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- Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 00:17:00 GMT
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- From: Hortideas Publishing <0004972767@MCIMAIL.COM>
- Subject: A Strange Bedfellow?
- Lines: 170
-
- From Greg Williams (920903 - 2)
-
- Quoting B.F. Skinner:
-
- The relation of organism to environment must be supposed to include the
- special case of the relation of scientist to subject matter.
- -- THE BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS, 1938, p. 43
-
- We often overlook the fact that human behavior is also a form of control.
- That an organism should act to control the world around it is as
- characteristic of life as breathing or reproduction. A person acts upon the
- environment, and what he [sic] achieves is essential to his survival and the
- survival of the species.... We cannot choose a way of life in which there is
- no control. We can only change the controlling conditions....
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, pp. 189-190
-
- Self-management raises the same question as self-knowledge: Who are the
- managing and managed selves? And again the answer is that they are repertoires
- of behavior.... The managed self is composed of what is significantly called
- selfish behavior -- the product of the biological reinforcers to which the
- species has been made sensitive through natural selection. The managing self,
- on the other hand, is set up mainly by the social environment, which has ITS
- selfish reasons for teaching a person to alter his [sic] behavior in such a
- way that it becomes less aversive and more reinforcing to others.
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, pp. 176-177
-
- One person manages another in the sense in which he manages himself. He does
- not do so by changing feelings or states of mind. The Greek gods were said to
- change behavior by giving men and women mental states, such as pride, mental
- confusion, or courage, but no one has been successful in doing so since. One
- person changes the behavior of another by changing the world in which he
- lives.
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, pp. 180-181
-
- In traditional terms, one person arranges positive or negative contingencies
- in order to create interests, provide encouragement, instill incentives or
- purposes, or raise consciousness in another person. In doing so, he brings him
- under control of various features of his environment.
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, p. 181
-
- A person who has been exposed to the promise of heaven and the threat of
- hell may feel stronger bodily states than one whose behavior is merely
- approved or censured by his fellow man. But neither one acts BECAUSE he knows
- or feels that his behavior is right; he acts because of the contingencies
- which have shaped his behavior and created the conditions he feels.
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, p. 193
-
- A physical world generates both physical action and the physical conditions
- within the body to which a person responds when a verbal community arranges
- the necessary contingencies.
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, p. 220
-
- In self-management the controlling self is different from the controlled.
- But all selves are the products of genetic and environmental histories. Self-
- knowledge and self-management are of social origin, and the selves known and
- managed are the products of both contingencies of survival and contingencies
- of reinforcement. Nothing about the position taken in this book questions the
- uniqueness of each member of the human species, but the uniqueness is inherent
- in the sources. There is no place in the scientific position for a self as a
- true originator or initiator of action.
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, p. 225
-
- It would be absurd for the behaviorist to contend that he is in any way
- exempt from his analysis. He cannot step out of the causal stream and observe
- behavior from some special point of vantage...
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, p. 234
-
- Democracy is a version of countercontrol designed to solve the problem of
- manipulation.... Contingencies designed for explicit purposes can be called
- manipulative, though it does not follow that they are exploitative; unarranged
- contingencies must be recognized as having equal power, and also possibly
- unhappy consequences.... To say that all control is manipulative and hence
- wrong is to overlook important uses in education, psychotherapy, government,
- and elsewhere.
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, pp. 243-244
-
- I have used technical terms in making a technical point. I have preferred a
- technical term elsewhere when it could be used at no great cost.... But
- elsewhere [in this book] I have freely used the lay vocabulary while accepting
- the responsibility of providing a technical translation upon demand....
- Those who approach a behavioristic formulation for the first time may be
- surprised by the mention of self-control. Does this not suggest some kind of
- inner determination?... According to traditional definitions of self-control,
- ... [etc.] the behaviorist is indeed inconsistent, but according to his own
- definitions he is not...
- "If human behavior is as fully determined as the behaviorist says it is, why
- does he bother to write a book? Does he believe that anything matters?" To
- answer that question we should have to go into the history of the behaviorist.
- Nothing he says about human behavior seriously changes the effect of that
- history. His research has not altered his concern for his fellow men...
- -- ABOUT BEHAVIORISM, 1974, pp. 247-248
-
- When two different response rates occur in the presence of different
- stimuli, the response is under STIMULUS CONTROL.
- ...
- The girl whose facial expressions make her look "approachable" instead of
- "aloof" is more likely to be asked for a date. She may assume an
- "approachable" expression to exert stimulus CONTROL over a young man's
- behavior.
- ...
- When a distant doorbell rings, you may "make a mistake" and go to the phone.
- The doorbell exerts some CONTROL over going to the phone. This phenomenon is
- called GENERALIZATION.
- ...
- A man may CONTROL the behavior of another man by arranging relevant
- conditions. Also, he may control his own behavior by arranging the same kinds
- of conditions.
- A mother may put candy out of sight to DECREASE the probability that her
- child will ask for it. She may do the same thing to reduce the PROBABILITY
- that she will eat the candy.
- In analyzing cases in which one response controls another, we distinguish
- between the controlling response and the controlled response. Putting candy
- out of sight is the CONTROLLING response; eating candy is the CONTROLLED
- response.
- ...
- Putting candy out of sight to keep from eating it CONTROLS behavior by
- REMOVING an SD [discriminative stimulus].
- -- THE ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR [a programmed text; "correct" answers in
- BOLDFACE]
-
- When you act to control yourself and other people, you are doing 'what God
- allows you to do rather than forces you to do.' And you do it by constructing
- a SITUATION that controls you or the others. Frazier does not control the
- members of Walden Two. The world which he designed and which they maintain is
- the controller.
- -- NOTEBOOKS, 1980, p. 112
-
-
- In short, for Skinner, the results of one person's responses to his/her
- environmental stimuli (which CONTROL him/her) can be another person's
- CONTROLLING stimuli.
-
- And on statistics:
-
-
- There are at the present time two quite different modes of approaching the
- behavior of organisms which are hard to distinguish theoretically but which
- are clearly different in practice. The statistical approach is characterized
- by relatively unrefined methods of measurement and a general neglect of the
- problem of direct description. The non-statistical approach confines itself to
- specific instances of behavior and to the development of methods of direct
- measurement and analysis. The statistical approach compensates for its lack of
- rigor at the stage of measurement by having recourse to statistical analysis,
- which the non-statistical approach in general avoids. The resulting
- formulations of behavior are as diverse as the methods through which they are
- achieved. The concepts established in the first case become a part of
- scientific knowledge only by virtue of statistical procedures, and their
- reference to the behavior of an individual is indirect. In the second case
- there is a simpler relation between a concept and its referent and a more
- immediate bearing upon the individual. It may be that the differences between
- the two approaches are transitory and that eventually a combination of the two
- will give us our best methods, but at the present time they are characterized
- by different and almost incompatible conceptions of a science of behavior.
- It is obvious that the kind of science here proposed naturally belongs on
- the non-statistical side of this argument. In placing itself in that position
- it gains the advantage of a kind of prediction concerning the individual that
- is necessarily lacking in a statistical science. The physician who is trying
- to determine whether his patient will die before morning can make little use
- of actuarial tables, nor can the student of behavior predict what a single
- organism will do if his laws apply only to groups. Individual prediction is of
- tremendous importance, so long as the organism is to be treated scientifically
- as a lawful system. Until we are spared the necessity of choosing between the
- two approaches, we must cast our lot with a non-statistical investigation of
- the individual and achieve whatever degree of reliability or reproducibility
- we may through the development of techniques of measurement and control.
- -- THE BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS, 1938, pp. 443-444
-
- It's a shame Skinner never got together with Phil Runkel!
-
- Greg
-