Explaining landscape change: Group identity and behavior.

Abstract

There is an ongoing need for behavior analysts to look beyond their conventional interests and to conduct research on the behavior of individuals as members of groups, and there is a corresponding need for other social scientists to take advantage of the established and growing body of concepts and principles developed by behavior analysts. One possible area of investigation concerns behavior that changes landscapes that groups occupy and that facilitates creation of regional landscapes. Both landscape change and regional landscape creation are general outcomes of behavior that are conventionally studied by cultural geographers, a group of scholars who have shown little interest in, indeed disdain for, behavior analysis. Notwithstanding the unfortunate precedent, the prospects for an integration of interests are encouraging. The concepts of rule-governed behavior and of delayed outcomes appear especially relevant. Keywords: cultural geography, landscape, behavior, group identity, religion ********** Cultural geography, as one part of the larger discipline of human geography, is concerned with relationships between people and place. For example, cultural geographers focusing on historical topics are interested in human behavior and related landscape change and regional landscape creation. One research question might be: Why did Mormon settlers choose to venture significantly beyond the American frontier in 1847 and settle in an area that most contemporary Americans regarded as inappropriate? Another question might be: Why did British settlers in southeastern Australia move from the established coastal region to initiate a pastoral economy beginning in the 1820s? Answers to questions such as these usually refer to specific contexts of people and place. Thus, Mormons moved from Nauvoo, Missouri, to the Salt Lake region to enhance group identity and facilitate creation of a Mormon place, while pastoral expansion in southeastern Australia was related to the interest in occupying land suited to wool production. Behavior analysts will recognize that these examples of cultural geographic questions are about human behavior, albeit at a group scale, and that behavior analytic concepts and principles might be relevant in seeking answers. However, as discussed in an earlier paper in this journal (Norton 2001b), research along these lines is atypical in the context of a cultural geography subdiscipline characterized by subjectivist approaches. Written for an audience of behavior analysts, this paper aims to encourage researchers to expand their horizons to include studies of behavior normally of interest to cultural geographers on the grounds that behavior analysts are particularly well equipped to provide explanations and insights. Of course, cultural geographers are being encouraged to apply behavior analytic concepts and principles in their studies (for example, Norton, 2000). Expressed rather differently, for both groups of scholars, the aim is to suggest the value of a behavior analytic informed research agenda for cultural geography. The paper is organized into four sections. First, there is a brief review of selected concepts introduced by cultural and historical geographers that are implicitly behaviorist. Second, two analyses that are explicitly behaviorist are briefly noted. Third, group identities and the landscapes groups occupy, value, and change are further discussed with reference to behavior analytic concepts and principles. An optimistic, but admittedly uncertain, final section appraises the prospects for a cultural geography informed by behavior analysis. Some cultural geographic concepts It is possible to identify many instances of cultural geographic research that have behaviorist overtones, but few that are explicitly based on the logic of behavior analysis. Seminal work by Sauer (1925, 1941), the doyen of American cultural geographers, has been interpreted as behaviorist because of the focus on culture as learned behavior, because of the interpretation of culture as cause of landscape change, and because of the claim that cultural groups strive to maximize satisfactions and minimize effort. …