Behavior and Social Issues

For two decades I have been talking and writing about a Total Safety Culture (TSC) as an ideal for organizations to work toward. Years ago I defined a TSC as an environmental setting where "everyone feels responsible for safety and pursues it on a daily...

ON THE DESIGN OF CULTURES: 1961 AND 2001 In The Design of Cultures, Skinner suggested that "there is considerable advantage in considering ... governmental, religious, economic, educational, and therapeutic institutions...simply as behavioral technologies"...

Proposals to improve culture by design immediately raise the thorny issue of values. Skinner's revolutionary solution to this old conundrum is to "step outside of the system" by treating value judgments as verbal behavior--thus "all objections to cultural...

The "good life" is not a world in which people have what they need; it is one in which the good things they need figure as reinforcers in effective contingencies (Skinner, 1975/1996, p. 69). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed...

ABSTRACT: American higher education has been undergoing significant changes in recent years. These changes affect students, faculty, and administrators and involve interlocking contingencies and meta-contingencies that constitute a great part of higher...

One of my interests involves the ways in which behaviorism is consistently misrepresented in both popular and academic sources. Such misrepresentations have appeared so steadily that a Special Interest Group to study them was formed within the Association...

SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATIONS TOWARDS BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS: A REVIEw OF SINGLE-CASE EVALUATION BY SOCIAL WORKERS BY MANSOOR A. F. KAZI. 1998, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing House. ISBN 1-85972-4140. 109 pp. 37.50 (British Pounds). As readers of this journal...

ABSTRACT: A series of three conferences on "Evolutionary Theory and Human Progress" was held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the fall of 1960. The first considered biological problems, the second, anthropological, and the third, psychological....

Skinner's analysis of the contingencies of reinforcement that lead to the establishment of cultural practices, provides a good opportunity to consider power relations between dominant and dominated groups in society. He points out how the social variables...

Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, contains two important messages for behavior analysts, one a statement of theoretical (and perhaps social-political) kinship and the other a suggestion...