An extended life: Tribute to Howard Rachlin

03Original abstract

Zusammenfassen is a German word that means “to summarize”, but its parts add up to more than its whole. Fassen means to take hold of; and Zusammen means bring together. We bring together in this special issue papers that take hold of parts of the legacy of Howard Rachlin. But there is no way to summarize his work. It is too diverse, too protean, too creative. Perusing these articles, as enriching as that will be, cannot tell you why its authors and so many others revere Howard Rachlin for his seminal contributions, and for himself. It cannot tell you why, in our esteem, he is noble. But it will give you an idea. Figure 1 pictures him and his lifelong partner Nahid, whose love may have given him his first inkling of an extended self. Rachlin made pioneering contributions in behavioral economics, choice and decision-making, self-control, delay-, probability-, and social-discounting, along with his early work on aversive control. He threw new light on social dilemmas. All of these find resonance in this special issue. In the last half of his life, Rachlin recognized that the proper study of behavior is the study of extended patterns of stimuli and responses: a symphony, not a C#; framing a house, not swinging a hammer. This insight led to his teleological behaviorism (TeB). Rather than deny the importance of mind, he embodied it as extended patterns of behavior, around which the more molecular components were organized. The term telos means aim, or goal. For Rachlin the telos of the C# was a Beethoven symphony. The telos of the papers in this collection is a symphony composed of his works and the extended patterns of his life. Another under-hyphenated German word is Festschrift. This special issue constitutes a written (Schrift) celebration (Fest)—a commemoration—of Rachlin. We celebrate Howie Rachlin, a gentle force of nature, who spent his life attempting to unravel the behavioral enigmas that we still confront. Howie's contribution to this Fest has been his new perspectives on behavior writ large, leading to a radically novel conception of behavior as a whole. What we acolytes bring to this celebration are echoes of his ideas, reshaped as they resonated in our life, and in that of our intellectual community. The first contributions to this Schrift are pictures of the man himself, in his own words, from an interview given by Carsta Simon a decade ago; and a satellite's image of the landscape of Rachlin's intellectual life taken by Matt Locey, taken just now. Intellectual contributions and extensions are often too rarefied to give a sense of the human behind the work. We lead with these articles to bring the soul of Rachlin (another extended pattern, of course) to bear on all of the subsequent papers. The epigraph to Rachlin's last book, Escape of the Mind, was an observation of Wittgenstein's, one that provides a synopsis, both of the book's major point, and of Rachlin's philosophy of behavior: If one sees the behavior of a living thing, one sees its soul. What is particularly special about the interview is how one can almost hear Rachlin's voice, can almost touch his soul. To construe how the pieces in this Schrift fit into the pattern of Rachlin's scientific life, you will find no better map than the one provided by Matt Locey. Locey divides that life into four epochs, each with their characteristic patterns, moving from empirical work on matching, punishment, and self-control, through behavioral economics and philosophy, to social discounting and Rachlin's capstone theory, TeB. Locey's is a most evocative and illuminating read. It includes a beautiful tree of students and colleagues, extended to their students, and to theirs in turn. This is a fitting companion piece to Simon's, with hers giving a personal in-depth picture, and Matt's giving a grand overview and evaluation of Howard's scientific oeuvre. It has been said that God is in the details. It has been said that the Devil is in the details. Somehow, in those tight spaces, they manage to avoid each other. As scientists, however, we engage both of these dual aspects of details—of data. Grand theories and philosophies can be beautiful things, but as scientists we seek their grounding in data, without which they are at best art; estimable, but entertainment only. We find salvation in data, and in theories based on data, which organize and possibly explain them. But here is where we are likely to trip over the Devil: Theories and models must be simpler than the data they explain. What is left out of their accounts may be unimportant, idiosyncratic; or may come to be recognized as a Devil's work, a fatal flaw for that account. Empiricists, and especially those mapping their data to models, execute a fine balancing act, from experimental question, its context, experimental design, data selection, analysis, to interpretation. This requires both skill and sweat. It is what makes science more than entertainment. Rachlin excelled both at the hard work of the laboratory, and the pensive work of the study. This Schrift will illuminate these dual aspects of his contributions. == Behaviorists sometimes find themselves in the shadow of giants from nearby fields. Daniel Kahneman, a cognitive psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his and Amos Tversky's work in behavioral economics and decision-making. They showed that decisions are often illogical, and even irrational, by current standards of logic and rationality (Lewis, 2017). The contribution by McKerchar and Mazur gets at least one of our feet out of that shadow. In replicating some of Tversky and Kahneman's classic work, their systematic use of the discounting paradigm generated data that ruled out explanation of the framing effects as explicable by either absolute or relative accounting. They were able to bring a nonstandard theory to bear on their data, which provided an excellent description of them. This extrapolation of Kahneman and Tversky's results also addressed the crucial issue of opportunity cost, which as one might expect, plays an important role in decisions. The Devil enters, stage-left. Research on delay discounting is often characterized by stories such as “A person confronts a choice between another slice of pie/another cigarette/another cocktail/unprotected sex/all of the above, versus a longer/healthier/happier life.” This frames the decision as between two positive goods. It is conceivable, is it not, that the participants interpret the question as a choice between an immediate good and a delayed bad? “Longer/healthier/happier” are vague concepts (unless of course they mean endless pie, booze and sex, a lusty Viking large-late heaven). Many people have given up cigarettes, not to get “a healthier life”—but because of the fear of lung cancer or associated calamities (Premack, 2017); they have given up overindulgence, facing the specter of the obese, diabetic, alcoholic with STD they could be in Christmas Future. Does this reframing—from a diffuse delayed positive, to a concrete delayed negative—change anything? You bet it does (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). The Washington University team, here led by Sarah Estle, untangles this interaction, and shows that a small immediate gain associated with a delayed loss (think cig now + emphysema later) significantly changes the operating characteristics of that loss. If you indulge in any of the Viking goods, you should read this article. Among Rachlin's most innovative offerings was his demonstration that the amount of money a person would provide to another individual varied as a hyperbolic function of the social distance between the two: A person will provide more to a close relative than a distant acquaintance. Battaglia and Romanowich extended Rachlin's social distance research to show that the propensity to share different types of personal information, such as one's finances or health, varied as a similar function of social distance. The researchers conclude that Rachlin's social discounting task can assess the propensity to share computer-based personal information. This is an important generalization of Rachlin and students' original extension of discounting to the social realm, adding another extension—from money to the commodity called information. Not unimportant in this media-modulated world, we suspect. Marshmallow tests for rats!!! Haynes and colleagues consider the following question. According to the standard hyperbolic model of intertemporal choice, once the larger later (LL) is chosen, animals should stick with it. But if given the opportunity to defect and eat the marshmallow, many often will. How to account for that? Rachlin's hypothesis was that the animal's sense of the delay to the LL was not fixed, but rather that it was sampled from a distribution around the true delay from any point in the interval. So sometimes it could seem farther way—and thus defection is sensible. If that is true, then pretraining with temporal intervals to reduce the variance around the expected delay through the interval should reduce the number of defections. Will it? No marshmallows here—turn to the article for a more nutritious read. Rachlin later fundamentally reconceptualized how we might think about self-control. He recognized that choices in the world involve far greater complexity and nuance than are captured by the binary options we offer our subjects. It's not the particular choice of whether or not to smoke that cigarette at that moment that matters, but rather the pattern of choices over time. We may be able to produce successful, long-term effective control of current behavior by their enduring consequences if we can weave that behavior into a pattern. Arfer took the challenge, extending the patterning hypothesis from delay to risky choice. Does the beautiful theory survive experimental test? Take bets and wait to see! To Match or to Maximize, that is the Question! … Strange question, though, isn't it? But as Gene Heyman shows us, it is a critical question when contemplating one of the causes of the parlous state of our world, overconsumption. Heyman shows, counterintuitively, that the Matching Law can lead to overconsumption. The regnant economic models involve bundling of commodities, which make other predictions. Heyman's analysis helps explain why efforts to increase consumption are so often more effective than those to constrain it. Read the article to know what drives your behavior; where it drives it; and how you might get off of that highway. One needs to take the good with the bad, they say. Rachlin's innovative and theoretically significant work on punishment was evident in his early publications, where pigeons had to take the bad with the good. Rachlin argued persuasively that punishment was the opposite of reinforcement: That they were symmetrical operations. This was against a literature arguing that they were asymmetrical, with punishment, unlike reinforcement, having transient suppressive effects with a rebound in responses once it is removed. Which is it? Shahan and crew set out to determine. We encourage readers to understand this old question, one of current relevance, through this paper's review of the issues. In carefully designed conditions, the authors supported one of the positions. Which one? The results may shock you, but at the same time be quite rewarding. Theories are machines that put data into correspondence with models. They select the kinds of data that are relevant and the kinds of models that are kosher (Hestenes, 1992). They also typically offer a broad-brush account that is accessible to nonexperts. Theoreticians are often occupied creating and testing ways of representing the facts delivered by empiricists. In this section you will see theoreticians evaluating representations of selection, volition, and choice of delayed and probabilistic goods. All of these have roots in the work of Rachlin. == You know about artificial intelligence, artificial neural-nets, and may have heard about artificial life. Read McDowell and co-workers' article to learn about artificial behavior emitted by artificial organisms (AOs). The authors conducted experiments with AOs, so perhaps we should have slotted this as an empirical article. Since no IRB was involved, however, we decided that it was theoretical. Do not let artificial mislead you though; these are the real things, hand-made and high quality. In a long line of research, McDowell and students have shown that from simple rules of variation and selection and genetic mixing (as happens in the creation of new generations of animals by blending the genes of parents), surprising behavioral patterns emerge. This article replicates the conditions observed in published studies where VI and VR punishment schedules were superimposed on VI schedules of reinforcement; the AOs, surprisingly, replicate behavioral data. Why “surprisingly”? Because there was no tweaking of the basic program to get these results: They were “out of the box”. If this leaves some of you scratching your heads about their behavior, watch out! In a couple of years these AOs may be scratching theirs about your behavior! Volition has been a problematic term for philosophers, theologians, biologists, and deterministically oriented behaviorists. Operant behavior has itself been described as “voluntary,” in contrast with the more deterministic reflexes, both unconditioned and Pavlovian. Neuringer explores the voluntary nature of operant behavior from three perspectives: Skinner's emphasis on contingent reinforcers; Rachlin's broad patterns of responses, presented in terms of his theory of teleological behaviorism; and Neuringer's own reinforcement-of-variability research. The three provide cases where operant behaviors can be adequately described as voluntary; and other cases where operant responses and voluntary actions differ. You will read Neuringer's contribution voluntarily. Think about that. One of the signal contributions of Rachlin was the unification of delay and probability discounting. Here Killeen takes a beady-eyed look at the theoretical rationale for that unification. He finds some logical and empirical problems with it, and proposes an alternative treatment of probability discounting, which he integrates with delay discounting in a novel way. Watch out though; it uses equations! If deterred by them, just look at his pretty pictures. The inverse linear model of discounting called “hyperbolic” provides a good account of nonhuman data. It is systematically off in its attempts to map the human data. Rachlin had the insight that calendar months might not be the same as human months. A student of S.S. Stevens, he explored a power-function map from calendar time to human time. It worked. Raising the time variable to an exponent less than 1 provided an excellent fit to human discounting data, in a model subsequently called a hyperboloid. But is that good enough? It requires model mavens for a verdict; and here we have a stellar array of them. Franck and colleagues put the hyperboloid through the wringer. It comes out fit to use, clean and certified. Wear it, over and over! Life is not two dimensional, but most of our models of it are. At best. It is all most of us can do. Rzeszutek and associates do better. They have combined delay discounting data and behavioral economic demand—how consumption changes as a function of the price of the good. But how can one integrate the effects of price and the effects of delay? It takes some wizardry; and all of these authors are wizards. It was gratifying that Rachlin's model came out well in this extension. We very much need a unified account of these paradigms, and this article takes us a big step in that direction. Stahlman and Catania examine how Rachlin's conception of self-control operates in evolutionary and societal realms. In all three domains, interactions between short-term consequences and extended, often delayed, long-term patterns are dynamic; they may direct behavior in the same direction, or in opposite directions. Uncharacteristic for this journal, Ainslie, Rachlin, Green, Stahlman and Catania's work constitutes a scientific exegesis of Romans 7:18-19: “…will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” This can happen many ways, delay discounting chief amongst them. But as Stahlman and Catania clearly show, one needn't be a saint or sinner to fall into that trap. Peacocks do it; Irish Elk do it; patterns of communication and social influence often lead communities to do it. Viral memes do it. We have all heard of segments of our community who, in some eyes, consistently vote against their own long-term interests. The authors explore the universality of such short-term traps to long-term bliss. This is an important generalization of process across domains, much as Skinner's classic Selection by Consequences was. In the present case, however, a more apt title is Seduction by Consequences. How you look at it; that is what perspectives means. This gives license. These contributors all have a driver's license. They are certified to steer conversation in profitable ways, ones that get us closer to our destination of understanding behavior, and Rachlin's take on it. You will find all of that here, in these great final papers. == Ed Wasserman focusses on Rachlin's enduring attempt to equate mental events with overt behaviors. Rachlin's teleological behaviorism is compared to early comparative psychology approaches, as represented by George Romanes, and experimental psychology approaches, as represented by E. G. Boring. Wasserman uses behavioral interpretations of mental events (some of those provided by Keller and Schoenfeld), critically evaluating Rachlin's position with regard to them. This is a very important contribution to a task that largely lies before us: Reconciling the mental and behavioral. Rachlin's (1989, 2018; 2014) TeB does this, yet it may be difficult for some of us to fully understand or assent to. By showing us how other scientists have dealt with very similar issues, and with his thoughtful evaluation of TeB, Wasserman helps keep TeB on the table as a behavioral alternative to mentalism. Inspired by Rachlin and informed by an old issue of a philosophy journal entitled “Psychology: A Behavioral Interpretation”, Catania asks what such an issue might look like today. His sections: “Causation,” “Good and Evil,” “Freedom and Volition,” “Time,” “Words,” and “Mind” remind us of the essays of Montaigne, who mused over similar topics. Here, however, data, and Rachlin's synoptic world-view, enrich Catania's essays. This, like the other papers, are elegant intellectual sustenance. The drink pairings for the other articles on the table of this Fest lean toward coffee and tea; for Charlie's, we recommend a glass of wine, to be slowly savored and sipped, while you savor and sip and ponder and enjoy his many insights. Rachlin's influence was multifaceted and broad. One example is offered by researchers in São Paulo. João Lucas Bernardy and his colleagues directed a multiyear seminar anchored by Rachlin's work, with specific focus on his 1989 book (see references). Together with their students, the researchers analyzed Rachlin's position on such topics as self-control and altruism. The analyses led to empirical studies on social distancing and on randomness, directly motivated by Rachlin's writings. Their contribution reminds us that an important influence of leaders such as Rachlin is measured, not by citation impact factors, but by human impact factors. Few have contributed to both basic and translational research, to both clinical and applied interventions, and to different disciplines such as behavior analysis, psychology at large, economics, and philosophy. The next two papers validate Rachlin's elevation into such a pantheon. The work by Vuchinich and colleagues stands on its own as innovative and effective, while simultaneously making clear its debt to the insights of Rachlin. 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Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2023 · doi:10.1002/jeab.823