Association for Behavior Analysis International

The history of behavior analysis is primarily one of keen attention given to the discrete responses of individual organisms under carefully controlled conditions. From this, we aspire to deal effectively with the totality of behavior under ordinary, undesigned conditions. One of our great advancements in getting to this goal is the matching law, which tells us that various measures of responding are proportional to various measures of reinforcement. This we usually ascribe to Herrnsteins basic experimental work in the early 1960s. Nowadays, however, when we want to prove the general worth of the matching law, we sometimes use it to explain scoring attempts in sports or the behavior of individual children in reasonably typical settings. However, more than half a century ago, in the early 1950s, the Ecological Psychologists were already attempting to relate rates of socially relevant classes of objectively measured behaviorin everyone in an entire cityto various objectively measured aspects of the physical environmentacross an entire city. One of the results of this effort was an anticipation of a matching-type analysis of the participation every inhabitant in a city in all of its response opportunities, as described in Roger Barker and Herbert Wright's lost classic, Midwest and Its Children (1954). The complexity and sophistication of this massive effort, and the attempts of Barker and Wright to graphically and mathematically organize the data, can serve as a lesson to behavior analysts looking to expand the relevance of their work from discrete responses in the lab to everyday behavior of great general import.

One of the main arguments for the defense of metacontingency as a model for explaining social phenomena is that it embraces another kind of selection (cultural selection) beyond natural and operant selection which, despite being emergent on operant processes, would not be reducible to operant selection. Therefore, for being in another level of analysis, cultural selection demands a conceptual framework of its own, hence the metacontingency. Our goal here is to discuss the argument of irreducibility through two models of reductionism: (a) Ernest Nagel's homogeneous reduction, according to which reduction is established when it's possible to derivate the reduced theory from the reductive theory without needing bridge laws; and (b) what we have called pragmatic reduction, which occurs when a theory situated at a lower level of analysis presents more parsimonious explanations as well as better conditions for prediction and control of phenomena supposedly occurring at a higher (emergent) level. Having these two models of reduction as our analytical framework, we will analyze the relations between two dyads present in the discussions regarding cultural selection: (a) individual social behavior and culture; and (b) contingency and metacontingency. We will suggest that although metacontingency seems to be reducible to contingency (and that we can explain social behavior in terms of operant behavior), from that does not necessarily follows that culture is reducible to individual social behavior.