Religious behaviors as strategies for organizing groups of people: A social contingency analysis

Análise comportamental do discurso: fundamentos e método

Este estudo descreve uma Análise Comportamental do Discurso (ACD), apresenta seus fundamentos e um método para efetivá-la, inferido de O Comportamento Verbal, de Skinner. Propõe a tese de que a ACD possa ser uma vertente de Análise do Discurso (AD), devido aos seus fundamentos epistemológicos: anti-mentalismo, anti-realismo e contextualismo. Discurso é um conjunto de comportamentos verbais sob controle das contingências de reforço (históricas e atuais) cujo sentido advém desse controle. Ao construir seu discurso, o falante combina operantes essenciais (mandos e tatos) em grupos temáticos intraverbais (emitidos às vezes como se fossem tatos) que são modificados com autoclíticos apropriados.

Language use as Social Strategy: A Review and an Analytic Framework for the Social Sciences

Language use as a social strategy is reviewed and a new interdisciplinary taxonomy developed. Four categories are suggested for using language: to get people to do things, to get people to say things, to keep people's attention, and to maintain social relationships. Within these categories, all of the discourse and conversational analysis literatures are reviewed, allowing a common framework within which to make more systematic analyses. Reinterpretations of psychological theories are suggested, and fresh avenues for interdisciplinary research are created. A major imperative from the review is that some form of ethnographic data collection is needed for all analyses of conversations and texts to incorporate more of the social, economic, historical, and cultural contexts into both our observations and theorizing.

Social behaviors as determined by different arrangements of social consequences: diffusion of responsibility effects with competition

According to a recently proposed synthesis, social loafing, social facilitation, and deindividuation can be viewed as different ways of arranging social consequences (B. Guerin, 1999). The effects of such arrangements have been measured in past research as productive output (social loafing and social facilitation) or as antinormative behaviors (deindividuation), but all 3 effects are manipulable by changing individual identifiability, evaluation, social identity, task difficulty, and presence in a group. The synthesis also predicted that these same variables would apply to other measures and other arrangements of social consequences. To this end, in the present 2 experiments, the author varied the arrangements for consequence diffusion in a competition situation by varying small and large competing groups and measured productive output and antinormative behaviors simultaneously. The 2 experiments showed social-consequence effects in competition situations with college students, giving further support for the social-consequence synthesis and the idea that the verbal naming of phenomena in social psychology is arbitrary.

Individuals as Social Relationships: 18 Ways that Acting Alone can be thought of as Social Behavior

This article argues to replace individualistic explanations of behavior with descriptions of social and historical context. Eighteen ways are outlined that playing a guitar alone in a room can be thought of as socially controlled rather than dispositionally controlled. Despite having a skin containing a body, a “person” for the social sciences is a conglomerate of social relationships or interactions that spans space and time. Thinking of people and causes as within a body shapes individualistic biases in our explanations and interventions. Rather than propose a new philosophy, this article reviews 18 concrete ways to begin thinking about people as social interactions and not agentic individuals. This changes the interventions we propose, alters how we view cultural practices, prevents some perennial problems of psychology, and leads the way to integrate psychology in the social sciences. Moving from dispositional explanations to study the historical and social context of social relationships also requires that psychology seriously adapt some of the more intensive research methods from other social sciences.

Following rules in the intermontane west: 19th-century mormon settlement

The academic discipline of human geography is concerned with human activities, especially as these relate to physical landscapes and contribute to the modification of those landscapes. Although little attention has been paid to objectivist philosophies to inform human geography, behavior analysis might offer a useful explanatory model. As an example, a behavior analysis of selected aspects of 19th-century Mormon movement and settlement in the intermontane West is conducted. Mormons are a society of believers who practice cooperative effort and support for other members, and the Mormon church is governed by priesthood authority with members being called to perform tasks. This analysis employs the concepts of metacontingency, rule-governed behavior, and delayed reinforcement to analyze how Mormons settled the intermontane West.

Replacing Catharsis and Uncertainty Reduction Theories with Descriptions of Historical and Social Context

Many explanations in psychology rely on notions of catharsis, drive reduction, or uncertainty reduction. This article criticizes such notions and suggests 3 ways that such theories can be replaced to make the phenomena events of social life rather than “inner” events: They have hidden social events as their conditions for occurrence; they are the result of conflicting social demands; and they function as good conversational rhetoric. Seven examples are given in detail, including the reduction in anxiety about life through religion, the cognitive psychology assumption of uncertainty reduction through categorization, and the reduction in anxiety resulting from making rumors. Relying on descriptions of historical and social context rather than on theories of catharsis provides a better basis for applied interventions and integration into the social sciences but requires that psychologists pay much more attention to measuring such details.