Nonverbal Correlates of the Five Flirting Styles. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 39(1)

 

Image Credits: Stokpic.com, Leah Kelley Photography, Inna Lesyk Photography,  Pixabay.com