Abstract
Despite extensive theoretical development, there is a lack of consensus in the metacontingency enterprise on the extent to which current metacontingency constructs describe experimental happenings. The purpose of this article is to provide an interbehavioral analysis of the metacontingency enterprise that examines relations between description and experimentation in order to facilitate research on cultural selection occurring through metacontingencies. In particular, this article considers how stimulus functions of descriptions of metacontingency constructs participate in metacontingency experiments in terms of specificity, types of analysis, levels of analysis, and procedures. The extent to which experimental findings are able to be described in terms of metacontingency constructs is assessed. Prominent events and relations demonstrated by metacontingency experiments are summarized and discussed, as well as inconsistencies between relations described and relations constructed based on events observed. Recommendations for experimental and descriptive adjustments are offered. Although this analysis may or may not have any bearing on the metacontingency enterprise, it may serve as a template for conducting interbehavioral analyses of activities in other enterprises, if not more analyses of the metacontingency enterprise.
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Notes
Events of study are discussed rather than objects because (1) observing objects constitute events and (2) behavioral and cultural “objects” of study are always events.
See Kantor (1958) for a more elaborate representation.
In his description, dependency relations are described as occurrence-contingencies and functional relations are described as function-contingencies.
Whether such events can acquire reinforcing properties is informed by molecular and molar orientations (see Baum, 1973, for a discussion).
When one contends that patterns of behavior can be reinforced (Baum, 2004; Locey & Rachlin, 2013), a coordinated operant contingency model only provides additional utility in demonstrating how reinforcing events are contingent on multiple environmental alterations that can acquire discriminative or reinforcing functions, which may be parsed for analytical purposes.
This may have been demonstrated if participants could only choose from one of three tokens—each of a different color—on any given trial. Although the authors state that tokens were only of one of three colors in Experiment 1, they did not state how many tokens participants could choose from.
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Fleming, W., Hayes, L.J. Relations between Description and Experimentation in the Metacontingency Enterprise: An Interbehavioral Analysis. Perspect Behav Sci 44, 417–472 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-021-00286-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-021-00286-y