The Science for Shaping a Sustainable Future
Definition of Culture and How it Evolves and Changes
Let's Save the World
Our most recent posting urged all of us that in order to shape a better future we need to act prosocially. The next few postings will address the science of how, individually and together, by engaging in prosocial behavior, we can ignite a cultural transformation that can enhance the immediate well-being of individuals but also secure health and happiness for generations to come. Through our behavior, we can shape a sustainable and healthy future. We can create a peaceful, equitable, and sustainable world. It is an evolutionary process, so it is going to take some time.
The Problem
Most of the sociocultural problems we face are driven by behavior. The increasing rate of violence and global warming, crime, homelessness, abuse, the breakdown of our educational and legal system, rampant racism, as well as the prevalent practice of engaging in immediate gratification (i.e., delay discounting) - are all behaviors or a result of our behavior. Malagodi (1986) warned us some time ago that "Our culture at large continues many practices that work against the well-being of its members and its chances for survival." Obviously, those practices have continued to degrade our culture to this day. It is time to act in order to change those detrimental practices.
More is now known about how to address and manage these problems. The science of behavior has much more to offer for reducing and managing behavior problems than is widely recognized and known. One of our primary goals with our essays is to inform you that there is a science of behavior that is rooted in the natural sciences that is now well established and can provide guidance in order to reframe our culture (Pennypacker & Perez, Engineering the Upswing - A Blueprint for Reframing Our Culture, 2022).
The Science of Behavior
Behavior may be defined in terms of the individual’s interaction with its environment (cultural context). As such, it is specific to individual organisms, not groups. It is not a property or characteristic of the organism, although the physical characteristics of the organism help define the limits of the organism's behavior repertoire (e.g., elephants can’t fly). A precise definition of behavior relates to the movements of all or some parts of the organisms and the resultant effect on some aspect of the environment, external or internal. It is useful to conceptualize behavior as a stream flowing through time, beginning in gestation and ending with death. The stream is composed of actions, both verbal and nonverbal responses, movements, complex performances, etc., all happening at once. We can identify certain instances in the stream and isolate them for analysis or modification or, we can create new instances of behavior as we do when we teach. In all cases, however, behavior is described by active verbs, not nouns or adjectives. In other words, behavior is what living things do in their environment.
Consequences, that which follow or do not follow behavior, shape us, wire the brain, shape our choices, and our choices shape our behavior and our society/culture. Consequences determine the future probability of a behavior. If a behavior is followed by rewarding consequences, it will probably occur again under similar circumstances. If it is consistently followed by a negative consequence then the probability of its occurrence will decrease or become extinguished. What makes a consequence rewarding or punishing is determined by how the consequence impacts the future rate of the behavior observed. We all learn from consequences. From molecular biology, we learn that consequences routinely activate, and deactivate genes. Neuroscience research demonstrates that learning from consequences expands wires and rewires the brain. Behavior and its biology are integrated. The study of behavior is a living science, therefore it is a natural science.
One of the problems we have today is that consequences are not systematically or properly applied for every occasion a behavior occurs. There are consequences there, without intent, but they may be reinforcing inappropriate behavior, like speeding or running a red light and not getting caught. If you get away with it, your behavior becomes rewarded and you will most likely do it again in the future. The frequency of that behavior will increase. The lack of guided and intentional consequences contributes largely to the observable decline in rule-following behavior that we now see everywhere. Consequences are the primary contributing factor in understanding and guiding how and why behavior is shaped, maintained, or extinguished/eliminated. Behavior is selected by consequences through a process consistent with natural selection.
Selection by Consequences
Skinner published one of his most influential scientific manuscripts in Science (July 31, 1981) - Selection by Consequences. What follows is Skinner’s summary:
“Selection by consequences is a causal mode found only in living things, or in machines made by living things. It was first recognized in natural selection, but it also accounts for the shaping and maintenance of the behavior of the individual and the evolution of cultures. In all three of these fields, it replaces explanations based on the causal modes of classical mechanics. The replacement is strongly resisted. Natural selection has now made its case, but similar delays in recognizing the role of selection in the other fields could deprive us of valuable help in solving the problems which confront us.”
In Selection by Consequences, Skinner described a causal model that explains human behavior as a joint result of three levels of selection 1) the contingencies of survival involved in natural selection, 2) the contingencies of reinforcement involved in the selection of individual behavior by consequences, and 3) contingencies of an evolving social environment/culture. This natural science approach brings two other fields that have adopted an evolutionist/selectionist approach such as biology and anthropology, and creates a milieu for behavior analysis to work with other evolutionary sciences and integrate the relation among all levels of analysis to study and manage the cultural evolution that is ongoing and is blind to most of us. It is ongoing and it is not guided and managed.
Adopting an Evolutionary View of Life
David Sloan Wilson is currently one of the most prominent evolutionary scientists. In his book, This View of Life - Completing the Darwinian Revolution (2019), he warned us that if cultural evolution remains unguided, we run the risk that the evolutionary process will take us to the wrong place. He cautioned us that “A firm knowledge of evolutionary theory, which includes our own species, is required to solve the problems of our age. Yet our current knowledge of humanity and our many attempts to improve our circumstances are to a large extent pre-Darwinian” Wilson makes a compelling argument that “Completing the Darwinian revolution therefore requires a massive reset in our understanding of humanity, which must take place at a timescale of years, not decades. We need not just a theory that states what it is, but a worldview that informs how we ought to act, while remaining fully within the bounds of scientific knowledge.” Wilson concludes that “It is one thing for a species to be well adapted to its environment and another to be adaptable to environmental change. The same goes for human cultures, and almost no existing culture is adaptable enough to keep pace with our ever- changing world. Conscious evolution requires the construction of a new system of cultural inheritance capable of operating at an unprecedented spatial and temporal scale. This will be a formidable task, but evolutionary theory does provide the tools to get the job done.”
Our culture needs to be guided and managed if we are going to save the world.
Culture - Operational Definition
Culture is the system of shared beliefs and values, practices and behavior, and the artifacts created that group members use to understand, manage, communicate, and interact with one another and their environment. It is transmitted from generation to generation through actions and participation within a given social environment, and the outcome and foundation of cumulative learned behaviors. It is the sum total of the learned behavior of a group of people that is generally considered the tradition of that people. People are what they learn and they act based on what they learned.
Sigrid Glenn, a prominent student of culture and social change notes “Learned behavior is the substructure of human culture, and the transmission of learned behavior powers the evolution of human culture. Human behavior produces cumulative change in human environments, and continually changing environments require continuing behavioral adjustments. Successful adjustments can become embedded in cultural practices and transmitted to later generations.”
Glenn also expresses concern that “most of the features of modern culture were not planned. Rather they simply emerged as a result of the contingencies of selection that supported the behavior of individuals.” She continues, “Unintended and culturally damaging results of human behavior are first identified, then bemoaned and, sometimes, finally dealt with.” She questions, “But can they be dealt with fast enough to ensure survival?” We urgently need to act.
Marvin Harris was a very prolific cultural anthropologist. In his book Cultural Materialism- The Struggle for a Science Culture (2001), he proposed a very functional systems theory of society that is an effort to account for its origin, maintenance, and management of change. He proposed:
The various parts of society are interrelated. When one part of society changes, other parts must also change.
Viewing society as a system of interrelated parts is at the core of most sociological theories. The difference in most theories is in terms of organizing principles.
This means that an institution, such as the family cannot be looked at in isolation from the economic, political, or religious institutions of a society. When one part changes it has an effect on other parts of the system.
The foundation of the sociocultural system is to be found in the environment in which one lives.
The physical and social environment determines the nature of the society/culture.
Since we are relatively free from biological drives and pre-dispositions, we learn the vast repertoire of human behavior through the socialization process.
The selection process responsible for sociocultural evolution operates on the individual level.
Society/culture tends to be stable systems. Any change in the system is resisted in other sectors of society.
Each society must maintain secure and orderly relationships among its people, its constituent group, and neighboring societies.
Harris noted that cultural materialism “is based on the simple premise that human life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence.” An important point he made is that his theory of cultural materialism “prioritizes material conditions as more likely than ideas to be causal in human societies.” Money is obviously a powerful reinforcer. It seems that it has become a major driver in shaping behavior in our culture.
We Owe the Future
William MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford, recently published a very important and provocative book, What We Owe The Future (2022). He introduces the concept longtermism; the view that we should be doing much more to protect the interests of future generations. He proposes that we have the moral responsibility to act in order to protect and improve the survival prospects of all future people. His message is that it is a moral priority that we act now to save the world for future generations. For example, we need to modify the practice of delay discounting.
He argues that we are living in a moment of remarkable importance. The rate of change and growth is unprecedented. It is a moment of significant plasticity in our values and beliefs. We need to shape the values that last into our future. We need to become students of history and learn from it. Good advice he provides is, “If you want to help positively influence the long-term future, look for important, solvable, and neglected problems to work on.” He worries about human extinction and addresses many factors including not caring for our physical environment, future pandemics, weapons development that go beyond nuclear science and depend on advances in biotechnology/engineered biology, conflicts around the world, and so on.
MacAskill's defined goal for all of us is “We should aim to preserve humanity’s potential: to secure a long and flourishing future.” To accomplish this he gives us three lessons: “Take robustly good action, build up options, and learn more.” It is all about our behavior.
Final thoughts
Our culture, including the social and physical environment, is decaying and has been evolving in a negative, unguided way for years. It is time that we act. Public awareness is key. Make a commitment to increase the frequency of your prosocial behavior - act to benefit the culture. Next, we will look at the decline in our culture over the last 60 years and how we have become a country of rule breakers and have changed from “We” to “I” behavior.
Thanks and see you next week.
Frank & Faris