"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."
Joseph Heller (Catch-22, 1961)
INTRODUCTION
Joseph Heller’s 1961 book, Catch-22, offers an excellent example of what we’d call circular reasoning. Those who wish to avoid combat must claim to be insane. But if you recognize the dangers of combat and want to avoid them, you must be sane. Therefore, you are not insane and must fight.
I find parallels in this example with a lot of things I’ve been hearing regarding people’s behavior in the news. For example, people are doing bad things because they’re morally corrupt. How do you know they’re morally corrupt? Well, they’re doing bad things. Or how about, they’re very quiet because they’re an introvert. How do you know they are an introvert? They are very quiet. Baum gives an excellent example in his book, Understanding Behaviorism: “Attributing delinquency to low self-esteem in no way explains the delinquency. Where did the low self-esteem come from? How can it cause delinquency? Is there any evidence of low self-esteem other than the behavior it is supposed to explain? Is low self-esteem anything other than the label for the activity that it is supposed to explain?” One more example: He is crying because he is anxious. And how do I know he’s anxious? Because he’s crying.
You begin to see the drawbacks of using this circular reasoning. It places an emphasis on the intangible, suggesting these are immutable parts of a person (e.g., self-esteem). This is one important aspect of mentalistic (traditional) psychology that differs from behaviorism. While mentalism attempts to separate the behavior (e.g., crying) from some entity inside the person (e.g., anxiety), behaviorism looks at the environmental determinants of behavior. For example, he is crying because his dog is missing. Anxiety might be able to describe a group of behaviors that occur under certain conditions (e.g., crying, elevated heart rate, perspiration), but the behaviors are not occurring because of anxiety. This difference is of monumental importance. Consider the difference in treatment. You don’t learn how to stop being anxious. You learn how to identify environmental stimuli that might cause undesirable behaviors (e.g., crying, elevated heart rate, perspiration). Revisiting Baum’s example, the best way to reduce delinquency (of course, we must define it to know exactly what that means) is to identify what are the environmental determinants that contribute to the behavior we identify as delinquent. To simply say, the individual has low self-esteem, does not provide us with action steps to reduce delinquency. We need to look at the environment. This is why the science of behavior can be of value to us. But to fully understand the complexities of behavior, we need to dig a little deeper.
SELECTION BY CONSEQUENCES: THE THREE LEVELS
THE BIOLOGICAL LEVEL
Skinner discussed three levels of selection in his seminal article published in Science, Selection by Consequences (1981). He writes, “In summary, then, human behavior is the joint product of (i) the contingencies of survival responsible for the natural selection of the species and (ii) the contingencies of reinforcement responsible for the repertoires (range of behaviors) acquired by its members, including (iii) the special contingencies maintained by an evolved social environment” (p. 502). Our ancestor’s goals were simply survival (e.g., hunting/gathering, building shelter) and reproduction. Those that survived likely did so because they had developed a culture that reinforced prosocial behavior. For example, cultures that cooperated when hunting would likely have a greater likelihood of success, while cultures that hunted alone might be less likely to survive. (Although prosocial behavior itself is not passed through genes, a culture of cooperation can be passed through generations through modeling the behavior.)
The reason our bodies look and work the way they do is that historically, they allowed our ancestors to survive. There are a few that are biologically important to most (if not all) living things, such as food, water, sex, and shelter. These all contribute to our survival as a species, so if we had ancestors that did not find water or food reinforcing (i.e., their body did not tell them they needed to eat, or perhaps rejected most foods), those are the variations that were selected against (i.e., they died and did not reproduce those genes). This is natural selection; variations in our genes that are either maintained (supporting survival and reproduction) or selected against (death).
It’s important to note that natural selection only operates against certain variations, not for. Selection for would imply a purpose or future function and lead to an indefensible teleology. Thus birds' wings did not evolve in order to enable flight; variation in that direction supported more efficient hunting. Birds who lacked the variation were thus denied as much success in capturing game, for example, and had a lower probability of survival. And because we are talking about survival across generations, it’s not a drastic, sudden change, but an excruciatingly slow process that we do not have the good fortune of witnessing, despite our mandatory participation. This is what Skinner referred to as “…the contingencies of survival responsible for the natural selection of the species” in his article, Selection by Consequences (1981, p. 502). However, there is also selection occurring at the individual and cultural levels. While selection of the species occurs at a slow pace, selection at the individual and cultural levels can be observed within a lifetime.
THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
Here is a simple example of selection at the individual level. We encourage any kind of babbling a baby will make. We smile, laugh, and play with the baby. Depending on the language you speak, you might start saying things like “Say mama. Say MAAAMAAA!” The baby will babble something like “baabaa.” You keep begging them to say “mama.” Eventually, you hear “mmm.” You freak out. You’re so happy that you squeal “YES MAMA!” while picking up your baby, smiling, laughing, throwing them up in the air. Your baby loves it. This is selection. You have reinforced an approximation of the correct, “mama” while minimizing reinforcement for other behaviors that do not approximate“mama” (“baabaa”). (Eventually, you’ll reinforce “baabaa,” like when your child is playing with a ball and you ask what they’re holding.). These variations in the baby’s babbling are either maintained (i.e., mama) or selected against (i.e., baabaa). Eventually, the baby will learn to say more complex sentences that will allow it to effectively communicate with those in their environment, such as when developing relationships as an adult, purchasing food, or telling the doctor their head hurts.
What’s occurring in the example above is shaping by successive approximations. We reinforce (e.g., smile, laugh, praise) anything that resembles “mmm.” However, we eventually need to be more stringent in what behavior is reinforced, so we begin reinforcing “maa” (or anything that more closely resembles “mama”). This is a lifelong process. Our children will begin forming sentences. They’re not going to begin saying “Mother, I would like water please.” But they might say “wada pees,” or something cute like that. And what we’ll do is help shape it into something more refined such as “water please” and then “I want water please.” The reason I like the example of language is that it demonstrates how learning occurs across the lifetime. This isn’t something that just occurs once and stops. It is a process that is constantly evolving and changing throughout our lifetime. And one feature that defines a culture is the language we use, which we’ll touch upon below.
THE CULTURAL LEVEL
To continue with our babbling example above, now imagine if every household decided to use its own unique alphabet to communicate. It would make purchasing goods and developing relationships with our neighbors very difficult. Essentially, it would make survival difficult for each household. Selection against these unique alphabets would occur. However, if rules were developed and everyone followed those rules (as we do now), it would increase the likelihood of survival of the community, and of the culture. And when survival becomes more likely, we can shift our focus to other behaviors that will continue to promote the culture’s success and happiness. For example, the majority of our culture is not hunting for food, but purchasing it at the grocery store. We are not preparing for the winter because we have shelter from extreme cold. We are also less concerned with diseases that might historically have decimated populations because we have modern medicine. Instead, many of us focus shifts from survival to prosocial behaviors that promote the success (survival) of our culture. Instead, we learn how to build better computers to be more efficient at work, continue to study medicine to help those in pain, and build more fuel-efficient cars to travel. (Note: I want to be very clear that there are many in the world who struggle to find consistent food, shelter, medicine, and compassion, and it is largely a result of the shift from a “We” to an “I” mentality, as described in our previous post (11/22/22). This is one of the many things we hope to discuss in our Substack and encourage you to provide us with your feedback).
One thing to note is that culture is not stagnant, it is fluid (rather, it should be). Marvin Harris was one of the first to describe culture in terms of our shared behaviors, rather than abstract concepts, in his book Our Kind (1989). And because our culture is simply an aggregate of everyone’s behaviors, as our behaviors change, our cultures change. We must also recognize that we are members of multiple cultures simultaneously. For example, you have a culture in your home that will likely differ from your work culture, or the culture at your school or church. The reason for the differences is that there are various contingencies operating on our behavior, and that will vary depending on the environment.
There is admittedly a lot to unpack here. We will never be able to say everything we want in a single post, but that is why we are using this medium. Now that we have provided a framework to prime readers as to our background and behavioral approach, future posts will become more focused on specific topics, such as education, violence, parenting, and others that readers might find interesting (yes, we need your feedback moving forward).
We’ll end with an eloquent piece from Sigrid Glenn’s 2004 article, Individual behavior, culture, and social change, as it nicely summarizes the breadth of information we hope to cover in the future:
“Increasingly complex cultures have emerged from the interplay among the human capacity for learning, the contingencies of reinforcement that account for the learned behavior of individuals, and the cultural transmission of learned behavior all in the formative context of physical features of local environments. Over a period of little more than 10,000 years, human cultures have evolved from small bands of hunter-gatherers, presumably showing one another how to produce fire and to fashion simple tools, to huge nation-states in which the integrated activities of hundreds of people participate in producing the fabric used to make clothing sold as Brand X or to make the laws by which millions of people live. Decades of education, formal and informal, are now required to develop and maintain the behavioral repertoires needed to participate in the vast webs of interrelated human behavior that constitute modern culture.”
See you next week.
Mike, it is great to have you onboard. Our book lays out a foundation for initiating an evolutionary process of cultural change . To go into definitions: Culture represents the beliefs, behavior and practices and the cultural artifacts of a group (art, literature, music, food etc). While society represents the social structures and organization of the people who share those beliefs and practices. Neither society nor culture could exist without the other. With these essays we plan to address many issues that are driven by behavior. The next few essays will start going into specific details. We are now laying the scientific foundation so that we all together can start behaving in a prosocial manner to intentionally change the course of our unguided cultural evolution that has brought us to where we are. Thanks for your feedback and endorsement and looking forward to your contributions. Best, Francisco Perez
A good bridge. These introductory posts have given me a good understanding of your overall approach, and I look forward to reading each future article your write on specific topics.