On privacy, causes, and contingencies.
Private thoughts matter only if you can point to the outside contingencies that gave them force.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Parrott (1984) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.
He asked: when do thoughts and feelings count in behavior analysis?
His answer: only if we can trace them back to things we can see and measure.
What they found
Private events—thoughts, emotions, urges—get meaning only after they sit on a chain of public contingencies.
No outside history, no power.
The paper gives behavior analysts permission to ignore “in-the-head” causes unless they link to real-world reinforcers or punishers.
How this fits with other research
Ghaziuddin (1997) extends the same rule to babies. Infants notice contingencies without any fancy cognitive software—just plain stimulus-consequence learning.
Taub et al. (1994) takes the idea into AIDS prevention. They swap “risky thoughts” for changeable community contingencies like free condoms and peer praise.
Schalock (2004) later uses the lens on autism. One camp says the whole disorder is contingency-shaped verbal trouble; the other adds genes and biology. Both still keep contingencies in the picture, showing the 1984 point holds across theories.
Why it matters
Next time a caregiver says, “He hits because he’s frustrated,” ask what outside events taught that frustration to cue hitting.
Track the public chain—demand removal, adult attention, toy gain—then redesign those contingencies.
You stay scientific, your intervention stays testable, and you avoid guessing about invisible causes.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Radical behaviorism may be distinguished from other varieties of behaviorism, notably methodological behaviorism, by the way it accommodates private events in causal explanations of behavior. That is, in an operational sense, radical behaviorism accommodates private phenomena in the context of the three term contingency of reinforcement with regard to their discriminative function, their nature as responses, or their reinforcing function. In any case, any contribution of a private phenomenon is presumably linked at some point to a prior public event that has endowed the private phenomenon with its functional significance.
The Behavior analyst, 1984 · doi:10.1007/BF03391881