Social behavior as discriminative stimulus and consequence in social anthropology.
Rituals run on applause, not mystery—spot the social payoff and you can swap the behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author looked at strange rituals and taboos from around the world.
He asked, "What keeps people doing these things?"
Instead of calling them symbols, he treated each ritual as a rule with built-in rewards and penalties.
What they found
Rituals work like group contracts.
If you follow the dance, wedding, or food rule, people smile, praise, or give gifts.
If you break the rule, you get frowns, gossip, or exile.
These social consequences keep the custom alive without any written law.
How this fits with other research
Six years later Assumpcão Júnior (1998) used the same idea on church habits.
He said prayers and songs are kept strong by the same social pay-offs, not by private fear relief.
The two papers share one thread: group approval is the hidden fuel.
Campbell (2003) moved the lens to office life.
He showed that bosses, like tribal elders, hold the same power: they hand out praise, perks, or pink slips.
All three papers treat culture—tribe, temple, or company—as a web of reinforcement.
Why it matters
When you see a client who bows to peer pressure, think "generalized reinforcer."
The crowd’s nod is the real prize.
Shape alternative behaviors that earn the same smile from friends.
Teach parents and teachers to shift the payoff: praise the new skill in public so the group keeps it going.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A behavior analysis is provided for three topics in social anthropology. Food, social relations, and ritual behaviors can enter into contingencies both as functional consequences and as discriminative stimuli for the reinforcement of behaviors through generalized social consequences. Many "symbolic" behaviors, which some social anthropologists believe go beyond an individual material basis, are analyzed as the latter. It is shown how the development of self-regulation to bridge remote consequences can undermine a group's generalized social control. It is also shown that rituals and taboos can be utilized to maintain generalized social compliance, which in turn can maintain both the community's verbal behavior and other group behaviors that bridge indirect and remote consequences.
The Behavior analyst, 1992 · doi:10.1007/BF03392583