Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavior interacts with its environment both during an organism’s lifetime, through operant selection and, across generations, through natural selection. The radical behaviorist’s attempt to explain operant selection usually both depends upon and denies the implicit, hypothetical process of reinforcement by response strengthening. In this symposium, we discuss what is problematic about strengthening by reinforcement and suggest how the interaction between behavior and the environment is better described without this unfalsifiable concept. In our talks, we put forward an assembly of alternatives, all replacing response strengthening by approaches questioning the traditional distinction between consequences and antecedents. These alternative explanatory approaches, namely, induction, signaling, and selection, not only explain food-maintained behavior, but also shock-maintained behavior. They explicitly connect behavior analysis and evolutionary theory and do not rely on hypothetical constructs. We will show data supporting our conceptual arguments and indicating that our alternatives to strengthening by reinforcement might not only improve conceptual cohesiveness but might also benefit both our basic science and our technology of behavior.

Research suggests that behavior depends on likely future environmental conditions, as generalized from past experience and present environment. We assessed how generalization across the various dimensions of important events – reinforcers – affects the degree to which behavior tracks changes in likely future reinforcer availability. Pigeons worked on a concurrent-choice task in which one response was more likely to produce a reinforcer before a stimulus change, and the other was more likely after the stimulus change. We manipulated the nature of the stimulus (time or number) and the nature of the response (e.g., to a location, color, or flash duration). Regardless of the nature of the stimulus and response, choice was well described by a model that assumes that control by the structure of the environment is weakened by generalization across the various dimensions of a reinforcer (or other important events). We suggest that generalization contributes substantially to the degree of control by likely future events.

There are no “reinforcers” or “punishers” as we colloquially know them in practice – there are only reinforcement and punishment effects. Response Disequilibrium Theory (RDT) is an approach to reinforcement that makes no assumptions about response strengthening or the value of stimuli to reinforce. RDT is the culmination of Timberlake and Allison’s (1974) response deprivation hypothesis and should be differentiated from motivating operations. The disequilibrium approach to reinforcement is a general theory of behavior that asks the following question: What do individuals usually do during their free time—without any constraints on their behavior—and what would happen if we disrupted that behavior with a contingency? Unlike other theories of reinforcement, RDT predicts the direction and magnitude of behavior change. RDT a priori specifies the necessary conditions for reinforcement, which makes it testable and practicable. Response Disequilibrium Treatment (RDTx) is an emerging application that can compete with the expediency of calling a stimulus a reinforcer. RDTx is defined by (1) the assessment of unconstrained activities in context and (2) the scheduled disruption of activities to induce socially significant behavior change. The current presentation aims to describe RDT’s terms, methods, and applications.