Newsletter
Volume 31 | 2008 | Number 1
Akershus Think Tank on Experimental and Conceptual Analysis of Cultural Change
By Dr. Ingunn Sandaker
In Oslo, Norway, from September 17-21, 2007, a number of scholars from various universities in the United States, Brazil and Norway met for a follow-up to the Campinas Think Tank on cultural selection in 2005 and the ABAI Annual Convention symposia on the same theme.
Following publication in Behavior and Social Issues (2004, Vol 13, No. 2) of a target article by Sigrid Glenn and Maria Malott with wide-ranging commentaries by behaviour analysts, a Think Tank on metacontingencies and the selection of cultural systems was arranged in Campinas, Brazil. Organized by Joao Claudio Todorov and Maria E. Malott, the event was sponsored by the Assosição Brasilieira de Psicoterapia e Medicina Comportamental (ABPMC ABA, Brazil) and Instituto Brasiliense de Analise do Comportamento (IBAC), with the collaboration of the Universidade Catolica de Goias and the Association for Behavior Analysis International.
At the ABAI conference in Atlanta 2006, several participants in the Campinas Think Tank presented their thoughts on cultural selection, later published along with related articles in Behavior and Social Issues (2006, Vol 15, No. 1) in a special section: “On Advancing Cultural Analytic Science.”
In February 2007, students and researchers in Sigrid Glenn’s Culture and Behavior Laboratory (initiated spring 2006) hosted a small group of researchers from Brazil and Norway for the purpose of establishing an international research consortium for the experimental analysis of culture and behavior change. At this meeting, it was decided that a next step might be to invite people interested in advancing experimental and conceptual analysis of cultural systems to a new Think Tank, this time hosted by Akershus University College of Norway, during September 2007 in collaboration with—and with generous support of—the University of North Texas.
Selected scholars with a stated interest in the field were invited to participate in the Akershus Think Tank on Experimental and Conceptual Analysis of Cultural Change, the goals of which were to develop a preliminary common language and to extend the research consortium to other universities and researchers with similar interests. (See Figure 1).
Figure 1. Think Tank participants: (Back row, left to right) Emmanuel Tourinho, Maria Amalia Andery, Mark Alavosius, Ramona Houmanfar, Sigrid Glenn, Ingunn Sandakar, Mark Mattaini, Anthony Biglan, Joao Todorov (front row, from left) Gunnar Ree, Maria Malott, ArneTerje Gulbrandsen, Leslie Burkett, and Britt Anderson.
The general plan for this Think Tank was to describe and review the phenomena of interest to the participants, and entertain questions and discussion by the group as a whole. This initial sequence of presentations and discussions was followed by a session dedicated to developing a preliminary agreement regarding conceptual language to use for different kinds of phenomena. We then broke into two groups of participants interested in discussing conceptual and applied questions respectively, and worked on developing research plans. On the final day, we all met to brainstorm on ways to continue collaboration among all of the groups.
The discussions during the Think Tank will be summed up in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Behavior Analysis.