Association for Behavior Analysis International

“Who we are” operates at the intersection of relational verbal behavior about oneself and generational histories of cultural selection that affect members of communities and groups. Solving “who we are” is not only at the center of a radical (i.e., all encompassing) science of human behavior, but is necessary to solve important social challenges of our time. The first speaker will discuss the progression of a behavioral understanding of culture and community from Skinner to the present culturo-behavior science movement. This work will highlight the formation of ideology that can desensitize behavior to direct contingencies of reinforcement and define convergent and divergent values systems that influence individual behavior both within and between groups. The second speaker will propose a dynamic model of relational behavior, Relational Density Theory, as a way to interpret shared relational frames inherent within our culture that negatively impact communities with an emphasis on prejudice based on gender and race. Relational frames that maintain prejudice and discrimination are likely vastly complex and interwoven leading to extreme resistance to change and rejection of competing information. Our final speaker will discuss implications of relational verbal behavior for disability communities, both within and outside of these communities, that ultimately impact the quality of life of disabled persons. Influencing relational frames surrounding disability will take much more than person-first or disability-first language and may necessitate rethinking entirely how we frame disability within our communities. Taken together, this symposium attempts to redefine our view of culture, relational framing, and the role of behavior analysts therein, lest we fail to seize this opportunity to influence large scale social change.

Behavior analysts, students, and faculty

In his seminal works, BF Skinner left a trail of breadcrumbs concerning the way that ideological conditioning desensitizes behavior to direct contingencies of reinforcement. This can have either desirable or disastrous results, depending on the circumstances. Skinner suggested that respondent, operant, and verbal conditioning all participate in the types of control that cultural agencies exert during ideological conditioning. Nevertheless, Skinner left analysis of the precise ways that such verbal conditioning emerges for future generations. RFT extends Skinner’s analysis by defining the behavior of valuing as verbal behavior that participates in a hierarchical network of verbal relations. In this talk, I contend that ideologies emerge as systems of values, a complex latticework of verbal relations that inhere within coherent verbal networks that are constructed over a lifetime, and which become increasingly inconspicuous as more relations get added. I trace the development of one such ideology and show how this results in a coherent sense of agentic self. Although ideological conditioning is valuable, situations in which it is over-extended abound. To this end, I discuss implications derived from an RFT analysis that pave the way to undermining unwanted ideological verbal relations. Lastly, I discuss implications for the emerging field of culturo-behavior science.