3 Review(s)

Radical behaviorist interpretation of complex behavior—that which is not amenable directly to an experimental analysis—has taken two forms. The first, which we may call "top-down," is perhaps the more frequently encountered, and is the mainstay of Skinners interpretations of economic, political and religious life—among other areas of application. It consists in suggesting surrogates of the elements of the three- or four-term contingency that might comprise responses of the kind controlled in the laboratory and the stimuli that would control them in such a closed setting. The behavior under interpretation, which typically occurs in a much more open setting, is then described as though it was predictable and controllable from a knowledge of the elements of the situation that have been labeled establishing operations, discriminative stimuli, reinforces and punishers.