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What
OBM Needs is More Jewish Mothers
Richard W. Malott1
Behavior Analysis Program
Department of Psychology
Western Michigan University
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It Is Cool to Think out of The Box,
But Never out of THE Box,
Never out of the Skinner Box.
E. Scott Geller’s main problem is that he’s a mentalist
in behavior-analyst clothing. And his main virtue is that he’s
a mentalist in behavior-analyst clothing. I disagree with everything
Geller (2002) and Steve Roberts (2002) wrote. But I agree with their
main point. Their main point is not that we would better sell behavior
analysis to mentalists, if we too became mentalists; that was just
an excuse for Scott and Steve to hop on their soap box and preach
mentalism in the guise of Scott’s active-caring model. Their
main point is that we would be better OBMers, if we became mentalists.
What I agree with in their main point is not that we should become
mentalists but that we should follow Skinner’s lead by abandoning
methodological behaviorism and by adopting radical behaviorism. In
other words, we should concern ourselves with private (covert) events
in our natural science of behavior analysis. (By the way, I would
like to thank Scott and Steve for sharing their soap box and allowing
me to preach radical behaviorism, especially as they knew in advance
that I would bite the hand that helped me onto their box.)
Don’t Drown
the Baby in the Bathwater
It is worthwhile to explore other sub-disciplines in psychology in
order to discover phenomena we behavior analysts have overlooked,
as Geller and Roberts have done. But such exploration is risky, because
it is too easy to allow our behavior-analytic world view to drown
in the mentalistic bath water of those other sub-disciplines, as Geller
and Roberts have done. Only the paranoid should attempt such explorations
and not unsupervised.
Our Enemy is Simplistic
Analyses
We should beware of two types of simplistic, erroneous
analyses. The most common in behavior analysis involves treating phenomena
as if they were the same when they are not (e.g., over-extrapolations
from the Skinner box such as treating the delayed delivery of a reinforcer
as if it were reinforcement). (Malott [1993] and Malott, Malott, &
Shimamune [1993 a &b]).
The other type of simplistic analysis involves treating phenomena
as if they were different when they really are not (e.g., under-extrapolations
from the Skinner box such as treating covert phenomena as if they
were mental events rather than examples of operant behavior to which
we can apply the principles of behavior). Scott and Steve commit both
types of erroneous analyses.
Words
are Important Analytical Tools
To Reward vs. To
Reinforce
To substitute to reward for to reinforce is to descend to the depths
of intellectual sloth, when used in lieu of a more careful analysis
of the relevant behavioral contingencies. One OBM misuse involves
the case of the delayed delivery of a reinforcer. In such cases, the
receipt of the reinforcer is too delayed from the behavior to have
actually reinforced that behavior (e.g., an end-of-the-month bonus
contingent on completing a task a few weeks before); the wary slothful
will say the bonus rewarded the task completion, thus avoiding the
more obvious, though more common, error of saying the bonus reinforced
the task completion. Such a use of to reward is a sneaky way of implying
reinforcement, without being held accountable for the misuse of the
term to reinforce. But, if it ain’t reinforcement, what the
heck is it? The wary slothful skate around that issue; but, gentle
reader, I shall soon rush in with an answer, in this conceptual miasma
where wise men (yes, and wise women too) fear to tread.
The intellectually slothful then talk about rewarding the group with
the implications that we are reinforcing the group. But we should
reinforce behavior, not people, let alone groups. The failure to insist
that we reinforce behavior, not people, leads to the intellectually
sloppy way of talking about reinforcing groups and thereby leads away
from the sort of careful analysis that would help us understand how
group contingencies generate contingencies that control the behavior
of the individual.
Reward vs. Reinforcer
Beware of operational definitions. Here is an example of
a common type of operational definition in psychology: “By intelligence,
all I mean is the score on an IQ test. So, you see, I’m not
really reifying intelligence; I’m not using it as an explanatory
fiction. I’m clean.”
Here is the problem with that operational definition of intelligence:
Within 5 seconds of reading the operational definition, it loses control
over the reader’s behavior and the commonsense definition retakes
its rightful seat at the controls: The reader is reading intelligence
as the cause (probably innate) of intelligent behavior. And with in
5 minutes of its being written, that operational definition also loses
control over the original writer’s thinking and writing.
Operational definitions that redefine common terms fail to win the
battle with the banned, commonsense definitions. And that is the problem
of stating, “When I write that a thing is a reward, I don’t
really mean is a reward; what I mean is a thing I hope might be a
reward. In other words, when I write that a thing is a reward I don’t
really mean reinforcer; what I mean is a thing I hope might be a reinforcer.”
Very soon, everyone is reading, if not writing, reward as if it were
reinforcer.
Others have proposed that we use putative reinforcer, when we do not
have experimental proof that the thing, event, or condition is a reinforcer.
Perhaps this has failed to catch on because putative sends too many
of us scrambling for the dictionary.
Generally, I recommend common, everyday English, when possible. In
most cases, presumed reinforcer would work. If need be, occasionally
we can be a little more loquacious and protect our rear end with something
like what I hope is a reinforcer.
Pedantic fear of commonsense. But, to some extent the whole
issue is merely pedantic. With a bit of introspective common sense,
we can usually tell if something will be a reinforcer. Otherwise,
it’s a little like Newton saying, “Well, that particular
putative apple may fall off this putative tree, as described by the
law of putative gravity; but we won’t know for sure until we
see it; and I won’t know for sure that’s an apple, until
I taste it.” While psychology, even behavior analysis, is still
a far cry from physics, we know water will be a reinforcer for a healthy,
water deprived rat. So, if the rat is not pressing the lever that
produces water, something else is amiss. And we know money will be
a reinforcer for a healthy worker or executive, regardless of their
state of money deprivation. If the person is not pressing the lever
that produces money, something else is amiss—probably the behavioral
contingencies.
Now it certainly is the case that failure to use effective reinforcers
is a major problem in working with children labeled autistic; however,
I see no evidence that using the terminology putative reinforcer or
reward will decrease the frequency of such futile endeavors. More
heavy-duty staff and systems interventions are needed to fix such
problems.
And, although one can come up with OBM examples where the presumed
reinforcer is not a reinforcer, they are relatively rare; and, again,
I see no reason to think that calling presumed reinforcers rewards
will decrease the frequency of the futile use of such non-reinforcers.
The danger of worrying about putative reinforcers. Furthermore,
concern for the effectiveness of reinforcers often sends people in
the wrong direction when trying to manage the performance of normal
people in normal settings (e.g., managers and workers in OBM settings).
If the person fails to do what it takes to get the reinforcer or to
avoid losing the reinforcer or to avoid losing the opportunity to
get the reinforcer, laymen and behavior analysts alike, tend to assume
that the person does not really care; they tend to assume that the
reinforcer is not really a reinforcer. They assume that grades are
not a sufficient reinforcer for a student who fails to study, that
a PhD degree is not a sufficient reinforcer for the student who fails
to complete his dissertation, that tenure is not a sufficient reinforcer
for the assistant professor who fails to publish enough articles,
that money is not a sufficient reinforcer for the salesman who fails
to make enough sales calls. The layman and the behavior analyst alike
are far too likely to blame the reinforcer or “motivation,”
when the problem is really the behavioral contingency connecting the
behavior to a powerful reinforcer. (I consider ineffective and effective
contingencies later in this article.)
Reinforcement vs.
Reinforcer
Rather than trying to distinguish between reward and reinforcer, we
would better invest our energy in distinguishing between reinforcement
and reinforcer and avoid the tendency to call reinforcers reinforcement.
I suggest that a reinforcer (positive reinforcer) is any stimulus,
event, or condition whose presentation immediately follows a response
and increases the frequency of that response. A reinforcement contingency
is the immediate, response-contingent presentation of a reinforcer
resulting in an increased frequency of that response. This allows
us to talk about contingencies where the reinforcer (e.g., money)
is presented one month after the causal behavior. Yes, the money is
still a reinforcer, even though the delay is too great for the money
to reinforce the behavior that produced it, even though this is not
a reinforcement contingency but merely an analog to a reinforcement
contingency (and it is the most chicken-hearted form of pedanticism
to say, we don’t really know if the money is a reinforcer until
we’ve shown that it will work as a reinforcer in a reinforcement
contingency with this person).
English and English
For anyone proposing a new term or a new use of an old term (like
reward, either as a noun or verb), I wish we could require that they
some how get a hold of English and English’s (1958) A Comprehensive
Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms. I have never
read such a thoughtful and wise consideration of terminology. Pay
special attention to bogus erudition, arbitrary definition, neologism,
rational coinage, theory begging and their critiques of phobia, reinforcement,
and reward.
The
Delayed Delivery of Reinforcers
Geller points out that, “A reward given long after the desired
behavior has occurred is unlikely to have a direct effect on that
behavior. Some rewards are not even associated with specific behaviors.
For example, the behavior most often reinforced by a group recognition
ceremony is attending the ceremony.” Yes, but it still might
work. Recognition at a group ceremony is a reinforcer for most of
us, no matter how jaded we might be. And, though the delayed delivery
of such a reinforcer is not a reinforcement contingency, it can still
reliably control behavior, if two conditions are met. First, the contingency
must be the right sort: It must involve only a small unit of behavior
(e.g., writing and submitting a brief proposal that an elaborate project
be considered for special recognition). A single outcome, no matter
how large and no matter how immediate, by itself, will not control
a large unit of behavior (e.g., doing the elaborate project that requires
500 hours of behavior). In addition, there must be a deadline (e.g.,
the person will avoid the loss of the possibility of the special recognition,
if they write and submit their brief proposal by 5 PM Friday).
Here is the second condition that must be met, if the delayed-delivery
contingency is to reliably control behavior: The person must know
the contingency; the person must be able to state the rule describing
that contingency. In other words, such behavior is rule-governed.
(For a more general, compatible treatment of rule-governed behavior
see Malott, Malott, and Trojan, 2000).
OBM does not usually fail because the reinforcers are ineffective
or their delivery too delayed. OBM fails because units of behavior
are too large and the deadlines are too vague or non-existent.
Radical
Behaviorism Expands Behavior Analysis
Skinner’s
Radical Behaviorism
One of Skinner’s most important and, perhaps, most underappreciated
contributions is the development of radical behaviorism, where he
argued that covert psychological events are behavioral just as are
overt psychological events, with the implication that the principles
of behavior apply to covert behavioral events just as they apply to
overt behavioral events (Skinner, 1953). Unfortunately, he generally
limited his analysis to the role covert, private stimuli play as SDs
in controlling overt tacting behavior (e.g., when someone describes
a covert event such as a toothache). Perhaps as an overreaction to
the mentalism that still dominates psychology, a mentalism where explanatory
fictions are invented as circular reifications for overt behavior,
in describing the role of private events in a natural science, Skinner
did not deal with phenomena like mental arithmetic, covert behavior
and covert behavioral chains that started with an extroceptive stimulus,
ended in an overt response, and involved several covert links in between.
An Expanded Radical
Behaviorism
As one of our foremost Skinnerian scholar and occasional Skinnerian
apologist has said, “Although that’s what Skinner wrote,
what he really meant is . . .” and “Although that’s
what Skinner wrote, if he were writing on the topic today, he would
agree with what I’m saying.” In the present context, I
am sure Skinner would have followed his own advise to recognize that
all private psychological events play an important role in our natural
science of behavior analysis, though he relegated private states,
such as feelings, to the status of mere epiphenomena of no causal
significance; I am sure he would have considered mental arithmetic
a real phenomenon and not have denied its existence, as classical
behaviorists do, nor would he have declared it not part of the subject
matter of behavior analysis, as methodological behaviorists do on
the grounds of the difficulty of obtaining inter-observer reliability.
So, in this slightly expanded radical behaviorism, Skinner would not
have declared mental arithmetic (or covert arithmetic, if you insist)
to be a mental way station, but rather just the covert links in a
behavioral chain that typically begins with an overt SD and ends with
an overt terminal response and overt reinforcement.
And this expanded radical behaviorism can incorporate the concepts
and issues Scott and Steve propose, some of which I will address in
the following sections.
Are
Geller’s Feelings Merely Skinner’s Epiphenomena?
Geller argues that social rewards (aka social reinforcers) make us
feel better, a worthwhile outcome in its own right; and I agree. He
further argues, “…, it’s likely that improving internal
person states [as a result of the social reinforcers] will have beneficial
indirect impact on desired behavior.” I agree with that, as
well, at least to some extent.
Empathy
As that most insightful of behavior analysts, Dale Carnegie, pointed
out, in his 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People, you
win friends and influence people by being a source of social reinforcers
for them, though the process is not necessarily response contingent
social reinforcement. He said, we want to do things for people who
have made us happy, especially people who give us social reinforcers;
we want them to be happy and not sad. (Of course, he did not use our
terminology.)
Now it is easy for behavior analysts to interpret this concern for
those who are concerned for us as a simple quid-pro-quo, back-scratching,
reciprocal contingency, where the behavior is maintained by instrumental
learned reinforcers, where we must maintain the approval and concern
of the other person by reciprocating, because that other person is
instrumental in (necessary for) our obtaining our own reinforcers—a
self-centered concern for numero uno. And that certainly accounts
for many, if not most instances of our concern for those who have
been concerned for us and our concern for those who have followed
Carnegie’s advice to “shower us with lavish praise.”
But I think there is more.
The concern for those who have shown concern for us is also maintained
by empathetic reinforcers and empathetic aversive conditions. Their
well being makes us happy (is a reinforcer for us), and their problems
make us unhappy (are aversive conditions for us). We truly experience
empathy for those who provide us with social reinforcers. And, by
empathy, I mean we are concerned for their wellbeing, even when they
will not be instrumental in our own wellbeing, even when we will never,
ever see them again; our happiness is mirrored by theirs.
And, Carnegie thoughtfully argues for the importance of social-reinforcement-based
empathy (again, not his terminology) with many persuasive case studies
illustrating its crucial role in winning friends and influencing people.
In fact, Carnegie went way beyond a simplistic applied behavior analysis,
long before a simplistic applied behavior analysis had evolved.
The Fragility of
Empathy
But empathy can be fragile and transient, transient much like our
resolve to drive more safely just after we have seen a horrible highway
accident, transient much like the resolve of our clients to use performance
management after attending one of our inspirational OBM workshops.
Commitment is easy to achieve but transient; maintenance is hard to
achieve but lasting.
In my 39 years as a faculty member, I have seen empathy cave in to
instrumental expedience with disappointing regularity, almost to the
point of treachery among people of good will, to the point that only
the naive would rely on anything more than the transient effect of
Geller’s “willingness to look out for the welfare of others,”
when that willingness is based on the prior receipt of social reinforcement
from those others. But this is not to argue against the powerful,
even though transient, effects of empathy that Carnegie documents.
However, I doubt that, to understand or use empathy, we need Geller’s
cognitive constructs of “self-esteem, personal control, optimism,
or sense of belonging.”
Incidentally, Skinner made an especially insightful point concerning
empathy: Empathy, sympathy, and compassion constitute a rarefied sensitivity
resulting from a high level of socialization, not a natural, automatic
result of being a human being. We are not born with the ability to
feel empathy, sympathy, and compassion; we learn it.
Empathetic Behavior
In addition to empathy as a state or condition of being (empathetic
feelings), we should consider empathetic behavior, the behavior of
acting in an empathetic manner, the behavior of expressing sympathy
and concern for the wellbeing of others and the behavior of working
toward the wellbeing of others, even when the condition of others
generates no empathetic feelings, even when other’s being happy
or sad does not cause us to be happy or sad. Just because empathetic
behavior does not always reflect feelings of empathy, it need not
reflect a simple quid-pro-quo, back-scratching, reciprocal contingency.
Instead, empathetic behavior can have its roots in Jewish-mother-induced
guilt.
Enter the Jewish
Mother
“What kind of son would not call his mother every evening to
see how her arthritis is doing, a mother who sacrificed so much for
her son?” “What kind of aunt is too busy to attend her
nephew’s bar mitzvah?” “What kind of person won’t
do the right thing by their family, their friends, their neighbors,
their employer, their employees?”
Well, it may not be clear what kind of person that would be; but we
certainly do not want to be one. And we feel shame and guilt when
we run the risk of becoming that kind of person either by failing
to act for the wellbeing of others or by acting in a way that will
harm the wellbeing of others. And that aversive guilt can generate
a lot of empathetic behavior, even though we may not feel empathy
for the other person: We visit the colleague laid up in the hospital,
not because we are feeling her pain but because it is the right thing
to do, the thing to do that will help us avoid feeling the guilt of
the calloused and uncaring. We clean up at the end of our shift, not
because we empathize with the inconvenience our thoughtlessness will
cause the next shift, and not because we can be identified as the
person who failed to clean up and thus be reprimanded, but because
the end-of-shift clean up will avoid the feelings of guilt we will
suffer, at least that we will suffer if our Jewish mother has done
her job, her early childhood programming. Of course managers and supervisors
may well bemoan the dearth of effective Jewish mothers in the Jewish
culture as well as the gentile culture.
However, beware the person who does not have a Jewish mother, beware
the person who is not highly motivated by the aversiveness of guilt,
if not by empathy, because, realistically, you will not be able to
implement OBM-type performance-management contingency with sufficient
comprehensiveness to reliably control the behavior of such a sociopath.
Therefore, on the basis of extensive, behavioral introspection and
extrospection, I conclude that feelings are not merely Skinner’s
epiphenomena; I conclude that Geller’s concern for the importance
of people’s feelings is well placed, though I think guilt, fear,
and shame are more effective workplace motivators than the happiness
and joy or Geller’s “self-esteem, personal control, optimism,
[and] sense of belonging.” However, I will concede that letting
down the group with which you have a sense of belonging will generate
more guilt than letting down the group from which you feel estranged;
and in that way, a sense of belonging may indirectly support more
responsible group-oriented behavior, more “active caring”
behavior.
The
Jewish-Mother Syndrome
Case study: Portnoy’s Complaint. In Portnoy’s
Complaint by Philip Roth (1967), Portnoy complains to his psychoanalyst,
“No matter how hard I try, I can never please my mother. All
of my successes, all of my achievements are marred by a nagging sense
of guilt.”
Portnoy had a nagging sense of guilt for never being able to please
his Jewish mother. And trying to escape this guilt is what sent Portnoy
to the psychoanalyst. But I think trying to escape the guilt is what
made Portnoy a professional success. Portnoy worked hard at his profession,
to escape the guilt of being a disappointment to his mother. Guilt.
Case study: Bar Mitzvah sweater. Elaine Mae tells this story:
The boy receives two sweaters for his bar mitzvah. The next morning
he comes downstairs wearing one of the sweaters. His mother accuses,
“So, you didn’t like your other sweater?” Guilt.
Case Study: A Hillbilly Story. He grew up in the mountains
of West Virginia. His daddy was a builder. He helped Daddy. Daddy
insisted that they always complete each project one week ahead of
schedule.
A few times the boy failed to get up when the alarm rang. Then his
mother would throw a bucket of cold water on him and stand there laughing.
So, generally the boy got up as soon as the alarm rang.
The boy practiced his basketball free throws. Mom required him to
hit 19 out of 20 shots. If he missed two, he’d have to finish
the 20 and then start all over again. Sometimes he would have to shoot
500 baskets. Because Mom sat there keeping score. The boy got a basketball
scholarship to college. And the man, Al Poling, publishes more articles
each year than the combination of the rest of his colleagues in our
psych department.
Why? Because he is always looking over his shoulder in case Mom comes
up with a bucket of water. Fear.
Case Study: La Chica Latina. She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela.
Students didn’t have to take the final exam, if they were among
the elite who scored 19 or 20 throughout the semester. She had never
had to take an exam. But in the 9th grade, she got an 18. She came
home crying. And Seniora Garcia said, “That’s OK, Chica;
don’t be so hard on yourself.”
When Senior Garcia came home, la Seniora cautioned, “Chica is
very upset about her 18; so don’t say anything.” But,
as soon as dinner started, el Senior said, “So, Chica, you’re
going to have to take the final exam with the other donkeys.”
The little girl ran to her room, locked the door, and cried for three
days.
Because she is still avoiding becoming a donkey again, Maria Malott
has is now one of the best OBMers I know. And, as with other highly
successful professionals, fear is Maria’s friend.
The Jewish-Mother Syndrome: Details. You can never do it right;
no matter how hard you try. So you try harder and harder, because,
if you don’t, you’ll feel even more guilt. Successful
people seem driven by this guilt, fear, and anxiety.
Without his own Jewish-mother syndrome, we would never have had the
world’s most brilliant, insightful psychotherapist—Sigmund
Freud. But, without their Jewish-mother syndromes, Dr. Freud’s
patients wouldn’t have needed the world’s most brilliant
psychotherapist. Nothing is free.
You do not have to be Jewish to be a Jewish mother; you can be Jewish,
Baptist, Catholic, or whatever. And you do not have to be a mother
to be a Jewish mother; you can be a mother, a father, or whatever.
But a person’s chances of being highly successful in a career
are much higher if they have had some sort of Jewish mother. Otherwise,
their chances are slim. A highly successful person must be very self-critical;
a highly successful person must have heavy fear, guilt, and/or shame.
The one secret of highly successful people. Though Covey may
need seven secrets for his people to be highly successful, I only
need one: “No matter how hard you try, you will never live up
to your Jewish mother’s expectations; so try harder.”
Of course this sort of aversive control is delicate; trying as hard
as you can must attenuate the aversiveness enough to negatively, differentially
reinforce that hard trying behavior; but it must not attenuate the
aversivness so much that there is not enough guilt, or fear, or shame
to maintain more escape/avoidance behavior.
Fear of failure -> success. Contrary to the common counseling-psychology
dogma of enablement, empowerment, etc., my observation is that fear
of failure is not why people fail to achieve, but rather fear of failure
is why people do achieve. Poor students are convinced they will ace
the next test without studying, even though they have never gotten
more than a C in their life; so they do not study and get less than
a C on the next test. And highly successful students are convinced
that they will fail the next test no matter how hard they study, even
though they have never gotten less than an A in their life; so they
study unreasonably hard and get an A. And once they graduate summa
cum laude, they bring their fear of failure into the work place and
become highly successful professionals.
Highly successful people got that fear of failure, that fear that
they would never live up to expectations, from their Jewish mother.
And I suspect these foundations were well laid before preschool and
certainly cast in concrete before junior high school. My observation
is that, if the person has not acquired this unreasonable fear before
they enter college, they never will. I have seen no convincing evidence
that any of us have the technology to become their later-day Jewish
mothers.
The Missing Jewish Mother. So what happens to the unfortunate
who have not had a good Jewish Mother? They will have a low rate of
empathetic behavior, and they will also have a low rate of other productive
professional or work behavior.
How do you manage such people? You set up explicit performance-management
contingencies with explicit deadlines for desirable behavior, either
empathetic behavior that will help others (e.g., clean up after your
shift) or production behavior (e.g., complete the 500-hour project).
And you describe those contingencies with explicit rules.
Suppose you yourself are one of those unfortunates who did not have
a good Jewish mother. To achieve your optimal personal and professional
success, you will have to use a set of self-management contingencies,
ideally with a surrogate Jewish mother who will manage your behavior.
But never fall victim to the fallacious fantasy that after enough
self-management experience you will acquire the automatic fear that
will allow you to dismiss your surrogate Jewish mother. If you did
not get it as a child, you never will; you and I will always need
these extrinsic performance-management contingencies.
The Fear Continuum. Of course, fear of failure is not dichotomous,
not all or none. We all have it to various degrees. Look at procrastination
on starting to work on a task that has a deadline, let us say, a deadline
of one month. The person who has been so fortunate as to have had
a highly effective Jewish mother in early childhood, will begin worrying
about the task, even before the beginning of the month when the task
will be assigned. That person will be trying to find out in advance
what the task is so he or she (usually she) can begin preparing even
more than a month in advance. Such people are highly, highly successful.
Those who have had moderately effective Jewish mothering will start
fearing failure at the beginning of the month when the task is assigned
and will start to work on it right away, with the immediate results
of a mild decrease in their fear, and with the long term results that
they complete a high quantity of high-quality tasks on a timely basis.
The less effective the Jewish mothering, the closer we get to the
deadline before we break into a cold sweat and start working on the
task, and therefore, we complete fewer, if any, high-quality tasks,
and perhaps none by the deadline. (I note that in spite of weeks of
gentle, gentile pleading by Tim Ludwig, the action editor for this
issue of JOBM, three of us have not yet gotten our manuscripts in,
in spite of having promised to do so by a date way before the pleading
started.)
A few people have had such an unfortunate early childhood history
that they never get anything done, let alone anything of high quality
or by the deadline. And, even fewer people have had such a fortunate
early childhood history that they can be highly productive without
deadlines, for example people like some scholarly and literary writers,
though, if you look closely, you will usually find some sort of hidden
deadline (often self-imposed) even for them.
Performance management as a substitute for the Jewish mother.
Performance management contingencies, with explicit deadlines can
be considered prosthetic devices for those of us who suffer the early-childhood
handicap of inadequate Jewish mothering. And the immediacy of the
deadlines needed to effectively control productive behavior is a function
of the degree of the handicap. A few highly successful people have
a sufficiently high fear of failure that they can start right away
on a project that has a one-year deadline; and they can maintain productive
behavior throughout the year until the project is completed (e.g.,
a dissertation).
But my observation is that such long-term work not divided into weekly
sub-goals with weekly deadlines will turn into feces. In other words,
most people will start fearing failure soon enough to start working
on substantial tasks in a timely manner, if the deadline is no longer
than a week a way. However, some people may need daily deadlines.
And some people may need hourly or minute-by-minute deadlines, depending
on their fear continuum.
Again, as a result of early-childhood Jewish mothering, simply stating
the goals and deadlines may be enough, because some people fear looking
bad in the eyes of their Jewish mother, even if that mother has long
since passed away. But, because of their lack of adequate early-childhood
fear inducement, others will need to be accountable to a real, live
person before fear of failure will kick in. And still others will
need an additional consequence contingent on failure to make the deadline,
a consequence like loss of the opportunity to get a bonus.
What all managers want is workers (e.g., line workers, middle managers,
secretaries, students, children) who start working on the task right
away and passionately stay on task until that task is done.
They want workers who do not need to be managed. They want workers
for whom fear of failure kicks in at the earliest possible moment.
But managers rarely get what they want. And the closer to the deadline
a person must be before starting to work, the smaller the sub-goals,
the more frequent the deadlines, the more frequent the monitoring,
the heaver the added consequence, the greater the expense of managing
that person.
In theory, we might be concerned with managers investing too many
resources in the management of the performance of workers with inadequate
childhood implantation of fear. But, in fact, managers almost always
fail to provide enough performance management, with the result that
they grudgingly accept low productivity or they incur the expense
and the sleepless nights of firing the worker. However, a moderate
amount of performance management would have more cost effectively
and more humanely saved the day and the worker.
Unfortunately, the more successful the manager as a professional,
the less tolerance they have for those who have not been as fortunate
as they in the early-childhood Jewish-mothering department. In other
words, they apply the same take-no-prisoners, hyper-critical standards
to the less successful that, early on, they learned to apply to themselves.
And they exemplify Robert Mager’s traditional manager who objects
to performance management with the pseudo-moralistic pronouncement,
“They should ought to want to do it (with out the codling of
added incentives and added performance-management contingencies).”
Rapprochement
I think Geller and Roberts are on the money when they point to the
importance of private events such as feelings, in the management of
human performance. If our workers were food deprived and we put pellets
of food in their mouths immediately after they performed appropriately,
we could ignore their inner lives. But our performance-management
outcomes are almost always delayed, by hours, days, or weeks. So the
worker needs to know the rule describing the performance management
contingency. And the point of this article, the worker needs to have
had an early-childhood behavioral history such that knowing the rule
and not being in compliance with that rule produces a condition that
is sufficiently aversive to maintain the appropriate behavior specified
by the rule or sufficiently aversive as to suppress the inappropriate
behavior specified by the rule. For all but the most pedantically
methodological in their behaviorism, that aversive condition is essentially
what everyone means by the everyday terms fear, guilt,
and shame. To ignore these private events is to produce a superficial,
simplistic explanation of the effectiveness of OBM, an explanation
that fails to intellectually satisfy our consumers, our clients. Our
clients know the contingencies controlling human work-place behavior
are much more complex and much more private than those controlling
the behavior of the rat in the Skinner box from which OBMers so often
over-extrapolate. And this leads to a final point.
How
Can We Sell OBM?
Though the question of how to sell OBM was just window dressing for
this series of articles, it is addressing an important window. So
please indulge my also giving an answer to that question: We best
sell OBM by doing two things:
First, by telling our students and clients the whole story, the inside
truth, as indicated in earlier sections. By abandoning our catch-them-being-good
mentality, by abandoning our simplistic extrapolations from the Skinner
box, and by going for a radical-behavioral emphasis on the importance
of aversive control and private events, while never abandoning the
Skinner box. We need to make clear that how the player plays the game
is determined not only by the rules of the game (the current behavioral
contingencies, both natural and performance management) but also by
what the player brings to the game (the readiness with which non-compliance
with the rules will generate guilt, fear, and shame [examples of Geller
and Roberts’ personal factors], as well as their specific game-related
skills).
And second, we best sell OBM by training more OBM practitioners. In
the whole field of applied behavior analysis, we have trouble arranging
the contingencies so that enough faculty are willing to train the
needed large numbers of students to be practitioners, rather than
restricting the graduate students they accept only to those who can
help the faculty members advance their professional careers of publishing
articles in our scholarly journals (Malott, 1992).
Therefore we need more behavior-analytic curricula specifically designed
to train our students to be practitioners (which most of them end
up being anyway, in spite of our best efforts), rather than curricula
designed to train our students to be scholars (which few end up being).
We need to emphasize the training of practitioners, rather than expediently
rationalizing that training to be scholars is the best way to train
our students to be practitioners and thereby sinking to the intellectual
dishonesty of abandoning everything we OBMers have learned and preach
to others about designing curricula that effectively train what needs
to be trained to a high level of fluency, rather than diluting our
training with so much emphasis on what is merely nice to know, but
far from essential.
Summary
A
Humble Caveat
Of course, this entire diatribe is only my opinion; and I could be
wrong, though not likely.
Read
comments on this article
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