[From Bill Powers (951213.0600 MST)]
Rick Marken (951212.2245) --
What a crock! Behavior modification has about as much to do with
teaching people how to control their perceptions as PCT has to do
with explaining how behavior is selected by reinforcers.
I think you're speaking hypothetically, extrapolating from your
understanding of how behavior mod is _supposed_ to work to the actual
practices of behavior modifiers. I have read a number of descriptions of
behavior mod therapies, and have found little in at least some of them
to object to.
In the first place, behavior modifiers (I'm speaking here of the
approaches I consider benign) do not arbitrarily decide how another
person is to behave, seize control of something the other person needs,
and withhold it until that person complies with the psychologist's goals
or beliefs. That is how a laboratory animal is treated, but not how
human beings are treated. Instead, the person is asked what is the
matter, what behaviors the person would like to change. Of course when
these behaviors are described, what is actually described are
perceptions that the person is having difficulty in controlling; the
actual actions are not considered. The person is often asked to list
life goals, and to pick which of these would be most desireable to work
on attaining. Methods are proposed for doing this, which sometimes
include giving oneself little rewards for good behavior, but mostly
involve developing a heightened awareness of the problem, so the person
is able to perceive better when it is happening.
I'm sure that the behavior modifiers accompany these procedures, in
their own minds, with translations into acceptable EAB terminology. But
what they seem to do in practice is to respect the autonomy of the other
person, to avoid controlling the other, and as much as possible to
encourage the client to assume control. And they clearly, obviously, put
helping the other person first, no matter what the theory says.
I think that all successful therapists who have been practicing for some
time end up abandoning most of the strict theoretical stances of the
field they came from, and adopt working principles that are close to
what PCT would recommend. Most good therapists, I think, instinctively
use the method of levels. Most of them recognize that conflicts are the
greatest barriers to progress; most of them realize that the goal of
therapy is for the client to achieve independent and competent control
of his or her own life. What these therapists _say_ they are doing might
be couched in quite different terms, but what they actually do is
probably perfectly in line with PCT. This is simply because their
experience with people has shown them that nothing else works. People
are control systems; either you treat them that way or you fail.
Of course there are also behavior mod types who go strictly by the book
and deliberately use reward and punishment to shape behavior toward
socially-acceptable norms (i.e., the ones the therapists accept). These
people often work on captive audiences like prisoners, patients in
mental hospitals, and schoolchildren. Here the coercion is complete;
there is no question of any person saying "I don't want to participate
in this program, I don't want to do what you want me to do." No choice
is offered. The goals for the behavior of the victims are decided for
them. All amenities of life and some of the necessities can be and are
withheld at the discretion of the person in charge, until compliance is
obtained. There are even cases where "aversion therapy" is used:
torture.
I don't think the difference is really just between a loose and a rigid
interpretation of the principles of operant conditioning. I think it's
largely a matter of some people wanting to help others, and some people
wanting to control others. The ones who are addicted to control enjoy
being in a position to withhold necessities, to force compliance with
their wishes, even to cause pain in the name of "doing what's best for
you and society." These people exist, I think, in every helping
profession. We call them sadists, or power-driven, or megalomaniacs.
They would behave the same no matter what theory they claimed as
justification for their actions. The Clockwork Orange approach could
just as well have been based on psychoanalysis, transactional analysis,
or PCT. The theory is just a smokescreen to hide the fact that you enjoy
what you're doing to other people.
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Best,
Bill P.