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

11 The inscription on the Liberty Bell, rung July 8, 1776, is from Leviticus: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" (25:10).

12 It has been argued that due process is applied in mental institutions through procedures which include medical diagnosis; that the constitutionally required limitation and explicitness of governmental action are limited to punitive rather than therapeutic action; and that therefore the total properties of total therapeutic institutions are not unconstitutional. Further, the deprivations are an outcome of civil rather than criminal action. However, the police power of the state is used to enforce compliance.

13 The assumption of parental roles, and therefore the assignment of child roles to patients, is not restricted to mental institutions. I recall an incident during my stay in a rehabilitation center following spinal injury. I was lying on a mobile cot waiting for an elevator, and was reading (it so happened) the Journal of applied behavior analysis, which had just arrived. A friendly student nurse came by and pulled the journal out of my hand, commenting cheerfully: "Oh! What are you reading?" (Goldiamond, in press). The student nurse (who was 20; I was then 50), it should be stressed, regarded her behavior as friendly. I have, unfortunately, also seen less friendly treatments when the roles described were assumed. The temptation to assume them is especially strong in chronic care institutions, which tend toward total properties.

The justification often given for this role is of protection from damage to others or self. While it is true that some people are liable to damage others, and some are liable to be thankful later that they were restrained from self-harm, the extent to which this liability extends to all patients is questionable, as is the practice of projecting the corollary treatment rationale to all patients.

14 Stent (1972) in his provocative discussion of "Prematurity and the uniqueness in scientific discovery," that is, why an idea will not he accepted at one time, hut will sweep the field at another, offers a structural explanation, i,e., scientific rejection or acceptance is explained by the structure of the scientist's "mind [for which] reality is a set of structural transforms of primary data taken from the world. This transformation is hierarchical, in that 'stronger' structures are formed from 'weaker' Structures through destruction of information" (pp. 92-93). I am suggesting a functional approach, in which acceptance and rejection are relatabe to the social contingencies of which they are a part. Needless to say, these can he highly complex and are not simply described by a one-to-one correspondence between changes in social requirements and changes in ideologies and the proportion of adherents, Indeed, clinical and laboratory observation of human behavior, and much earlier (as well as present) animal work support the complexity of the relation between even simple behaviors, their contingencies, and the conditions of the investigation. Nor should it be assumed that models and ideologies do not control behavior, in the same sense that we speak of "stimulus control" when we discuss discriminative stimuli. Like other discriminative stimuli, ideologies will control behavior not by virtue of their presence or repetition, but by the consequences contingent on behaviors in their presence, In this sense, rather than being simple S^sup D^s, they are closer to that class I have designated elsewhere as providing "abstractional" or "instructional control" (Goldiamond, 1965), The statement, "There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come" translates into the power of an "idea which rationalizes contingencies whose time has come" or increases their probability.