Overview: By combining several of the strong features of behavioral science, we can create powerful synergies that will accelerate the development of our understanding of everyday life. A combined focus on both prosocial behavior and positive interventions helps people become happier and more creative. It also moves psychology away from "disease models," toward models that emphasize developing the best parts of the human potential. Linking studies from laboratory, clinical and natural environments promises to add another synergy, allowing us to benefit from the unique inputs from all three types of research. There is much to be learned in natural environments and they provide a promising growth area for the future. It is partially up to us to communicate these positive synergies with colleagues, students, and society as a whole. Arguments are given for emphasizing human freedom, because our science helps free people from aversives and empowers them to develop their human potential with positive tools.Introduction
Everyday life (25% of the way down)
"Common-Sense" Psychology (50% down)
BPEL (65% down)
Freedom (90% down)
References to all publications (95% down)Introduction
Entering the twenty-first century, many of us feel excited about the application of behavior principles to everyday life. There is much to be discovered, and this knowledge can help us share the philosophy and practice of positive social living with ever more people. As more and more people discover that behavior principles and behavior modification are far more powerful that other forms of psychological and social interventions, people in many sectors of society are realizing that behavioral strategies are well worth investigating and employing.
Let us suggest several strong points of the behavioral approach that--when taken together--give us reason to expect accelerating rates of success in the coming years. The more aware that people are of the numerous reasons for optimism, the better the chances are that they can entwine these multiple strong points into their own work and advance the science of positive living.
First, the bad old days: Freud and many other early psychologists were compulsively interested in mental illnesses, such as human psychoses and neuroses; and their theories were deeply infused with pessimistic assumptions about human nature--based on notions of illness, perversion and distorted mental functioning. For over a century, psychological research has focused far more attention on the abnormal, painful and bizarre aspects of human nature than on the healthy and positive aspects.
It is time for a reversal of many decades of negative bias in psychology--deriving from early overuse of "disease models" of the mind. It is time for us to study optimism, enthusiasm, kindness, love, generosity, courage, honesty, creativity and all the other healthy aspects of behavior--most of which flourish and grow under positive contingencies of reinforcement.
Cautela and Ishaq (1996) develop a closely related theme in their book, Contemporary Issues in Behavior Therapy: Improving the Human Condition. The subtitle captures an admirable behavioral project: Let us help people develop as many valuable skills as possible, with the goal of enhancing the quality of human life. Helping people see how they can improve their own lot in life--while treating others well--promises to improve the human condition. In addition, these positive goals can be attained without depleting the earth's nonrenewable natural resources or adding to pollution: It takes minimal material resources to enhance the greatest natural resource on the planet--the number of happy, prosocial and creative people.
When we arm people with knowledge of behavior principles, we help give them tools for learning any skills that they value. We also show them why prosocial behavior is so much more rewarding than antisocial behavior--and why positive learning methods are better than aversive ones. Ever since the Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, people have been aware of the value of using science to develop the human potential, but only in the past century have we discovered the behavioral tools that can empower growing numbers of people to actualize their human potentials. Every person who learns to follow this positive, growth-oriented way of life then serves as a role model who makes it easier for others to learn the art of positive living and learning.
Positive behavioral interventions are well suited for developing the human potential for behaviors that are both personally gratifying and socially constructive. Even two decades ago, Mussen and Eisenberg-Berg's (1977) book, Roots of Caring, Sharing and Helping, showed that behavioral and social learning theories provided the best tools for helping children and adults learn prosocial habits. We know that whining, pouting, aggression, self-injurious behavior and other dysfunctional behavior can result from misplaced positive social attention. Why not direct our positive social attention to desirable behavior and help each individual get maximum support for learning creative and prosocial behavior. These positive behaviors tend to be incompatible with antisocial and disruptive behavior; hence, the differential reinforcement of prosocial behavior can thwart the emergence and continuance of problematic behavior.
Watson and Tharp's (1999) Self-Directed Behavior, Logue's (1995) Self-Control, and other related books show people how to become personal scientists who can study their own behavior, plan interventions, assess their progress and improve on their earlier interventions. In addition, there are valuable books from a behavioral perspective on having better relationships, happier marriages, doing positive parenting, and running organizations more cooperatively.
Everyday Life
Although behavioral science began with detailed laboratory research, it has expanded into clinical and natural settings. We suggest that applying positive behavioral interventions in everyday life is potentially a major growth area for the future.
Behavioral research has made great strides in laboratory settings, and will doubtlessly continue to do so in the future, since carefully controlled experiments and observations are easiest to obtain in laboratories. As laboratory findings were tested in clinical settings, behavior science proved that it could grow beyond laboratory settings. Increasingly, behavioral interventions are being taken into natural settings--such as classrooms, family and marriage relationships, sex therapy, self-direction, community activities, business organizations and government policy making--where they are being successfully implemented.
Admittedly, everyday settings are much messier and more complex than laboratory and clinical environments; and this may deter behavioral practitioners who value strict experimental control from entering them. But the complexity of natural settings creates an exciting behavioral caldron that stimulates many questions about behavior and raises countless hypotheses that can enrich laboratory, clinical and field research. If we allow laboratory, clinical and field research to develop in isolation, we are weaker and will develop more slowly than if we attempt to integrate all the parts into a powerful whole.
Studies of everyday life can interlock nicely with laboratory and clinical research by focusing us on behavior that is crucial for helping people function at their best in the multifaceted contingencies of their everyday surroundings. The better we understand the labyrinthine complexities that people face in reaching valuable goals in their personal lives, the better we can design positive behavioral interventions that they will find useful. Every step we make in helping people attain better lives is likely to win more support for our discipline, including the grant support needed to advance laboratory, clinical and field research on many important behavioral topics.
Some behaviorists are reluctant to generalize behavioral principles to natural environments, since experimental control and empirical research are weak there. But there are two strong reasons for overcoming that reluctance to apply our science to natural settings.
First, Skinner was not reluctant to generalize his science far beyond his database, yet his work was an enormous catalyst for the advance of our science. In Walden Two, Science and Human Behavior, and About Behaviorism, Skinner (1948, 1953, 1974) clearly showed how deeply interested he was in applying behavioral analyses and interventions to many facets of society. These and other of Skinner's books contained numerous examples from everyday life. They interested people from many disciplines in applying functional analyses of behavior to a broad range of topics. Modern behaviorists have vastly more empirical data than Skinner did--from laboratory, clinical and natural settings--to support analyses of everyday life; thus, we should be less reluctant than he to grapple with the complexities of everyday life.
Second, our competitors feel little compunction about using their theories to analyze everyday life. Freudians have not felt inhibited about extending their theories to interpret the lives of world famous individuals and common people, fearlessly projecting their theories onto others. Medical doctors still ask patients about their "libido," as if this Freudian term explains the causes of sexual interest and arousal. Many people believe they must recapture their childhood memories and psychoanalyze the earliest sources of psychic pains and traumas to gain insight--even though psychoanalysis has not been proven to give them release from the pain, psychic distress or maladaptive behaviors. Behaviorists can do better than Freudians at helping people understand their emotions and actions, past and present, so why not do it?
Sociobiologists also display few inhibitions about writing articles and books with their analyses of sexual behavior--as if evolution were the only cause of behavior. In so doing, they teach people misconceptions about the nature of male and female psychology--most of which are not supported by the empirical research on sex and gender. Cognitive psychologists write about "cognitive dissonance," "insufficient justification," "internal motivation" and much more--as if these cognitive variables explained the crucial aspects of life. Popular psychology still instructs people to "go with their feelings" and do what people taught them to do in Kindergarten. Since most people believe that cognitions and gut feelings control their lives, these assertions seem reasonable to many readers.
Behavioral psychology can offer much more modern and empirically defensible theories to explain the details of everyday life than can the other disciplines. We need to study behavior in natural environments and write about the cognitions, emotions and behaviors that people experience in their daily lives from a behavioral perspective. The fact that behavioral science has demanded--and been rewarded for using--experimental control in laboratory and clinic should not deter us from expanding our science into less controlled environments. We can do better than our competition.
"Common-Sense" Psychology
Having studied behavior in natural environments for 30 years, we are impressed by how few people talk in terms of the "consequences" or "outcomes" of their behavior. Most people verbalize about behavior in prescientific terms. They rely on "folk knowledge" and "common sense" to regulate their behavior. Common sense is useful at times: "A stitch in time saves nine." But people could have much fuller and rewarding lives if they had access to the scientific information developed over recent decades of careful behavioral research.
Then we listen to people's "common-sense" psychology, we often hear belief's in "ventilating anger" and "having emotional catharses," as if it would be healthy to "purge evil spirits from the body." Repressing or modifying any basic animal urges or preponent responses seems unthinkable to many people, as if they might then explode because they did not "release" the first behavior that came to them. Behavioral research reveals that "ventilating" anger and aggression often reinforces these behaviors, rather than defusing them. It often hurts the innocent people or pets on whom we ventilate our angry emotions. Is there a better way?
Common-sense psychology is full of inaccurate information. What should we do? We encourage behaviorists to realize that highly controlled experimental analyses of behavior are incredibly valuable, but we should also venture into complex natural environments and deal with everyday problems. It is within our grasp and is well worth doing.
As behavioral science expands further into everyday settings, those of us who were trained in laboratory and clinical settings need to be sensitized to behavior principles as they appear in natural environments. We hope our book, Behavior Principles in Everyday Life (Baldwin and Baldwin, 2001) can help behaviorists and their students to see the multiple ways our science applies to everyday life. It gives readers hundreds of everyday examples that help them learn to describe daily life using a behavioral vocabulary, which trains the verbal skills for analyzing daily experiences behaviorally. As people learn to verbalize about their lives behaviorally, it is easier for them to do functional analyses of the antecedents and consequences surrounding daily activities. This lays the foundation for asking countless questions about daily practices: Are people treating their friends, lovers, spouses or children as well as they could? What practices might be better? Many people could learn to create more positive behavioral interventions if given the tools.
Let us help people learn how to think in terms of positive psychology and social science. The more we share our behavioral knowledge of everyday life, the more that others will learn to talk and think in these terms.
Step by step, a little at a time, we can augment people's "common sense' with behavioral knowledge. Historical research shows that "common sense" and "folk knowledge" are always in flux and changing over time. For example, the past decades have seen a gradual shift away from Victorian and Freudian styles of child rearing--toward greater use of positive consequences, time-out and prosocial role models. The more broadly we spread knowledge of our science of positive behavioral interventions, the more that such scientific information can displace the prescientific knowledge from culture. This has happened in other sciences, advancing the social evolution of empirically justified folk knowledge: Today, many nonscientists know a great deal about lasers, computers, and navigating through cyberspace--things that were not common knowledge just a few decades ago.
People are eager to learn about new medications that reduce pain, infection, or sexual problems. They become interested in behavior principles when we show how this knowledge helps people create more rewarding friendships, intimate relationships and happy marriages; how it can improve child rearing, education and therapy; and how it advances human creativity, problem solving and self-understanding. Why not teach broadly-oriented courses that attract many interested students who can use learning principles when they become our future teachers, counselors, doctors, nurses, business people, coaches, physical therapists--and college professors? Why not resolve to write more for nonprofessionals who could benefit from behavioral knowledge, then reward ourselves for each success! If we do not act to modify our culture, we may see people "ventilating," "sublimating," and "having catharses" for many years to come.
Behavior Principles in Everyday Life
As we have written and rewritten our book, Behavior Principles in Everyday Life, we have actively sought student inputs on all aspects of the book's content and style. Inputs from students and reviewers have firmly convinced us that most students find it easiest to learn behavior principles by studying concrete examples from natural settings, starting with the easiest principles and gradually moving to more complex ones. Teaching with everyday life examples gives students a comfortable foundation on which to stand: They can focus on the behavioral principles without having to know the complex vocabularies or procedures used in laboratory or clinical research. Our students report having numerous exciting "Eureka!" experiences--which they describe as positive reinforcers--as they read behavioral material about their own lives. "So that's why I do that!" People who are allowed to see functional analyses of their own lives can experience frequent and immediate positive reinforcement for learning our science--with minimal costs.
People from many walks of life can benefit from learning behavioral principles. Most people care about several of the following aspects of life: friendship, love, marriage, family, child rearing, education, decision making, athletics or business. We can communicate behavior principles best by repeatedly showing how people can apply learning principles to all of the behaviors and situations people value, because they are already motivated to learn knowledge that could be useful to them. And at the most abstract level, we know that sharing knowledge about positive behavioral interventions will help our science be used more widely, which will enrich many people's lives and improve the human condition.
As the information revolution accelerates and allows ever more people to access all types of knowledge, the practicality of our science should make it increasingly appealing to people in every sector of life where we successfully demonstrate its utility. It is up to us to explain the uses of our science through every medium we can.
Most people believe: "You only live once." Today, people have average life expectancies of 70 to 85 years. Some people will have years of pleasure, while others have years of pain. We can share the knowledge of behavior principles so that people gain the power to direct their behavior toward something of beauty.
In an important sense, life is an art form, and we all can create something beautiful or grotesque. Behaviorists are in a position to tell people, "Life is like a canvas and you are the artists. You can create a beautiful canvas or slash it to shreds. Why not learn the behavior principles that are useful in creating beautiful behaviors and relationships."
By emphasizing the positive goals of life, we can help people learn to minimize the use of aversive control. Because prosocial behavior is usually incompatible with antisocial and destructive behavior, teaching people to value positive, creative and prosocial behavior is a form of DRI--Differential Reinforcement of Incompatible Behavior. People who have learned to fill most of the hours of their lives with friendly, caring, helpful and creative activities develop lifestyles that are incompatible with doing antisocial behavior; hence they rarely need to be reprimanded, jailed or punished. Teachers, aids, social workers, researchers and writers without advanced knowledge of behavior principles can avoid many prescientific temptations to fall back on aversive control. When people learn to use DRI and reinforce multiple prosocial behaviors, they in turn are rewarded as they observe increases in prosocial behavior and declines in antisocial behavior.
Freedom
If we wish to shift from aversive control to more positive interventions, let us focus on freedom. Our science allows people to learn the tools for improving the human condition, developing greater self-efficacy, while taking control of their personal and social lives. Behavior science helps people become free from pain and free to attain more rewarding futures.
Behavioral science has helped people gain more tools for making wise behavioral decisions--and attaining lasting behavioral changes--than any other branch of psychology. Behavioral interventions advance human freedom, as defined by freedom from pain and suffering. They can also help people gain the power to make wise and informed choices about their future behavior, then learn how to modify their behavior to reach their personal goals. It is important for us to emphasize the humanistic side of our science--our capacity for improving the human condition. Each and every individual who learns how better do develop his or her human potential benefits by having a fuller and happier life. Our whole society--and planet earth--benefits from encouraging more and more people to develop their potential and contribute to bettering the human condition.
References
Cautela, J.R., & Ishaq, W. (Eds.). (1996). Contemporary issues in behavior therapy: Improving the human condition. New York: Plenum Press.
Baldwin, J.D., & Baldwin, J.I. (2001). Behavior principles in everyday life (4th edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Logue, A.W. (1995). Self-control: Waiting until tomorrow for what you want today. Upper-Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Mussen, P., & Eisenberg-Berg, N. (1977).Roots of caring, sharing and helping. San Francisco: Freeman.
Skinner, B.F. (1948). Walden two. New York: Macmillan.
Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan.
Skinner, B.F. (1974). About behaviorism. New York: Knopf.
Watson, D.L., & Tharp, R.G. (1997). Self-directed behavior (7th edition). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
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