Rule-governed Behavior Research Articles

An operant analysis of problem solving

AbstractBehavior that solves a problem is distinguished by the fact that it changes another part of the solver's behavior and is strengthened when it does so. Problem solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli. Verbal responses produce especially useful stimuli, because they affect other people. As a culture formulates maxims, laws, grammar, and science, its members behave more effectively without direct or prolonged contact with the contingencies thus formulated. The culture solves problems for its members, and does so by transmitting the verbal discriminative stimuli called rules. Induction, deduction, and the construction of models are ways of producing rules. Behavior that solves a problem may result from direct shaping by contingencies or from rules constructed either by the problem solver or by others. Because different controlling variables are involved, contingency-shaped behavior is never exactly like rule-governed behavior. The distinction must take account of (1) a system which establishes certain contingencies of reinforcement, such as some part of the natural environment, a piece of equipment, or a verbal community; (2) the behavior shaped and maintained by these contingencies; (3) rules, derived from the contingencies, which specify discriminative stimuli, responses, and consequences, and (4) the behavior occasioned by the rules.

VERBAL BEHAVIOR

THE RECENT HISTORY AND CURRENT STATUS OF THE AREA OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR ARE CONSIDERED IN TERMS OF THREE MAJOR THEMATIC LINES: the operant conditioning of adult verbal behavior, learning to be an effective speaker and listener, and developments directly related to Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Other topics not directly related to the main themes are also considered: the work of Kurt Salzinger, ape-language research, and human operant research related to rule-governed behavior.

Rule-governed behavior, self-management, and the developmentally disabled: A theoretical analysis

In the human-made environment, much human behavior produces outcomes important to the well-being of the individual that, nonetheless, fail to reinforce or punish that individual's behavior. However, rules describing such ineffective contingencies can control the relevant behavior, if the person has the prerequisite skills, including self-management skills. Perhaps such rule-governed behavior is another repertoire the developmentally disabled need in order to approximate normal performance in our culture.

Same-different discriminations in the pigeon

Three pigeons were trained to observe five lighted keys and to peck whichever key displayed a color different from that of the other four keys. Their above-chance performances were maintained when a novel color was introduced and when they were required to peck two nonmatching keys during each trial. The results are discussed in relation to response stereotypy and the acquisition of rule-governed (conceptual) behavior.

Language and Liberation

It has now been over a generation since Rosa Parks' historic refusal to move to the back of the bus triggered one of the several cataclysmic forces that fundamentally altered Black-white political relations in our time. White America sought to deal with this newly released Black energy in several systematic ways. Key among them was the acceleration of research on Blacks and the implementation of various up-from-the-ghetto and Great Society type social action programs. The logic of this response was premised on the assumption that if the Black socio-cultural environment were enriched, Black energy would be channeled toward the goal of assimilation into America's mainstream. With the national spotlight on Black people, language scholars went to work. They re-examined those views that had characterized Black speech as impoverished. Generating new descriptions of Black English that demonstrated the systematic and rule-governed behavior of Black speakers, the investigators showed convincingly that Black language is not impoverished, i.e., it does not reflect cognitive deficiency, and it has the inherent capacity to communicate any message its speakers intend. This reexamination succeeded in increasing about Black speech and in challenging prevailing negative views about Black linguistic and cognitive ability. On July 12, 1979, this research formed the nucleus of the existing knowledge on which Federal Judge Charles W. Joiner based his decision in the King (Black English) case.1 That ruling

Bateson and Behaviorism

Gregory Bateson has influenced many social scientists through his writings and theories. His works are not well known, however, among behaviorists. Since many of his concepts seem to have some relevance to applied and experimental behavior analysis, the purpose of this paper is to introduce his writings, comparing his ideas with other behaviorists such as Skinner, Kuo, and Kantor, and suggest some topics for future research. Some behavioral topic areas most likely to be influenced by Bateson’s theories are the relationship between learning and evolution, and rule-governed behavior.

Translation as Rule-Governed Behaviour

Access to full text is restricted. WSU Libraries provides access to electronic copy of this article via commercial databases and library online catalog: http://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1332858

Intuition, Induction, and the Middle Way

The tapestry of Wilfrid Sellars's writings is dauntingly rich in stimulus and suggestion. I shall take up here an intriguing strand of thought that was woven into one of his early papers 'Language, Rules and Behavior',1 and I shall discuss some of the issues to which it gives rise. Sellars was concerned in that paper with the procedures by which people evaluate actions as right or wrong, arguments as valid or invalid, and cognitive claims as well or ill grounded. He sought to map out a true via media, in his treatment of such procedures, between rationalistic apriorism and what, for want of a better term then (nowadays we should call it 'naturalised epistemology'), he called 'descriptivism', by which he understood the claim that all meaningful con cepts and problems belong to the empirical or descriptive sciences, including the sciences of human behaviour. Sellars was thus led to ask not only 'What sort of a thing is justification?' but also 'How do we come to accept the rules or laws that license justifications?' And he saw these questions as arising in relation to any dialogue in which one party seeks to justify something to another. With regard to the justification of actions he held that the in tuitionism of Ross, Prichard and Ewing was reasonably faithful to the phenomenology of moral thought and experience, though he did not agree with their belief in a nonnatural quality or relation (of goodness or Tightness) that may belong to actions over and above their empirical characteristics. With regard to the justification of predictions he held that the relevant cover ing laws are ultimately rendered acceptable by an appeal to instances of their application. But he was reluctant to conceive this kind of appeal as an induc tive procedure. Instead he called it an application of Socratic method, since the purpose of this method is to make explicit the rules that we have implicit ly adopted for thought and action, and Sellars interpreted our judgments to the effect that A causally necessitates as the expression of a rule governing our use of the terms 'A' and 'B': science consists in the attempt, by remodel ing human language, to develop a system of rule-governed behaviour which will adjust the human organism to the environment. Thus far Sellars in 1949; and I shall examine this thesis without regard to any modifications in Sellars's published views since that date, because my ob ject is to explore an intriguing range of questions that Sellars's 1949 thesis raises, rather than to pursue an ad hominem critique.

UNINSTRUCTED HUMAN RESPONDING: SENSITIVITY OF LOW‐RATE PERFORMANCE TO SCHEDULE CONTINGENCIES

College students' presses on a telegraph key occasionally turned on a light in the presence of which button presses produced points later exchangeable for money. Initially, responding was maintained by low-rate contingencies superimposed on either random-interval or random-ratio schedules. Later, the low-rate contingencies were relaxed. Low-rate key pressing had been established for some students by shaping and for others by demonstration and written instructions. After the low-rate contingencies were relaxed, higher response rates generally did not increase point earnings with random-interval scheduling, but did so with random-ratio scheduling. In both cases, shaped responding usually increased, and instructed responding usually continued at an unchanged low rate. The insensitivity of instructed responding typically occurred despite contact with the contingencies. The differential sensitivity to schedule contingencies of shaped responding relative to instructed responding is consistent with the different properties of contingency-governed and rule-governed behavior and is not rate-dependent.

Rule-Governed Behaviour

Rule-Governed Behaviour

Civic Humanism and Parliamentary Reform: The Case of the Society of the Friends of the People

The tradition of thought known as civic humanism has recently occupied the attention of a number of commentators. Not only has it been examined in the place of its birth, Renaissance Italy, and more especially Florence, but in a recent work J. G. A. Pocock has traced the influence of the tradition in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and finally in the New World. The question considered here is the particular use to which civic modes of thought and argument were put by a group of moderate reformers in the debates on parliamentary reform in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Although this period has received attention from social and constitutional historians, it has not been discussed by historians of ideas.Civic humanism is both an analysis of a political problem and a range of recommendations as to how the problem is best to be solved. The problem is defined in terms of the deleterious effects of time on political organization. Human organizations rely on the ordered and rule-governed behavior of individuals. Such behavior exhibits, over time, a constant tendency to disintegrate into selfish action. Political and legal institutions provide the immediate incentives to prevent this happening. Yet how can these institutions themselves be safeguarded or rendered self-regulating?The solution to the problem of achieving political stability through time is seen essentially as a moral solution, that is to say it is seen to lie in the creation of a particular set of attitudes towards political life amongst the citizens of the polity.

CONTINGENCY‐SHAPED AND RULE‐GOVERNED BEHAVIOR: INSTRUCTIONAL CONTROL OF HUMAN LOSS AVOIDANCE

Instructions can override the influence of programmed schedules of reinforcement. Although this finding has been interpreted as a limitation of reinforcement schedule control in humans, an alternative approach considers instructional control, itself, as a phenomenon determined by subjects' reinforcement histories. This approach was supported in a series of experiments that studied instructional and schedule control when instructions either did or did not accord with the schedule of reinforcement. Experiment I demonstrated that accurate instructions control discriminative performances on multiple avoidance schedules, and that such control persists in a novel discrimination. Experiments II and III showed that elimination of instruction-following occurs when inaccurate instructions cause subjects to contact a monetary loss contingency. Experiment IV demonstrated the reinforcing properties of accurate instructions. Skinner's view of rule-governed behavior is consistent with these findings, and can be extended to account for many aspects of instructional control of human operant behavior.

Behaviorism on Verstehen and Erklaren

Modern behaviorism has made significant progress in analyzing private behavior: cognition and emotion. The behavioral distinction between contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior establishes a starting point for analyzing tacit (subjective, private) knowledge and explicit (objective, public) knowledge. The present paper extends this analysis to include the issues of verstehen and erklaren. One subset of tacit knowledge is verstehen. Behavioral analysis (1) describes the special qualities of this type of tacit knowledge and (2) delineates the circumstances under which verstehen will occur and produce valid understanding. Modern behaviorism makes it possible to carry out a scientific analysis of the socialization experiences through which people learn to attach meaning to their thoughts, actions and emotions. Thus, modern behaviorism can generate an erltlarte understanding of the topic usually reserved for verstehen. Neither tacit nor explicit knowledge can replace the other, nor can verstehen and erklaren. Both are needed and natural components of human behavior. Since both are frequently intermeshed, rarely does one encounter a pure form of either.

Rule-Governed Behavior in a Syntactically Ruleless World

Rule-Governed Behavior in a Syntactically Ruleless World

Rule-governed behavior as a psychological process.

Rule-governed behavior as a psychological process.

Relationship between creativity, sex, and rule-orientation behavior.

The present study investigated how levels of rule-orientation behavior and sex relate to creative functioning. Thirty male and 30 female undergraduates were given the Arrow-Dot task in order to derive high and low levels of three rule-orientations: rule-governed, rule-violation, and rule-overconformity. Ss were also administered the Circles task in order to obtain indexes of originality and elaboration. Six 2 × 2 factorial analyses of variance, with originality and elaboration as dependent variables, sex and level of rule-orientation behavior as independent variables provided tests of three hypotheses: (1) females high in rule-governed behavior will be more creative than males high in rule-governed behavior, (2) females high in rule-violation behavior will manifest less creative ability than males high in rule-violation behavior, and (3) females showing high rule-overconformity behavior will be more creative than males high in rule-oversubscription. Statistically, the first hypothesis was partially confirmed as reflected in the main effects for rule-governed levels. Other hypotheses were not supported.

Observational learning of rule-governed behavior by children.

Observational learning of rule-governed behavior by children.

Current Issues in Psycholinguistics and Second Language Teaching

It is urged that there is no real conflict between the audiolingual and cognitive-code theories as applied to language teaching. It is false to make an opposition between rule-governed behavior and language habits. The notion of habit is, however, more general than that of rule, and is not as conceptually inadequate as sometimes claimed. The learning of second languages requires both the acquisition of knowledge about rules and the formation of the habits described by these rules. Language teaching procedures can be improved by application of psychological knowledge concerning the learning of language habits. It is stressed that situational meaning must be incorporated into language rules where it is applicable, and that the corresponding language habits must be made contingent upon these situational meanings.

Beyond Atomism and Holism—the Concept of the Holon

The concept of the holon is meant to supply the missing link between atomism and holism; and to supplant the dualistic way of thinking in terms of 'parts' and 'wholes', which is so deeply engrained in mental habits, by a multilevelled stratified approach. The term holon may be applied to any stable subwhole in an organismic, cognitive, or social hierarchy which displays rule-governed behaviour and/or structural gestalt constancy. Thus biological holons are self-regulating 'open systems' governed by a set of fixed rules which account for the holon's coherence, stability, and its specific pattern of structure and function. The holons which constitute an organismic or social hierarchy are Janus-faced entities: facing upward, towards the apex, they function as dependent parts of a larger whole facing downward. The opposite aspect of the holon is its integrative tendency to function as an integral part of an existing or evolving larger whole.

PRAVILIMA VOĐENA PONAŠANJA – DA LI IH ODREĐUJU SPOLJAŠNJE ILI UNUTRAŠNJE VARIJABLE?

Cilj ovog istraživanja jeste ispitivanje efekata spoljašnjih varijabli (vrsta instrukcije, promjena u kontekstu, redoslijed izlaganja stimulusa) i unutrašnje varijable (konformizam) na pravilima vođena ponašanja, tj. na slijeđenje disfunkcionalnog pravila i vrijeme reakcije prilikom davanja odgovora. U istraživanju su korištene tri vrste instrukcije: one koje u sebi sadrže nagradu, kaznu zadavanjem i kaznu oduzimanjem. Eksperiment je koncipiran tako da je u prvoj fazi pravilo bilo funkcionalno tj. dovodilo do osvajanja bodova, dok je bez najave u promjeni konteksta, u drugoj fazi, pravilo postalo disfunkcionalno – nije donosilo bodove. U eksperimentu je učestvovalo 94 studenta Univerziteta u Banjoj Luci, starosti od 19 do 21 godine, pri čemu je bilo više pripadnica ženskog pola (81).
 Dobijeni rezultati pokazuju da promjena konteksta u kome pravilo više nije funkcionalno, kao i informacija o nagradi u sklopu instrukcije, značajno povećava vjerovatnoću napuštanja disfunkcionalnog pravila, dok izraženiji konformizam, s druge strane, smanjuje vjerovatnoću napuštanja disfunkcionalnog pravila. Nadalje, rezultati pokazuju da postoje značajne dvostruke interakcije varijabli u predikciji slijeđenja pravila. Najviši logistički regresioni koeficijenti su dobijeni za interakcije spoljašnjih varijabli, tj. konteksta i vrste instrukcije, dok su za interakcije vrste instrukcije i konformizma, kao i konteksta i konformizma, vrijednosti logističkih regresionih koeficijenata nešto niži. Trostruke interakcije između unutrašnjih i spoljašnjih varijabli u predikciji slijeđenja pravila su takođe značajne. Promjena konteksta, manje izražen konformizam i informacija o nagradi u sklopu instrukcije povećavaju vjerovatnoću napuštanja disfunkcionalnog pravila, dok promjena konteksta u interakciji sa izraženijim konformizmom i informacijom o kazni oduzimanjem smanjuju vjerovatnoću napuštanja pravila. Na vrijeme reakcije efekat ostvaruju spoljašnje varijable, dok unutrašnja, tj. konformizam, ne ostvaruje značajan efekat. Promjena u kontekstu, kao i informacija o kazni oduzimanjem u sklopu instrukcije dovode do produžavanja vremena reagovanje, dok redoslijed izlaganja dovodi do njegovog skraćivanja.