What Is Rational Behavior In Microeconomics?

Why has Behavior Analysis, with all its theoretical and methodological robustness, not succeeded in becoming the main framework within the Human and Animal Behavioral Sciences?

• Why has Behavior Analysis been so left aside, or even ignored, within Psychology, Neuroscience and other related sciences in its efforts to explain (mainly) Human Complex Behavior? Behavior Analysis emerged as a field of psychology concerned in investigating the 'Behavior', being it animal or human, in a evolutionary perspective, by adopting a selectionist approach to account basic and complex behavior. Its project as an experimental investigation field of Behavior, was always to be a Natural Science of Behavior. In doing so, Behavior Analysis is oriented mostly with Biology (specifically with evolutionary biology) as noted by one of its main proponents B. F. Skinner, in his book "About Behaviorism" (1974): "The experimental analysis of behavior is a rigorous, extensive, and a rapidly advancing branch of biology" (italics added). Its epistemological evolutionary approach, gave it a huge theoretical and conceptual toolbox in accounting behavioral complexity, similarly to that comprised by evolutionary biology, a well established field within natural sciences. This, allied to the strong experimental tradition, makes Behavior Analysis a promising field in explaining behavior within behavioral sciences, and related areas, mainly concerning to the validity and reliability of its accounts, as is expected from any natural (and historical) science. Even despite some recent efforts in integrating behavioral and neurological experimental data to accounts complex behavior, most known by the work of John Donahoe and David Palmer (1994/2004) "Learning and Complex Behavior", by means of a biobehavioral model to the explanation of basic and complex behavioral phenomena, contemporary behavioral sciences (including Neuroscience) is mostly based in cognitive 'explanations' (inferred-process approaches, as in the words of Donahoe and Palmer), that by its 'nature' create mostly disparate and ephemeral interpretations, frequently logically circular, and fails in proposing integrative basic principles for both basic and complex behavior. As well noted by Catania (2013) in a recently published article in "General Review of Psychology": Psychology still hasn’t settled on whether its subject matter is mind or behavior. It is ever more appropriate that the components of the American Psychological Association are called Divisions, because psychology has become more fractionated with each passing decade. Of the approaches considered here, comparisons among them would perhaps find only some rare combinations in which the contributors would mutually see themselves as compatible with each other. That does not bode well. (p. 133) All of this, despite all the advantages of having a Natural Science of Behavior that is well oriented with other natural sciences, like Biology, and adopts a unifying epistemology and theoretical framework as well as sustains a robust methodological apparatus.

• Answer:

  Old School Behaviorism Is Making Way For Something That Includes Cognition Hi Ingur, A few problems with your answer, primarily revolving around the fact that BA has changed from the way you've characterized it. Also, some of the 4 arguments you present are either not arguments, or require some data to back them up. But behaviorism reduced complex human behavior to being solely environmentally induced. It left no room for the study of any introspective and intuitive elements of human experience. Well, if you broaden your conception of "environment" to include the organism's cognitions, then "introspective elements" are included. As they should be. If behaviorism can't account for my subjective experience, what use is it? This is why I think you may be working from a 1980s version of behavior analysis. Modern BA regards thoughts and emotions as behaviors essential to understanding and explaining human experience. See http://contextualscience.org/what_is_rft for instance. We normally think of our mental states as causing behavior. But given that something cannot cause itself, behaviorism cannot accommodate this intuition. This I think, is a non-argument. With regard to the first statement, so what? We normally think of the earth as being flat, but that doesn't mean we have to accept that as a starting point for anything. Why should how "we normally think" be accorded any privileged status? Secondly, who says behaviorism needs to account for "causes"? What if there aren't any causes? This statement carries a mechanistic assumption that modern behaviorists don't necessarily buy. Or need to. It's possible in science to produces laws and explanations without positing causes and mechanisms. For any given mental state, no set of behavioral dispositions is essentially associated with it. I refer to my previous point about "mental states", and in any case ask why should a "set of behavioral dispositions" (again, whatever that is - sounds like you may be producing a circular argument: "mental state" = "set of behavioral dispositions") be essentially associated with any mental state. I know of no behaviorist who claims that it would be. But perhaps I've misunderstood your meaning. Behavior does not depend primarily upon a person's learning and conditioning history. Their representation and interpretation is more important. Sentence one: pure assertion - where's your proof of this claim? To refute this core claim of behaviorism you'll need to show a behavior that happens in the absence of a conditioning history. Apart from reflexes, which are givens, I don't know of any. We'd also need to define "representing" and "interpreting" as some kind of not-behavior. I think you can see some circularity and self-reference problems creeping in. ;-) Sentence two: Assertion, but still maybe an acceptable goal for a science of human beings. So now we need a research program from that to produce effective interventions and/or predictions. Where are they? If behaviorism is true, then two beings that share all of their behavioral dispositions cannot differ in what qualia (subjective aspects of our conscious mental states) accompany their sensory interactions. But this cannot hold true. First up, nobody is claiming behaviorism is "true" in the sense of a final answer, just that it explains more phenomena more parsimoniously than other accounts. Secondly, well, I think I need to understand what you mean by "behavioral dispositions". It's an unfamiliar term to me. I'm hoping you don't mean some kind of reification of behavioral frequency or "habit strength under certain environmental contingencies" because that would undermine your argument. Could you give a couple of concrete examples of what holding true and not holding true would look like? Behaviorism can't explain the development of human language. Do you mean within species development or individual lifespan development? It can do both. The former by combining with other branches of biology (comparative psychology, palaeophysiology) and the latter through operant and classical conditioning processes. See also the link on Relational Frame Theory I posted above. Modern behaviorism is explaining cognition as part of human behavior. This endeavor will continue, and I believe, behaviorism will become the dominant framework in psychology of humans. It just won't look much like the "old " form of behaviorism that many psychology students like me were taught in the 1980s!