Functions of the environment in behavioral evolution.
Treat your therapy space like an eco-system that breeds strong responses and weeds out weak ones.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors built a theory. They said the environment works like natural selection.
It picks which behaviors survive. It also triggers each single response.
They used no data. They wrote a paper to explain the idea.
What they found
The environment has two jobs. First, it keeps useful operants and drops weak ones.
Second, it acts right now. SDs, motivating ops, and context change what happens next.
These two forces run together. One shapes long-term form. One starts the next move.
How this fits with other research
Leslie (2006) shows the idea is old. Herbert Spencer wrote the same thing in 1855.
Ninness et al. (2018) move the idea forward. They use computer nets to mimic how the world picks stimulus relations.
Winett et al. (1991) defend lab work. They say we still need tight experiments to prove the selection story.
Why it matters
You already control the environment. Now see it as a living filter.
Arrange cues and consequences so the right behaviors get selected and triggered every day.
Ask: is my room feeding the forms I want and starving the rest?
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This paper explores some of the ways in which the environment functions with respect to behavior within an explanatory framework analogous to that of evolutionary biology. In both the behavioral and organic domains, the environment functions differently with respect to individual occurrences and evolutionary units. Within the behavioral domain, the problem of accounting for an occurrence of an operant instance differs from that of accounting for the existence of the operant unit of which the instance is a part. Maintaining these distinctions in levels of analysis within the behavioral domain, we focus first on operant units and operant instances as products of evolutionary processes occurring in the behavioral domain and second upon the causal role of the environment with respect to the existence of operant units and the occurrence of operant instances. The environment's function is selective with respect to origin, maintenance, suppression, and extinction of behavioral populations. At the level of operant instances, the environment has instantiating functions-evocative or alterative. Evocative functions are exemplified by discriminative relations, and alterative functions include both conditional and motivative relations. Implications are considered regarding extension of the analogy to more complex behavior-environment relations.
The Behavior analyst, 1994 · doi:10.1007/BF03392674