Contemporary Behavior Research Articles

Pilgrimage in Turbulent Contexts: One Hundred Years of Pilgrimage to the Holy Land

In this paper, I review select developments in the last one hundred years of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic pilgrimage to sites found today in Israel and the Occupied Territories. I argue that only by viewing the pilgrimages under analysis as dissipative systems, is one able to explain historical change in this most turbulent of contexts. When combined with an understanding of pilgrimage as social action, this approach enables historians of religions to account for not only the restructuring of pilgrimages over time but also to understand dynamics surrounding ritual birth and death. Furthermore, the political strategies of traditionalists and revivalists who attempt to authenticate contemporary ritual behavior by linking it up to purportedly longstanding, unchanged practices are undermined. After initially focusing upon changes in pilgrimage catalyzed by socio-political events, I discuss the birth of distinctively new pilgrimages associated with the rise of the State of Israel as well as the demise of several other pilgrimages in the years since 1948.

A Preliminary Strategic Marketing Framework for New Product Development

This article responds to the identified considerations and gaps in existing research on the way a new idea is transformed into a market-accepted new product. Utilizing the findings of an extensive theoretical analysis and empirical investigation on the subject, this research studies new product development within a wider strategic marketing context. The research interrelates three different perspectives: the process-defining perspective, that identifies and refines the managerial implications and theoretical considerations; the value-defining perspective, which investigates the various types and stakeholders of value; and the context-defining (contemporary consumer behavior and strategic marketing) perspective, which positions the entire innovation process within the comprehensive set of environmental and organizational processes and factors. The article concludes with the development of a preliminary Contemporary Strategic Framework for New Product Development. The framework answers the various theoretical considerations on the subject, incorporating the various processes’ stages and interrelationships within a single descriptive system. In addition, it provides constructive functional managerial value through potential practical implementation and prescriptive interpretation.

Grand Guignol and littérature putride in contemporary Korean horror cinema: Park Chan-wook's cinematic translation of Zola's Thérèse Raquin

ABSTRACTThere seems to be near-universal agreement that South Korean director Park Chan-wook's films are highly disturbing. For one, Park uses violence and extreme abjection in his films to critique contemporary Korean society and human behaviour more broadly. More interestingly, the critical voices surrounding Park as a film-maker in the contemporary ‘transnational’ cinematic landscape are strikingly similar to those that surrounded French Naturalist author Emile Zola. I explore the variety of ways in which Park's 2009 film Thirst plays with the horror genre as it adapts and builds upon Emile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin (TR). I also suggest that the literary environment surrounding Zola's creation of TR has much in common with the current cinematic environment in Korea. I argue finally that Zola and Park, as purveyors of art, share similar ‘instinctual tendencies’, and I analyse select scenes in Thirst to demonstrate how Park uses Zola's TR to create an entirely new cinematic hybrid form.

A study of influential authors, works and research network of consumer behavior research

With the proliferation of consumer behavior research in recent decades, the ability to effectively identify the most influential and representative collection of research articles had become significantly important. Research in the consumer behavior area had developed rapidly, but no recent studies had examined contemporary consumer behavior research. This paper employed author co-citation analysis, a bibliometric methodology and social network analysis methodology, to highlight the most influential authors, to analyze citation relationships, to exploit changes in the intellectual base and to show trends and patterns in the consumer behavior field over two consecutive time periods, 1989 to 1998 and 1999 to 2008. In order to analyze the dynamic intellectual structure of consumer behavior research, author co-citation analysis was conducted of 16,536 references from 606 articles found in the SSCI and SCI databases from 1989 to 2008. In addition, factor analysis was used to examine the breadth of the authors’ research areas. The aims of this paper were twofold: to provide a valuable direction for future consumer behavior research, and to propose an objective means of establishing the relative importance of different knowledge nodes in the recent development of the consumer behavior field. Key words: Consumer behavior, bibliometric analysis, author co-citation analysis, social network analysis, knowledge of network.

Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France, and Japan

As the promise of health care reform in the United States continues to face political and legal hurdles, few questions evoke as heated a debate as those surrounding cost control. Though most stakeholders agree that too many dollars change hands in the U.S. health care economy, politically tenable solutions to the problem have been elusive, as evidenced by the paucity of substantive cost-control measures in the current reform efforts. At the heart of the debate are fundamental tensions between patient choice and societal cost, between autonomous physician decision-making and adherence to clinical guidelines, and between free healthcare markets and government oversight of those markets. This past spring, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) was introduced in the United States as a key component of the deficit reduction plan and was designed as a neutral body with the authority to cut Medicare spending if the federal health insurance program exceeded certain targets. A predictable backand-forth ensued. Opponents invoked the “rationing” defense, arguing that clinical care would suffer as independent physician decision-making was limited by government intervention, while supporters maintained that Medicare cannot afford to keep paying for health care at its current levels (Pear 2011). Though reform efforts such as the IPAB have focused on payment, critical to this discussion is the contribution of physician behaviors to the cost of care (Krugman 2011). Specifically, while most people assume that physicians are ordering only what is necessary for patients according to their professional ethics, sometimes other factors, including financial incentives, drive their decisions (Grande et al. 2009; Wazana 2000). Some of the more powerful financial incentives in medicine include financial ties to companies (for example, honoraria, consulting fees) and the payment incentives from fee-for-service clinical practice. The existence of these incentives— and the conflicts of interest they create—is the subject of Marc Rodwin’s new book, Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine. In his history-heavy analysis of the growth and symbiosis of medicine and industry in the United States, France, and Japan, Rodwin chronicles the cultural, legal, and institutional factors that have contributed to each country’s current landscape of financial incentives in clinical medicine. Each tells a different story of how organized medicine, professional self-regulation, market competition, and payers affect contemporary physician behavior and provides insight into the relationship between this behavior and health care cost. Bioethical Inquiry (2011) 8:383–386 DOI 10.1007/s11673-011-9326-y

Portrayals of management fashions in contemporary management and organisational behaviour textbooks

Portrayals of management fashions in contemporary management and organisational behaviour textbooks

Cross-domain analogies as relating derived relations among two separate relational networks.

Contemporary behavior analytic research is making headway in analyzing analogy as the establishment of a relation of coordination among common types of trained or derived relations. Previous studies have been focused on within-domain analogy. The current study expands previous research by analyzing cross-domain analogy as relating relations among separate relational networks and by correlating participants' performance with a standard measure of analogical reasoning. In two experiments, adult participants first completed general intelligence and analogical reasoning tests. Subsequently, they were exposed to a computerized conditional discrimination training procedure designed to create two relational networks, each consisting of two 3-member equivalence classes. The critical test was a two-part analogical test in which participants had to relate combinatorial relations of coordination and distinction between the two relational networks. In Experiment 1, combinatorial relations for each network were individually tested prior to analogical testing, but in Experiment 2 they were not. Across both experiments, 65% of participants passed the analogical test on the first attempt. Moreover, results from the training procedure were strongly correlated with the standard measure of analogical reasoning.

Translational research: It’s not 1960s behavior analysis

We like Critchfield’s (2011) article,which is scholarly, clear, and insight-ful. In it, Critchfield provides anexcellent overview of translationalresearch in behavior analysis andsuggests several general strategiesfor increasing the likelihood that suchresearch, which has been scarce inpast years, will become more com-mon and benefit the discipline as wellas humanity at large. As he pointsout, a small number of people havebeen responsible for most of thetranslational research that has ap-peared, and relatively few behavioranalysts are well trained in both thebasic science and applied areas of ourdiscipline. In an attempt to provide acrude index of how many contempo-rary behavior analysts are produc-tive, and hence at least somewhatskilled, in the basic science andapplied areas of our discipline, weused PsycINFO to determine thenumber of people who authored atleast one article in both the Journal ofthe Experimental Analysis of Behavior(JEAB) and the Journal of AppliedBehavior Analysis (JABA)from2006through 2010 (i.e., in the last 5 years).Thirty-eight people did so. This is asubstantial number, but it is impor-tant to note that during this period381 people were listed as JEABauthors and 718 people were listedas JABA authors. Thus, only 3.6% ofthe total number of authors (38 of1,061) published in both journals.Their names and the number ofarticles they published in each journalduring this period are shown inTable 1.Although publishing in a givenarea is not strong evidence of exper-tise in that area (an author could,e.g., contribute just by collectingdata), it is likely that most, andprobably all, of these people knowquite a bit about both the basicscience and applied areas of ourdiscipline and hence could play lead-ership roles in increasing the amountand quality of translational researchproduced. Some of them, such asTom Critchfield and Bud Mace,obviously do so (e.g., Mace & Critch-field, 2010).Both Critchfield (2011) and Poling(2010) suggested that current gradu-ate training programs might be inad-equate for producing competenttranslational researchers, but neitheroffered specific strategies for im-provement. Examining the formaland informal training received bythe researchers listed in Table 1 couldprovide clues regarding the experienc-es that develop the repertoire neededto bridge the basic-to-applied chasm.Critchfield pointed out that he wasinfluenced by Bill Redmon in a coursethat combined basic and appliedreadings, and our hunch is that manyof those listed in Table 1 studied withmentors who had broad interests. Forwhat it’s worth, one of us (Poling) wasmentored by Andy Lattal and TravisThompson, both of whom have pub-lished applied, basic, and translation-al studies, and Poling has donelikewise. Many of his students, in-cluding the coauthor of this article(Edwards), are also generalists.As generalists, they use a variety ofresearch methods while they retain acommitment to the tactics and strat-egies characteristic of behavior anal-ysis (e.g., Poling, Methot, & LeSage,1995; Sidman, 1960) and to use them

Self-concept and Decision-making Styles: A Comparison between Young Korean and American Consumers

The purpose of this study is to investigate differences in self-concepts and their influence on decision-making styles in apparel shopping across two cultures; namely, Korea and the United States. Data is obtained from university students in both countries (3 universities in Korea and 2 universities in the United States), generating a sample size of 1,166. The questionnaire consists of three parts: decision-making styles for apparel shopping, selfconcepts, and demographic information. The results indicate that Korean respondents have higher interdependent self-concepts than the American respondents. Moreover, the selfconcepts of young consumers have significant effects on their decision-making styles. This study also finds that the self-concepts of young consumers from both countries has a significantly different impact on decision-making styles for apparel shopping. The similarities and/or differences of the relationships between self-concepts and decisionmaking styles of young Korean and American consumers are also found when such relationships are examined within each country. This study makes a unique contribution to enhancing the understanding of contemporary global consumer behavior by exploring relationships in culture, self-concepts, and decision-making styles of young consumers.

Masochism in political behavior: a Lacanian perspective

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to offer an explanation of masochism in political behavior using the concepts developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For the purposes of this paper, masochism in political behavior is defined as any political behavior in which the protagonists willingly pursue self‐directed pain and suffering in order to accomplish their political goals. It involves the self‐chosen endangerment of one's life and liberty and thus includes a whole range of contemporary behaviors, from hunger strikes and suicide bombers to the old “escape from freedom” phenomena now on the rise even in the established democracies. Lacan's basic thesis is that masochistic behavior is an effort on the part of the subject to establish law‐giving structures where there were none before. In other words, the masochist's sacrifice is a provocative attempt to carve out an autonomous space in the political environment whose structure does not allow it. This is why the masochist's “victories” will by necessity be temporary and will require constant repetition. Lasting changes in political structures necessitate other types of behavior. In order to provide evidence for this thesis, I will present two detailed case studies. One will explore the issue of masochism in the Russian political culture based on the studies by Daniel Rancour‐Laferriere. The second case study will be based on my own research and first‐hand experiences as an active participant in the political life of Montenegro. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

WHAT IS RADICAL BEHAVIORISM? A REVIEW OF JAY MOORE'S CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF RADICAL BEHAVIORISM

B. F. Skinner founded both radical behaviorism and behavior analysis. His founding innovations included: a versatile preparation for studying behavior; explicating the generic nature of stimulus and response; a pragmatic criterion for defining behavioral units; response rate as a datum; the concept of stimulus control; the concept of verbal behavior; and explicating the explanatory power of contingencies. Besides these achievements, however, Skinner also made some mistakes. Subsequent developments in radical behaviorist thought have attempted to remedy these mistakes. Moore's book presents a “party line” version of radical behaviorism. It focuses narrowly on a few of Skinner's concepts (mostly mentalism and verbal behavior) and contains no criticism of his mistakes. In fact, Moore adds a few mistakes of his own manufacture; for example, he insists that the mental realm does not exist—an unprovable and distracting assertion. The book's portrayal of behavior analysis would have been current around 1960; it mentions almost none of the developments since then. It also includes almost no developments in radical behaviorism since Skinner. Moore's book would give an unwary reader a highly distorted picture of contemporary behavior analysis and radical behaviorism.

Governing Irrationality, or a More Than Rational Government? Reflections on the Rescientisation of Decision Making in British Public Policy

It appears that recent debates within human geography, and the broader social sciences, concerning the more-than-rational constitution of human decision making are now being paralleled by changes in the ways in which public policy makers are conceiving of and addressing human behaviour. This paper focuses on the rise of so-called Behaviour Change policies in public policy in the UK. Behaviour Change policies draw on the behavioural insights being developed within the neuro-sciences, behavioural economics, and psychology. These new behavioural theories suggest not only that human decision making relies on a previously overlooked irrational component, but that the irrationality of decision making is sufficiently consistent to enable effective public policy intervention into the varied times and spaces that surround human decisions. This paper charts the emergence of Behaviour Change policies within a range of British public policy sectors, and the political and scientific antecedents of such policies. Ultimately, the paper develops a geographically informed, ethical critique of the contemporary Behaviour Change regime that is emerging in the UK. Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews with leading policy executives, and case studies that reflect the application of Behaviour Change policies on the design and constitution of British streets, the analysis claims that current strategies are predicated on a partial reading of new behavioural theories. We argue that this partial reading of human cognition is leading to the construction of public policies that seek to arbitrarily decouple the rational and emotional components of human decision making with deleterious social and political consequences.

Hooking up: Gender Differences, Evolution, and Pluralistic Ignorance

"Hooking-up"--engaging in no-strings-attached sexual behaviors with uncommitted partners--has become a norm on college campuses, and raises the potential for disease, unintended pregnancy, and physical and psychological trauma. The primacy of sex in the evolutionary process suggests that predictions derived from evolutionary theory may be a useful first step toward understanding these contemporary behaviors. This study assessed the hook-up behaviors and attitudes of 507 college students. As predicted by behavioral-evolutionary theory: men were more comfortable than women with all types of sexual behaviors; women correctly attributed higher comfort levels to men, but overestimated men's actual comfort levels; and men correctly attributed lower comfort levels to women, but still overestimated women's actual comfort levels. Both genders attributed higher comfort levels to same-gendered others, reinforcing a pluralistic ignorance effect that might contribute to the high frequency of hook-up behaviors in spite of the low comfort levels reported and suggesting that hooking up may be a modern form of intrasexual competition between females for potential mates.

Editorial: Identifying the genetic and environmental influences on psychological outcomes

Editorial: Identifying the genetic and environmental influences on psychological outcomes

Semantic false memories in the form of derived relational intrusions following training.

Contemporary behavior analytic research is making headway in characterizing memory phenomena that typically have been characterized by cognitive models, and the current study extends this development by producing "false memories" in the form of functional equivalence responding. A match-to-sample training procedure was administered in order to encourage participants to treat groups of unrelated English words as being interchangeable. Following training, participants were presented with a list of words from within one of the groups for a free recall test and a recognition test. Results showed that participants were more likely to falsely recall and recognize words that had been assigned to the same group as the list words during prior training, relative to words not assigned to the same group and relative to words that co-occurred with list words. These results indicate that semantic relatedness can be experimentally manipulated in order to produce specific false memories.

What Would Veblen Wear?

Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class is largely based on his explication of emulation whereby individuals of lower status imitate people of higher status. The proliferation of identity categories and the democratization of consumer credit complicate the application of emulation to contemporary consumer behavior. Veblen is ill-equipped to describe consumption related to social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity. The phenomenon of dressing down within dominant American culture reveals the limits of Veblen's ideas when applied to less privileged social categories. An exclusive focus on individual choices ignores the interaction of structure and agency that characterizes the practice of consumption in contemporary society.

Symposium: the future of aversive control research

Given the limited attention to aversive control currently granted by contemporary behavior analysis, no consideration of this topic would be complete without a view to the future. If behavior analysis is ever to approximate Skinner’s vision of a comprehensive treatment of the psychological world, much remains to be done in the study of aversive control. This special issue closes with a “symposium” consisting of four essays that address intriguing future directions for research on aversive control. Investigators who are actively pursuing questions about aversive control were invited to introduce the general thrust of their work and to discuss its implications, including in revealing important unfinished business for an experimental analysis of aversive control.

Defining Delayed Consequences as Reinforcers: Some Do, Some Don’t, and Nothing Changes

Results of a survey sent to members of the editorial boards of five behavior-analytic journals in 1990 indicated that there was no consensus among respondents with respect to whether delayed events can function as reinforcers (Schlinger, Blakely, Fillhard, & Poling, 1991). Since that time, several studies with nonhuman animals have demonstrated that events delayed by at least several seconds can increase the probability of occurrence of the responses that produce them. To determine the relative number of contemporary behavior analysts who nonetheless believe that reinforcers must immediately follow the responses that produce them, the present study replicated the procedures used by Schlinger et al., with similar results. That is, respondents did not agree with respect to whether delayed events could be reinforcers.

Asante Hightimers and the Fashionable Display of Women's Wealth in Contemporary Ghana

In Ghana's Ashanti Region, there is a certain category of woman commonly called preman (pl. premanfoo), a word that is the local version of the English play-man or playboy. Despite this word's seemingly male cast, preman is a term applied primarily to women, particularly wealthy market traders. This article explores the relationship between the flamboyantly fashionable behavior of the preman and the long-established Asante cultural practice of poatwa (“challenge”), involving both visual and verbal assertions of superior status. During the twentieth century, fashionable dress developed into a particularly female mode of high-status display that provided visible proof of a woman's success in accumulating the prestigious textiles that became an increasingly important form of female wealth. The most extreme form of such displays are the extravagant, highly visible, and sometimes scandalous fashions of the Asante preman, which may be best understood as a distinctively female mode of contemporary Asante poatwa behavior.

A contemporary behavior analysis of anxiety and avoidance.

Despite the central status of avoidance in explaining the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders, surprisingly little behavioral research has been conducted on human avoidance. In the present paper, first we provide a brief review of the empirical literature on avoidance. Next, we describe the implications of research on derived relational responding and the transformation of functions for a contemporary behavioral account of avoidance, before providing several illustrative research examples of laboratory-based analogues of key clinical treatment processes. Finally, we suggest some challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for behavioral research on anxiety and avoidance.