This unfolding 72 article set deals with deeper topics in the science of behaviorology. Most of these topics concern initial scientific answers for some of humanity’s ancient questions, because the ancient—and many current—answers to these questions remain inadequate. The ancient–question topics include values, rights, ethics, morals, language, consciousness, personhood, life, death, and reality. Some more recent topics also receive some coverage, topics such as the Law of Cumulative Complexity, robotics, evolutions, and experimental and applied research methods. Another set of 72 unfolding articles titled “Mysteries of Living” covers more basic topics.
A major point of research is to gather analyzable data. Researchers collect the data through recorders and displays of one sort or another that they connect to the operant experimental chambers in which the behavior of subjects occurs. They also attach computerized equipment and interfaces that not only manage the experimental conditions but also manage the recorders and displays.
Disciplinary contingencies compelled the use of single–subject experimental designs throughout the history of natural behavior science. This started with the experimental preparations of Skinner’s early laboratory at Harvard in the 1930s and continues up through today’s laboratory and applied research efforts.
The first several decades of experimental behavior science occurred from the 1930s through the 1950s. During this time Skinner, his colleagues in the natural science of behavior, and their students (i.e., the predecessors of today’s behaviorologists) gradually built the foundations of their behaviorological science mostly through the kinds of basic laboratory methodologies that we covered in the last column.
After considering the ABAB/Reversal type of single–subject designs for basic experimental research in a recent column, this column turns to similar designs for applied research and practice. In applied settings, research considerations differ from laboratory settings, and some compel the adoption of the more complicated “multiple–baseline” single–subject designs that a later column covers.
In 1975 David Anderson and I worked on an applied study at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, which was when and where I began my college teaching career. This study contains some uncommon features worthy of attention, features that one would usually only find spread across several studies.
As early behaviorological practitioners adapted ABAB/Reversal designs to applied settings, they faced increasingly complex applied situations requiring more sophisticated single–subject experimental designs. For example, sometimes the repetition of Baseline or Intervention phases would stand out as unethical or otherwise not possible.
In considering multiple–baseline designs, an example from an actual study using one of the multiple–baseline forms would help. The value of this example, which involves the behavior–based form, also resides in two of its other characteristics.
Given a whole, functioning physiology—an organism—behavior occurs, because eliciting, evocative, or other stimuli occur. The functionally related combination of behaviors and stimuli makes up contingencies. Occasionally a contingency occurs alone, but more often two or more contingencies operate at the same time, and researchers have called these concurrent contingencies.
The lower pen, which we call the event pen, records the onset and offset of experiment–defined events by going up one step after which it can only go back down one step. As the paper unrolls, this pen marks a line at two slightly different levels according to whether it has moved up or moved down its one allowed step.
As with love traditional and current but pre–scientific and unscientific opposition insists that science lacks the ability to address those ancient questions. With the help of these columns, you may find that view dangerous, because it interferes with the likely most successful activities for solving global problems. Starting with this column, the first long–standing question for our focus concerns that most ubiquitous of ancient and contemporary human behaviors, language, which is verbal behavior.
