[From Rick Marken (951213.1900)]
I said:
In fact, behavior modification practitioners are generally not
foolish enough to practice what they preach.
It is not really lack of "foolishness" that prevents b-mod
practitioners from practicing what they preach; it is the fact
that both the practitioners and their victims ... er, patients,
are control systems. The practitioners probably don't like the
stress of the conflict that results from attempts to arbitrarily
control the behavior of another control system (they have a
reference near zero for the amount of chronic error they want
to experience) so they adjust their actions, as necessary, to
keep perceived stress near zero.
Some of these adjustments of action will probably create a significant
disturbance to other variables being controlled by the practitioners
(like the perception of the explanatory power of reinforcement
theory). But, as we have seen, reinforcement theorists are
tremendously skilled at describing any behavioral phenomenon
in terms of reinforcement theory. So the b-mod practitioner would
be expected to preach the gospel of of reinforcement theory with
increasing passion as the actions used to do "b-mad" become less
and less consistent with reinforcement theory.
Best
Rick