Abstract
This is an article describing and analyzing my four months working as a Psychologist in the Occupied Territories known as the West Bank, Palestine. While I speak of two families and two children, this is done to make the story easier to tell. Actually, I worked with several families and multiple children. I discovered the power and challenge of a collectivist culture to applying learning theory principles. The work of Professors Nathan Azrin (Azrin, 1974), Richard Foxx (Foxx, 1982), and Marc Gold (Gold, 1974) was basic to my therapeutic approach. Azrin and Foxx were able to bridge the gap between modifying the behavior of laboratory animals to the teaching of humans and their families to decrease negative actions and increase positive ones in two primary ways. In the instances reported in this paper parent of the individuals successfully though hesitantly raised their expectations and were taught to break down the tasks into more manageable steps. Marc Gold expressly focused on Moderately Intellectual Disabled Individuals. Where this paper is different from hundreds of other behavioral modification reports is the unique context of a collectivist Palestinian culture struggling to survive under a military occupation. The collectivist imperative required the mothers (who were cast by the culture into the primary distributors of rewards and task difficulty). Simultaneously, because of the military occupation the mothers were unable to travel (from Bethlehem to Jerusalem) to institutions and agencies which could have provided guidance and support.
Highlights
In the USA, our deeply ingrained individualism can be illustrated by our aversion to car pooling - forcing us to reward it by creating High Occupancy Vehicle lanes in large cities
There was fatal violence which led to a strict military occupation, severely limiting travel visas, and tightening of access to other countries into Israel and with the West Bank itself
Given the populations I was serving, I used a form of behavior modification (BMod) (D'Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971) known currently as Applied Behavior Analysis (Gresham, Gansle, & Noell, 1993)
Summary
How do I get your attention when so many other legitimate needs demand your time and resources? One option might be to take the advice of Michael Corleone in Mario Puzo’s, The Godfather. If you are Jewish or Christian: there are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world. If you are Muslim, Israel has one of the most powerful armed forces in the world with a high probability of possessing and the capability to deliver over 100 nuclear weapons. This is an area of the world about which you might wish to know a little bit more
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