TOWARD A CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL PROBLEMS: ETHICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES RAISED BY APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

Despite the difficulty of describing its exact shape, one should have no difficulty in describing what behavior modification is not. Psychosurgery, for example, is not one of the chapter headings in a textbook on experimental psychology, nor are learning psychologists licensed in its use. By the same token, many of the other practices currently ascribed to behavior modification do not fall within its domain.

Popular confusion stems partly from the fact that "behavior can be changed, or modified" by a variety of techniques, including drugs, hypnosis, aversive therapy, rewards and punishments, implanted electrodes, and psychosurgery.52 Since all of these can modify behavior, the popular press then labels them as behavior modification techniques. However, it should be noted that behavior can be changed or modified by psychoanalysis, Gestalt therapy, primal screams, lectures, books, jobs, religion. By the same logic, these must also be included in the definition of behavior modification techniques. Like the frog in Aesop's fable, the definition has become so inflated, it has burst.

What partially underlies this particular confusion is a failure to distinguish between dependent and independent variables53 (or effects and causes) on the one hand, and control and analysis, on the other.

A dependent variable may be a function of a variety of different independent variables, and the same effect may be produced by a variety of different causes. The direction of motion by a sphere may be a function of gravitational forces, of remote control by radio, of control by the navigators within, or of other variables or causes. To designate all of these, therefore, as directional techniques, and therefore to assume some similarity between them other than the trivial observation noted is questionable. To designate all of them by the properties of one, e.g., attractional techniques, or of more than one, e.g., guidance techniques, suggests either confusion or sloganeering for ulterior purposes ("Travel with Interplanetary: our navigators are as dependable as gravity.").

Because one can analyze the data by the same conceptual system does not mean that the same (conceptually derivative) control system is involved. Because the movements of the sphere and the flying of a kite may both be comprehended by the same scientific discipline, physics, does not make the boy flying the kite an engineer or other kind of applied physicist-although the navigator may well be an engineer. And the boy needs know no physics to fly or construct his kite. Indeed, when he makes a new one, he may strain the predictive and analytic knowledge of his physicist father.54

Accordingly, with regard to the first source of confusion, namely, dependent and independent variables, just because some procedure can be used to modify behavior does not make it a behavior modification technique. Psychoanalytic therapy and behavior therapy can both be used to modify behavior, but since they employ different conceptual schemes which harness their independent variables differently, they are not both behavior modification techniques. Behavior modification refers only to that body of procedures and conceptual systems derivable from experimental psychology or experimental learning theory. The reader is referred to Bandura (1969) for what these might be and to the sharply divergent approaches presented. Stances taken and procedures deployed by one school may not therefore legitimately be used to designate the stances and procedures of another.55 To take a more familiar example-because psychoanalytic and nondirective therapies both appear in a book called Psychotherapy similarly does not legitimize designating the stances and procedures of one by the other. In this article I am taking a stance for applied behavior analysis, which is one particular orientation and approach, and is only one among the range of approaches appearing between Bandura's covers.