מדעי ההתנהגות כמדע (ד"ר הנרי שלינגר)

BEHAVIOUR ANALYSIS: A NATURAL SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOUR There are a number of different sciences that study behavior. Behavior Analysis is one of them. For example there are people who study the effects of genes on behavior, there are people who study the effects of the brain and the nervous system on behavior. Behavior Analysis studies the effects of environment on behavior and I would call Behavior Analysis a natural science, and by the way, the Natural Sciences are: Chemistry, Physics and Biology typically. Psychology is never considered to be a natural science. Behavior Analysis is natural science because It focuses on objective observable events and it looks for causes that are physical, unlike Psychology, which often focuses on mental or cognitive events and causes that or mental or cognitive and those are not objective events and depending upon whom you talk to they’re not physical either.

00:51 - So, when I say that Behavior Analysis studies the effects of environment on behavior I need to tell you what I mean by environment, because it’s a different view than what most people have. If you ask people to define environment most people will tell you it’s someone’s surroundings. But a behavioral view of environment is all of the ‘stimuli’ that affect behavior in a given moment. Now, that’s not a technical definition but it’s a very thorough definition. So by ‘stimuli’ we really are talking about stimulus changes, so we’re talking about sound waves, light waves, etc.

01:23 - and we’re talking about the effects of those stimuli on behavior at a given moment and there are three implications of that definition of environment that are really profound. The first implication is that the environment is not just your surroundings but it’s inside you as well. Because if environment includes all stimuli that affect your behavior well some ‘stimuli’ are inside you for example, if you have pain inside you, or if you eat a meal, you feel pressure inside you. Well, that’s part of your environment as well. So this notion that environment is only outside you is not correct.

01:53 - A second important implication of the definition is that your environment is constantly changing. And by that I mean a moment to moment. The environment appears to be static for the most part to most people but if you know how to look at it it’s in changing every moment. I mean, there are different stimulus changes that affect you every moment. So it’s very fluid, as is your behavior. So we have behavior, which is very fluid, changing moment to moment, and environment which is very fluent, changing moment to moment, which makes studying those relationships very complicated. The third implication of the definition of environment is that no two people share the same environment and this is funny because people often ask me, parents will often say: “I have three kids and they all grew up in the same environment, but they turned out so different.

” 02:39 - The implication is that they must have turned out differently because they have different genes, since they were raised in the same environment, but of course based upon the definition of environment that we operate under, no two people can have the same environment because no two people have the exact same ‘stimuli’ that affect their behavior at any given moment. So… Behavior Analysis is a Natural Science of the effects of environment on behavior. Environment defines the way that I just defined it. .