Tutorial: Selection of Cultures and the Role of Recurrent Contingencies and Interlocking Behavioral Contingencies

Abstract

The interplay between a population’s traits and environmental events feeds evolution by natural selection. These traits may vary from innate predispositions to acquire specific behavioral topographies to the ability to learn through local environmental changes (operant behavior). Thus, learning capability is historically inseparable from evolution by natural selection. In humans, besides inheriting behavioral predispositions and the ability to acquire novel behavioral repertoires, learning is dependent on social learning of culturally transmitted practices. Cultural practices are selected by environmental events as a function of their adaptive value to the group and also enhance members’ adaptive capability. Within a verbal community, individuals cooperate and coordinate their behavior, producing environmental changes that would not be possible otherwise. Those cooperative and coordinated responses are under the control of the verbal community’s sets of contingencies (i.e., culture), which also evolve over time. In this paper, the coevolutionary processes involving natural selection, selection of operant behavior, and selection of cultures (environmental settings) will be discussed within a behavior-analytic perspective. A special focus will be given to interlocking behavioral contingencies (IBCs) involved in maintaining and transmitting practices (controlling IBCs) and in the verbal community’s joint efforts (execution IBCs).