The aesthetics of behavioral arrangements.
Let contingencies be tight where precision matters and loose where it doesn’t, so clients stick with them.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hineline (2005) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment. The paper asks: what makes a behavioral contingency feel good to the humans who live under it?
The author borrows the idea of craftsmanship from furniture maker David Pye. A good contingency, like a good chair, needs tight joints where strength matters and gentle curves where comfort counts.
What they found
There is no data table. The finding is a rule of thumb: build contingencies that are surgically exact at critical points and pleasantly loose everywhere else.
This mix of precision and wiggle room, the paper argues, makes interventions more beautiful and more likely to last.
How this fits with other research
de Rose (2022) extends the same idea into a lab-ready model. Where Hineline (2005) talks about beauty, de Rose shows that derived stimulus relations can measure that beauty in listener responses.
Coe et al. (1997) and Calamari et al. (1987) are earlier cousins. They asked how tight a contingency must be; Hineline (2005) answers by adding the craftsman’s eye for graceful slack.
Petursdottir et al. (2023) mirrors the argument in AAC design: pick symbols and grid sizes for user comfort, not just technical labels. Same spirit, different hardware.
Why it matters
You already shape behavior with millisecond timing. Now ask: where can I give the client a little breathing room? Maybe the token board can use any color chip, as long as five chips earn the break. Maybe the praise statement can vary in wording, never in timing. These tiny freedoms turn a rigid plan into a plan people enjoy following.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
With their origins in scientific validation, behavior-analytic applications have understandably been developed with an engineering rather than a crafting orientation. Nevertheless, traditions of craftsmanship can be instructive for devising aesthetically pleasing arrangements-arrangements that people will try, and having tried, will choose to continue living with. Pye (1968) provides suggestions for this, particularly through his distinctions between workmanship of risk versus workmanship of certainty, and the mating of functional precision with effective or otherwise pleasing variability. Close examination of woodworking tools as well as antique machines offers instructive analogues that show, for instance, that misplaced precision can be dysfunctional when precision is not essential to a design. Variability should be allowed or even encouraged. Thus, in the design of behavioral contingencies as well as of practical or purely aesthetic objects, "precise versus variable" is not necessarily a distinction between good and bad. More generally, behavior analysts would do well to look beyond their technical experience for ways to improve the aesthetics of contingency design while continuing to understand the resulting innovations in relation to behavior-analytic principles.
The Behavior analyst, 2005 · doi:10.1007/BF03392101