Envisioning cultural practices.
Draw contingency loops to see and fix the culture that keeps your staff or clients stuck.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author borrowed flow-chart tools from systems engineering.
He wanted pictures that show how daily rewards and penalties lock together to make a culture.
No clients, no data—just a how-to guide for sketching cultural practices.
What they found
When you draw each person’s “if-then” arrows, big cultural patterns pop out.
The maps reveal hidden loops that keep bad practices alive.
Once you see the loop, you can redraw it to create a better culture.
How this fits with other research
Malagodi (1986) first shouted “study culture!” but gave no drawing tools—Mattaini (1996) hands you the pencil.
Malott (2004) later used the same kind of maps to plan how behavior analysis could spread country-wide.
McGee et al. (2019) took the idea inside autism agencies: map the workplace contingencies before you try to grow.
Cox (2026) looks at verbal communities with computer models instead of paper diagrams, but both treat language as a system of interlocking contingencies.
Why it matters
Next time your team keeps sliding back to old routines, sketch the loop on a whiteboard.
Circle the reinforcers that hold the old pattern, then draw a new arrow that delivers the same payoff for better behavior.
One sheet of paper can replace hours of complaining about “culture.”
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Graphic visualization has demonstrated its value for organizing transactional data and modeling complex phenomena in a wide variety of fields, from theoretical physics to medicine. Behavior analysts have historically used a variety of graphic tools not only for presentation but also for analysis and teaching. As they turn increasingly to the analysis and design of cultural practices, the phenomena behavior analysts study are becoming increasingly complicated. Many cultural practices of interest are embedded in extensive webs of interlocking practices and contingencies that can be difficult to grasp comprehensively. Building on contingency diagrams, which have proven to be useful for the analysis of operant behavior, and graphic tools developed for object-oriented systems analysis, this paper suggests graphic tools for capturing the interlocking contingencies that constitute cultures. These diagrams offer a broad-bandwidth technology for analyzing and designing cultural practices.
The Behavior analyst, 1996 · doi:10.1007/BF03393168