Thanks so much for reading! Glad you’e excited. it will be slow going but I am glad to have loosened my self-imposed restrictions on what this pub is for! :)
The political strategist Frank Luntz wrote that, "It's not what you say, it's what people hear." It's odd that a discipline so attuned conceptually to the interactive nature of social relations would have evolved to be relatively tone-deaf to this problem. "Behavior" may not be a bad word, but to a lot of people it FEELS bad, which epistemologically is about the same thing. We do love our precise verbiage, but to my knowledge nobody has ever checked, empirically, whether there are alternative ways to convey the same thing (including, potentially, some that smack of mentalism! gasp!) that might be as effective but better appreciated by "people out there." Instead we mostly keep insisting that precision is needed, in the process alienating a lot of potential converts.
Agreed! This is why I have been using “being” and “experience” as imperfect substitutes for behavior in places. But I agree that empirically determining a new term would seem a logical step, given the resistance to the word “behavior.” Thanks for the comment!
I enjoyed reading your post, as always. When I taught ABA classes (during my graduate studies) I liked the concept of response classes, the notion that a whole class of responses increased in frequency when a particular behavior was reinforced. Not just one behavior. Your post reminded me of that.
I like that concept, too. It’s an important one!! We tend to forget or oversimply it sometimes. Thank you for reading and engaging. It is always appreciated. :)
Wow this is so excellent! Thank you for all you put here — so well put. I’m excited for future entries.
Thanks so much for reading! Glad you’e excited. it will be slow going but I am glad to have loosened my self-imposed restrictions on what this pub is for! :)
The political strategist Frank Luntz wrote that, "It's not what you say, it's what people hear." It's odd that a discipline so attuned conceptually to the interactive nature of social relations would have evolved to be relatively tone-deaf to this problem. "Behavior" may not be a bad word, but to a lot of people it FEELS bad, which epistemologically is about the same thing. We do love our precise verbiage, but to my knowledge nobody has ever checked, empirically, whether there are alternative ways to convey the same thing (including, potentially, some that smack of mentalism! gasp!) that might be as effective but better appreciated by "people out there." Instead we mostly keep insisting that precision is needed, in the process alienating a lot of potential converts.
Agreed! This is why I have been using “being” and “experience” as imperfect substitutes for behavior in places. But I agree that empirically determining a new term would seem a logical step, given the resistance to the word “behavior.” Thanks for the comment!
I enjoyed reading your post, as always. When I taught ABA classes (during my graduate studies) I liked the concept of response classes, the notion that a whole class of responses increased in frequency when a particular behavior was reinforced. Not just one behavior. Your post reminded me of that.
I like that concept, too. It’s an important one!! We tend to forget or oversimply it sometimes. Thank you for reading and engaging. It is always appreciated. :)