Relational operants: processes and implications: a response to Palmer's review of Relational Frame Theory.
Relational operants are just operants—no new principles required.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors reply to a critic who said Relational Frame Theory invents new mental rules.
They walk through how relational operants are built. Kids hear many examples of same, opposite, before, after.
Each example is a normal contingency: hear the word, see the outcome, get praise. No hidden brain software is needed.
What they found
The paper shows that relating A to B is just an operant. It is shaped the same way as pressing a lever.
Multiple exemplars do the work. After enough drills the child can relate new items without direct teaching.
How this fits with other research
Davison et al. (2003) aired the same worry in a friendly debate. Their talk sets the stage for this formal answer.
Palmer (2023) keeps the fight going. He uses autoclitic frames to explain grammar. Hatton et al. (2004) would say both tricks live inside plain operant history.
Calamari et al. (1987) already argued that rules are function-altering stimuli. The 2004 paper extends that move to relational frames.
Why it matters
You do not need a new theory folder to teach derived relations. Stack exemplars, reinforce, and test. If a learner can match cat-animal and dog-animal, you have built a relational operant with normal ABA tools. Keep your procedure simple and your explanation simpler.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Palmer has recently criticized Relational Frame Theory (RFT) on the grounds that it has developed data in search of a principle. In this reply, we show that he has done so by attacking fundamental concepts within behavior analysis itself, including the functional nature of an operant and contingencies of reinforcement as a behavioral process. His claim that RFT appeals to new behavioral principles to explain the development of relational operants is shown to be incorrect: As with any operant, RFT appeals to a history of contacted consistencies in contingencies across multiple ex-emplars to explain them. New principles only emerge later as a logically necessary extension of such operants if they exist--a view that Palmer failed to address or appreciate. Palmer's desire to see the use of methods other than matching-to-sample is proper but already largely satisfied in the empirical literature on RFT. We show Palmer's defense of Skinner's definition of verbal behavior to be illogical and unresponsive to the empirical challenge behavior analysis faces. Palmer's alternative common sense mediational associationistic account is another in more than a century of such accounts, all of which have failed empirically. At its root, Palmer's criticism is based on a mechanistic philosophy that is hostile to a traditional functional behavior analytic approach.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2004 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2004.82-213