Association for Behavior Analysis International

A particular case of self-control happens when the conflict between immediate and delayed consequences are associated with consequences more favorable to the individual, or more favorable to the group. In such cases, responding under control of delayed consequences more favorable to the group can be called Ethical Self-Control. Literature on Behavior Analysis points out that the selection of self-control and ethical self-control depends on contingencies delivered by members of the group, which permits us to say that these phenomena are cultural products. This work investigated the selection, maintenance, and transmission of ethical self-control in two settings analogous to cultural contingencies: macrocontingencies and metacontingencies. Two microcultures were exposed to a task in which each participant had to choose a line in a colored 10x10 matrix. There were individual consequences according to which choices of odd lines produced three tokens that could be exchanged for money, and choices of even lines produced only one token. Cultural contingencies allowed the production of school items that would be donated to public schools. The production of such items depended up on the existence of macrocontingencies or metacontingencies. We investigated the effect of cultural consequences and cumulative product on ethical self-control responses, in situations in which the production of the cultural consequences and the cumulative product are concurrent with responses that produced a higher magnitude reinforcer, in alternate conditions of macrocontingencies and metacontingencies. Results suggest that both the cultural consequence and the cumulative product were effective in the selection of ethical self-control. The data also suggest that macrocontingencies were not effective in the selections of IBCs+APs, but were effective in the maintenance after they were selected in metacontingency conditions. In macrocontingency conditions a larger number of school items were produced, but the probability of producing items in metacontingency conditions were lower than in macrocontingencies conditions, suggesting that the former was more effective in the production of cultural consequences.

Skinner (1981) suggested that natural selection operates not only at the biological level, but is also responsible for the evolution of behavioral repertoires throughout an organisms lifetime. McDowell (2004) implemented the selectionist account in a computational theory of behavior dynamics. The theory causes a population of behaviors to evolve through time under the selection pressure exerted by the environment. It has been tested under a variety of conditions and the emergent outcomes were repeatedly shown to be qualitatively and quantitatively indistinguishable from those displayed by live organisms (McDowell, in press). The present project investigated the effects of various environmental variables (e.g. reward magnitude) on the behavior variability of virtual organisms characterized by various mutation rates. High mutation rates produced behavioral constellations similar to those displayed by ADHD-diagnosed children. These effects were counteracted by arranging richer or more structured environments (higher changeover delay). Interestingly, arranging low-value environments caused organisms characterized by low mutation rates to display abnormally high levels of variability. These findings suggest that similar high-level phenotypes such ADHD may be caused by various combinations of organismic and environmental features (equifinality), during a dynamic process governed by Darwinian forces.

Recent studies have shown differences between delay discounting (DD) of gains and losses. More specifically, some studies have suggested that the relation of value and delay may not be monotonic, but biphasic, what would not be supported by mathematical models used to describe data. We reanalyzed data of four experiments that evaluated delay discounting with losses in order to compare and evaluate two mathematical models. Experiment 1 was looking for correlations between DD and depressive symptoms, Experiment 2 was concerned on the influence of age and income on DD with losses, Experiment 3 was concerned with anxiety and Experiment 4 was testing the influence of a mood induction procedure. In this study we conducted four analyses of the 119 original individual data. The first analysis was a categorization of data in three patterns: Discounting, Stable and Revaluation (initial discounting followed by increase in value). The second analysis compared R and corrected R. The third analysis was an F-test conducted for each individual data. And the last analysis considered Akaike Information Criterion. Analyses 1 and 2 favored a complex equation, while the other two favored a simpler model. The implications of each method of data analysis are discussed.