Newsletter
Volume 31| 2008 | Number 2
News from the ABA Student Committee
By Corina Jimenez-Gomez
Mission Statement
The ABAI Student Committee’s mission is to provide organizational support for ABAI student members that will promote participation in ABAI and professional growth, and enable members to contribute to the science of behavior analysis.
Student Committee Accomplishments and Activities (Oct 2007 – May 2008)
Promoting Student Involvement
In order to promote involvement, the committee plans to e-mail student members to encourage election of new ABAI student representatives, and to contact student members and program representatives to request suggestions and encourage participation in the Behavioral Bash.
Getting Information to Student Members
The ABA Student Committee Web page was updated and now includes ABAI student-oriented events, a list of 2007-2008 Program Representatives, Presidential Scholar Essay Contest information, and a request for nominations for the Outstanding Mentor Awards.
The fall newsletter included information on Student Representatives, the mission of the ABAI Student Committee, ABAI 2008 Chicago Annual Conference, and contests and awards.
Mass e-mails were sent to student members that addressed topics such as PDS events in the 2008 conference; nominations for the Outstanding Mentor Award; Presidential Scholar Essay Contest submissions; and the Find-a-roommate program, in which the student committee helped five ABAI student members connect that were interested in this program.
Convention 2008 – Chicago
During theconference, the Student Committee organized 12 events for the 2008 ABAI conference as part of our Professional Development Series. The committee is the sponsor of the annual Student Committee Business Meeting and Expo Poster and organized the Behavioral Bash with the help of Program representatives. During all PDS events, we collected survey data from attendees on the quality and relevance of the events. The data will be used in the planning future events.
The winner of the first “Presidential Scholar Essay Contest,” Todd A. Ward (University of Nevada, Reno) was announced at the Presidential Scholar address and received a book written by Dr. Becker, this year’s Presidential Scholar. The winning essay is published in this issue of the ABAI newsletter.
Plans for 2008-2009
The committee’s plans for the upcoming year are to continue to encourage involvement of ABAI student members; further promote PDS events for the ABAI convention through program representatives, our website, and e-mail summary of these events; solicit student participation at ABAI events through the Program Representative intiative; implement the strategic plan to further promote growth of student membership in ABAI; and encourage participation in the Presidential Scholar Essay Contest.
ABA Student Representatives
In May, Corina Jimenez-Gomez (Student Representative) will move to Past Student Representative, Erick Dubuque (Student Representative-Elect) will move to Current Student Representative, and Marianne Jackson (Past Student Representative) will leave the council.
Presidential Scholar Essay Contest Winner–Gary Becker and Behavior Analysis: Collaboration for Complex Human Behavior
By Todd A. Ward, M. A.
University of Nevada, Reno
The life’s work of economist Gary Becker has shaped the way our society deals with social problems. In a time when criminal behavior was thought be a product of mental illness, Becker looked to factors related to employment opportunities and the justice system. Today, research based on Becker’s perspective informs the development of sentencing regulations administered by judges. His perspective also improves our understanding of workplace issues such as the earnings gender-gap and workplace discrimination (Becker, 1993).
Becker’s impact is due in part to his enriched economic perspective, the basic tenants of which are outlined below. Becker (1993, 1995) describes his approach as an analysis of the social world with unparalleled explanatory power that allows for the contribution of many social sciences in their respected domains. This essay will briefly outline the essence of Becker’s system and provide a general conceptual framework to guide collaboration between his approach and behavior analysis.
Skinner’s approach (1974) conceptualized the individual as a locus at which phylogenic and ontogenic histories converge to produce behavior at any given point in time. In economics, the household may be thought of as the locus at which income and costs of material goods interact to produce economic behavior. Becker’s system, however, greatly enriches the role of the household in terms of the diversity of convergent factors as well as the diversity of behavior produced by such factors (Febrero & Schwartz, 1995). It is this enrichment that leaves Becker’s system unrivaled in its explanatory power and paves the way for a seamless union of behavior analysis with economics.
Traditionally, economic behavior constituted the buying and selling of material goods bought and sold in the market-place. Such behavior thus functioned to maximize material gains while minimizing monetary costs. Becker, by contrast, conceptualized economic behavior as a product resulting from the interaction of material goods with time. The incorporation of time led Becker to conceptualize virtually all human behavior as “goods” analogous to material goods but whose price is no longer solely a function of the market, but also a function of time which produces a shadow price; now, such traditionally non-economic behavior as sleeping has a “price.” To Becker, sleeping is a good whose shadow price is a function of the interaction of certain material goods, such as a bed and a house, with time. The value of time is not fixed, but fluctuates throughout the week and is a function of income and type of employment (Febrero & Schwartz, 1995).
Secondly, Becker differs from traditional economics in his acceptance of historical influences on behavior. He gives particular importance to one’s childhood history, including the effects of parental interaction, tradition, and what may be generally described as socialization (Becker, 2002). These factors then influence general patterns of behavior later in life such as those related to religion, politics, tastes for certain foods and fashion, as well as one’s smoking and drinking habits. Such factors also allow Becker to reject the traditional economic notion of “irrationality,” or behaving in a way that seems disconnected to the costs and benefits of the behavior. For example, a family’s resistance to sell the house in which they lived for 20 years for exceedingly more than its monetary worth would be called irrational to traditional economists, but not to Becker. Becker would examine the histories acquired by the family who has lived in the house for all of those years and the sentimental value the house acquired during that time.
Any scientific system, if properly formulated, provides a means to practically deal with the small part of nature to which it addresses (Skinner, 1953). Behavior analysis deals with the behavior-environment relations of the individual organism. The analytic goals of prediction and control led to the conception of the operant class, rather than specific behavioral instances, as the primary analytical unit (Skinner, 1957). Thus, reinforcement increases the probability that all responses which have received that kind of reinforcement in the past will occur again so long as the physical or relational (i.e., arbitrarily applicable; see Hayes, Barnes-Holmes & Roche, 2001) antecedent stimulus properties resemble those that previously occasioned such reinforcement.
While behavior analysts exceed in explaining individual behavior given environmental conditions, Becker exceeds in explaining the existence of environmental conditions themselves. Kantor (1982) might say that while behavior analysts account for the functional properties of stimuli, Becker accounts for the very existence of stimulus objects. Such objects include those one may call “technological,” such as articles of clothing, automobiles, and houses, some of which provide resources directly relevant to our survival, such as food, water, and electricity. For the most part, the modern cultural environment in which behavior is nested cannot exist without some sort of income to “purchase and maintain” that environment. Furthermore, while Becker (1993) accounts for the statistical behavior of sociological groups at a macro level, the behavior analyst would account for psychological collectivities (Kantor, 1982), or common behavior among individuals with respect to stimulus objects. A major source of such common behavior resides in those childhood interactions with members of particular sociological groups called “socialization,” of which Kantor and Becker specifically address. Thus, carefully articulating the scientific boundaries of behavior analysis and economics can provide for a productive collaboration between both fields.
This opportunity for collaboration comes at a time when some behavior analysts have expressed concern that Skinner’s (1953, 1971) dream of large-scale cultural change has yet to occur, and that our scientific interests are narrowing (Geller, 2001; Hayes, 2001). Collaboration with Becker could potentially address these issues by providing a fresh source of ideas to stimulate research in complex human behavior, particularly the sparse behavioral research on human social behavior (Johnston, 1996), and supplement existing related behavioral studies such as those investigating resource allocation (Pietras, Cherek, Lane, & Tcheremissine, 2006) and marketing (Hantula & Bragger, 1999). Collaboration with macro-level sciences such as Becker’s presents an exciting opportunity to meld Skinnerian and Kantorian theory, to aid in the full realization of Skinner’s dream, and tackle human behavior it its full complexity.
References
- Becker, G. S. (1992). Habits, addictions, and traditions. Kyklos, 45, 327-346.
- Becker, G. S. (1993). Nobel lecture: The economic way of looking at behavior. Journal of Political Economy, 101, 385-409.
- Becker, G. S. (1995). The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. In Febrero, R., & Schwartz, P. (Eds.), The essence of Becker (pp. 4-17). Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. (Reprinted from the Economic Approach to Human Behavior, pp. 3-14, by G. S. Becker, 1976, Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
- Febrero, R., & Schwartz, P. (1995). The Essence of Becker: An Introduction. In Febrero, R., & Schwartz, P. (Eds.), The essence of Becker. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.
- Geller, E. S. (2001). Behavioral Safety: Meeting the challenge of making a large-scale difference. The Behavior Analyst Today, 2, 64-77.
- Hantula, D. A., & Bragger, J. L. (1999). The effects of feedback equivocality on escalation of commitment: An empirical investigation of decision dilemma theory. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29, 424-444.
- Hayes, S. C. (2001). The greatest dangers facing behavior analysis today. The Behavior Analyst Today, 2, 61-63.
- Hayes, S. C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (2001) (Eds.). Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian account of language and cognition. New York: Plenum Press.
- Johnston, J. M., (1996). Distinguishing between applied research and practice. The Behavior Analyst, 19, 35-47.
- Kantor, J. R. (1982). Cultural psychology. Chicago, IL: Principia Press.
- Pietras, C. J., Cherek, D. R., Lane, S. D., & Tcheremissine, O. (2006). Risk reduction and resource pooling on a cooperation task. Psychological Record, 56, 387-410.
- Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: Free Press.
- Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Cambridge, MA: B.F. Skinner Foundation.
- Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom & dignity. New York: Bantam.