Association for Behavior Analysis International

The global community is facing an onslaught of wide-ranging, multi-determined, and vexing cross-national conflicts, environmental threats, political and social upheavals, human and animal migrations, health and economic inequities, and human rights violations, to name a few prominent social ills. Culturo-behavior science (CBS) has evolved into a behavior analytic approach that draws on concepts like the metacontingency and context to analyze and intervene with social and cultural problems on the systems level. The increase in prominence achieved by CBS can be seen in recent books (e.g., Cihon & Mattaini, 2020) and journal issues (e.g., Perspectives on Behavior Science, Hantula, 2019) devoted to it, as well as in the growth of Behavior and Social Issues, the ABAI journal devoted exclusively to addressing social problems through behavior analysis. This symposium, sponsored by Behaviorists for Social Responsibility, presents recent CBS work on two urgent global problems that potentially have Earth-threatening consequences: war and climate change.

Behavior analysts interested in applying their skills to systemic social problems

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by torrents of state-promulgated propaganda. From the behavior analytic perspective, propaganda is promoted through antecedent stimulus control, as demonstrated by Rakos (1993) for the first US-Iraq war; this analysis categorized US war propaganda missives in terms of stimulus equivalence, motivating operations, rules, and discriminative stimuli and assessed their functional impact. The current inquiry follows a similar strategy, but updates the analysis by using newer conceptual tools like the metacontingency and contextual behavior science. This examination of the Russian propaganda effort reveals it to be less successful than the US campaign in 1990. A comparison of the propaganda strategies used by the US in 1990 with those used by Russia in 2022 expose important similarities in stimulus control tactics, despite the two countries’ political and ideological differences. But the analysis also suggests key differences that may contribute to the lesser impact of the Russian propaganda effort.

The study that will be presented, was carried out in a civil construction site of a double-track railway tunnel, in Italy, by two students of the engineer course of the University Politecnico of Milano. During the month of October 2022, the implementation of the B-BS protocol officially started, with the objective to increase the adoption of safe behaviors and develop a safety-based value culture for the entire construction site. Later, in May 2022, because of the relevant problems, in terms of safety and productivity, of failures and breakdowns with the machineries, an extension of the BBS project was decided to be taken forward, that specifically focused on the change of behaviors related to the maintenance of the machineries used by the workers, specifically for the miners group. For this purpose, specific pinpointing on maintenance behaviors was taken forward, with the construction of a checklist that was then used to observe and measure the behaviors. Through the baseline phase the company’s management team had the possibility to conduct a detailed analysis of the status of the maintenance of the machineries and select the objective behaviors for improvement. Through the use of graphs and data, the paper will present how a BBS process, with observations, measurements of behaviors through checklist and release of immediate feedback and monthly safety meeting, had an effect on the objective of increasing the maintenance behaviors of the machineries was shown.

Successful behavior change interventions often fail to scale, limiting their impact. Analysis of the contingencies surrounding large-scale change is frequently required; indeed, the entire field of implementation science focuses on this challenge. Established empirical methods reminiscent of functional analysis - sometimes called "barriers analysis” or “determinants analysis” - identify potential barriers to adoption, and suggest ways to surmount them. A nonlinear analysis of the contingencies and meta-contingencies enhances this exercise. In this symposium, we use a comparative approach to deconstruct attempts to scale up interventions in organizations, large-n autism service delivery, K-12 education, and environmental sustainability. Interdisciplinary insights will add to the lessons learned. Developing a successful intervention is only the first step in an implementation process leading to meaningful large-scale change. And as prominently illustrated the case of climate change, we are rapidly running out of time to scale up.

Intermediate: understand contingency analysis, meta-contingences