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Trait-based
Personality Theory, Ontogenic Behavioral Continuity, and Behavior
Analysis
Richard W. Malott1
Behavior Analysis Program
Department of Psychology
Western Michigan University
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Abstract
Behavior analysts can and should but rarely do account for the ontogenic
continuity of behavior, thus leaving the field open to the reified,
biological-deterministic traits of personality theorists.
Circular
Reifications
The well-written, carefully reasoned article by B Roberts (2002)
pulled my chain almost as violently as did the articles by Geller
and S Roberts (2002). B Roberts suggests that, at last, organizational
behavior management (OBM) and personality psychology are reunited.
Fortunately, that is an overstatement; the reuniting is occurring
but only in the worldview of a small number of OBM behavior analysts
(e.g., Geller and S Roberts).
Indeed, I think we must diligently avoid B Robert’s suggestion
of “opening … OBM to other models of human nature beyond
behaviorism.” And though I agree “that the idea of consistent
human behavior …is (not) intellectually indefensible,”
I would argue that what is intellectually indefensible is “that
the idea of consistent human behavior (must be) embodied in the notion
of a trait,” with all the baggage accompanying the term “trait.”
And, though I do not want us to “open . . . OBM to other models
of human nature,” I do want us behavior analysts to be open
to the large amount of excellent data collected by non-behaviorists.
I also agree that, with the impressive exception of Staats (1977),
unfortunately most behavior analysts, have ignored “the idea
of consistent human behavior,” thus leaving the field open to
the mentalistic reifications of trait-based personality theory.
Reifications are usually circular explanatory fictions invented to
explain observable behavior, behavior that itself is cited to prove
the existence of those reifications: Why does this manager behave
in such a responsible manner? Because of her personality, one of her
personality traits is high responsibility. How do you know she has
the high-responsibility trait? Because she acts in a responsible manner.
The fact that a trait psycho-diagnostician may have sampled some of
her behavior on a paper-based personality test and then assigned to
her the high-responsibility trait does not remove the circularity
of the trait as a reified explanatory fiction; it merely obfuscates
that circularity.
In no way does consistent human behavior (I like “ontogenic
behavioral continuity”) demand that we invent reified explanatory
fictions such as personality traits. For example, essentially all
people who learn a second language after they have become adults will
always speak that language with the accent of their first language.
So, for the rest of my life, I will speak Spanish like the gringo
I am. But this ontogenic behavioral continuity, my behaving in that
consistently gringo manner throughout my life, does not mean I have
the gringoism trait. Instead, it means I did not have the preschool
opportunity of learning Spanish at the same time and in the same way
I learned English (nor does it mean my language-learning synapses
have calcified, for that matter).
Similarly, the manager’s consistently behaving in a responsible
manner does not mean she has the responsibility trait. Instead, it
means she did have the opportunity (and I would suggest largely a
preschool opportunity) to learn the complex behavioral repertoire
and values (reinforcers and aversive conditions) that results in her
behaving responsibly. Furthermore, that complex repertoire and those
values are not reifications.
In addition to being intellectually indefensible, the circular, reified
notion of personality trait is intellectually stultifying. Why does
she consistently behave responsibly? Because she has the responsibility
trait. QED. End of questions. End of analysis.
However, consider this question-answer sequence: Why does she consistently
behave responsibly? Because she has learned the complex behavioral
repertoire and values that support behaving responsibly. Certainly
not the end of discussion and analysis. Instead, that question-answer
sequence leads to more questions: What are those repertoires and values?
How did she learn them? And how do they support her consistently behaving
responsibly? What happens when people do not learn the repertoire
and values you suggest are so crucial for supporting responsible behavior?
Furthermore, those questions are answerable by empirical research.
And there remains the possibility of empirically disconfirming the
entire notion that such repertoires and values account for her responsible
behavior, the notion that they account for the ontogenic behavioral
continuity (essentially lifetime continuity) of her responsible behavior.
Ontogenic
Behavioral Continuity
Years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a summer remedial classroom
for the most rotten, vicious, killer grade-school students of Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula (actually, they were tame by more-global standards).
And, in addition to those remedial students, some of the teacher and
staff children were in the classroom. The same performance-management
contingencies and rules applied to all the kids, but the teacher/staff
kids were much more on task, much more obedient, and much less disruptive
than the remedial kids were. Neither group of kids came to us as little tabula rasas; instead, their behavioral histories had written
all over their slates by the time we saw them. Each came to the playing
table with his or her own stacked deck. The playing field was level,
but each kid’s ball bat was a different weight.
Since then, in every setting where I have done performance management,
this question has intrigued me: How much of the person’s performance
is determined by the current natural and performance-management contingencies
and how much is determined by that person’s pre-existing behavioral
repertoire and values (often reflected in covert behavioral contingencies).
For example, I also see the effects of the pre-existing repertoire
and values in my university courses, which are highly structured and
loaded with performance-management contingencies. Although my goal
is that all students do the hard work needed to learn enough to earn
an A, rarely do we achieve that goal; and an occasional student will
do quite poorly. In other words, some students (actually the majority
of the students) enter the university and my courses with the pre-existing
repertoires and values that will result in their working hard and
learning an A’s worth of behavior analysis, at least in my highly-structured
courses loaded with performance management contingences; a few do
not. In spite of our best efforts, we never manage to create equality
heaven.
(As a side observation, essentially all my students do much better
in my behaviorally designed courses than they do in traditionally
taught courses. And though we never achieve equality heaven, we greatly
reduce the achievement disparity among students. This means the poorer
students benefit more from the structure and added contingencies than
do the better students [e.g., a student who would achieve 90% in a
traditional course will achieve 95% in my course {a 5% improvement}]),
while a student who would achieve 60% in a traditional course will
achieve 85% in my courses {a 25% improvement}; do not take the numbers
literally].)
Both the example of the grade-school classroom and the example of
the university classroom illustrate ontogenic behavioral continuity:
The repertoires and values that cause students to perform and thereby
learn at a particular level in one classroom will cause them to perform
and learn at much the same level in subsequent classrooms. And though
performance management can have a major impact on that performance
and learning, it rarely eliminates all traces of the ontogenic behavioral
continuity that causes consistent performance and learning differences
among the students.
This doesn’t mean we could not eliminate those differences by
bringing everyone up to the level of the top performers; but it would
require a Lovaasian intensity and commitment that may rarely seem
cost effective with populations other than preschool children labeled
“autistic”. Furthermore, even Lovaas fails to normalize
all of his autistic children; for some of the children, even Lovaas
(1987) fails to eliminate the ontogenic behavioral continuity maintained
by the children’s pre-existing repertoires and values (or for
the biological determinists, maintained by the autistic genes and
bad blood).
Ontogenic
Behavioral Continuity and Preschool Fatalism
B Roberts suggests that, in addition to changing behavior, behavior
analysts should concentrate on changing traits. And I agree that behavior
analysts should concentrate more on changing the repertoires and values
that result in ontogenic behavioral continuity, changing them in such
a manner that people will behave in healthier, happier, more productive,
less harmful ways in the absence of optimal behavioral contingencies
later in life (e.g., that they will behave responsibly, even when
the boss is not looking). And I also agree that affecting ontogenic
behavioral continuity can be a long-term investment in positive change.
But, in addition to the difficulty of affecting ontogenic behavioral
continuity, there is a big catch, what I call “preschool fatalism”--before
we enter grade school, we learn most of the repertoire and values
that will result in ontogenic behavioral continuity. And psychologists,
including behavior analysts, have not developed the technology nor
gained access to the resources needed to change the crucial repertoire
and values once people have become adults and perhaps even teenagers.
Preschool fatalism is illustrated by our failure to speak a late-learned
second language without an accent, in spite of years of immersion
in the second-language verbal community. The inability to combat preschool
fatalism is illustrated by our failure to normalize the repertoire
and values of children labeled “autistic” when we intervene
after they are six years old. The extent of this inability to change
the pre-existing repertoire and values is illustrated by the fact
that I know of only one documented example where anyone, psychologist,
behavior analyst, or whoever, has been able to achieve such a post-preschool
change; this was the case of an 18-yearold, male transsexual who acquired
a male-heterosexual repertoire and values (Barlow, Reynolds, &
Agras, 1973); and that case study has not been extensively replicated.
Of course, many people claim to make such changes in the repertoire
and values of adults, but the absence of convincing data leaves me
skeptical, whether the claim makers are clinical psychologists touting
the impact of a few one-hour sessions of talk therapy, educators touting
the benefits of workshops teaching high-risk college students to self-manage
their study time and study behaviors, or motivational OBM speakers.
And my own experience running behavioral interventions for high-risk
entering college students and students on academic probation leaves
me equally skeptical.
However, preschool fatalism does not prevent us from learning a foreign
language as an adult; but it does prevent us from ever speaking that
language with a convincing accent. And, more to the point of this
article, preschool fatalism does not prevent us from learning how
to drive a car as an adult; but it does prevent us from driving it
safely (i.e., cautiously, soberly, and within the speed limit) when
the cop isn’t there. In other words, if we have not grown up
with a set of values that make drunken speeding unthinkably aversive,
no amount of smiley-face stickers and no amount of thank-you-for-not-driving-like-a-complete-idiot
tickets is likely to help us acquire those crucial aversive values
as adults.
If this pessimistic preschool-fatalistic view is correct, how are
we going to save the world with behavior analysis? Two ways? First,
take seriously the claims from long ago, those claims of the Catholic
priests, who said they could permanently mould a person’s character,
if they could provide that person with moral and religious training
from infancy, and the claim of John B. Watson, who said he could raise
any infant to be a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief, not that either
set of claims have been experimentally demonstrated. To date, our
most impressive data come from behavior-analytic work with preschool
autistic children (Lovaas, 1987).
The second way to save the world with behavior analysis is to do performance
management with adults. We cannot change the early repertoires and
values of those adults; but we can set up effective performance-management
contingencies, such as pay for performance contingencies; and JOBM
is full of successful OBM examples of performance-management contingencies
with adults. Although we cannot change their early repertoires and
values so that an adult will act in a responsible manner in the absence
of supervision, we can set up performance-management contingencies
so that adult will act in a responsible manner, as long as those contingencies
are in place and make contact with specific instance of the responsible
behavior. But we should not expect the responsible behavior to maintain
once we remove those contingencies, no matter how carefully we “fade”
them out. And we should be prepared for the likelihood that a very
small number of those adults will come to us with such deficient preschool
repertoires and values that it will not be cost effective to provide
the detailed performance management need to get them to act responsibly.
So, even if we never manage to develop reliable ways of changing the
course of well-established ontogenic continuity, we still have two
powerful world-saving tools, intensive preschool training and adult
performance management. But such interventions will always be much
more costly than the pathetically inadequate, ineffective, lightweight
interventions currently practiced in education, clinical psychology,
and organizational psychology. It takes more than motivational speakers
to save the world.
A caveat: B Roberts (this issue) mentions that social reformers find
the biologically wired traits of personality theorists to be unpalatable.
And unfortunately, this behavior-analytic preschool-fatalistic view
of the ontogenic continuity of behavior may be only slightly more
palatable to us social reformers. This behavioral view may be slightly
more palatable because it suggests a solution to social problems considerably
short of eugenics; and it may still be a little difficult to swallow
because this behavioral solution is almost stultifyingly hard to implement,
much harder than the inadequate solutions proposed by most social
reformers (e.g., school uniforms will not turn concrete jungles into
pre-Harvard prep-schools).
Biological
Determinism
The dominance of circular, reified explanatory fictions, such as
personality traits, is the major reason why psychology has had such
limited success as a natural science. Almost as destructive is psychology’s
penchant for biological determinism—the explanation of complex
human behavior and the explanation of the behavioral differences among
human beings in terms of innate, largely genetic causes.
Unfortunately, the shady history of biological determinism has done
little to dampen psychology’s enthusiasm for biological determinism.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of scientific racism and scientific
sexism where the world’s foremost scientists scientifically
proved the biological basis for the obvious moral and intellectual
inferiority of women, Africans, Orientals, Italians of course, and
to a lesser extent, the French. A major reason for this inferiority
was that all of those lower forms of humanity had smaller brains than
did western European men, especially smaller than the brains of those
world’s foremost scientists, except for some embarrassing exceptions.
Overt expressions of scientific racism and sexism are less popular
than in the good old days, but scientific racism is far from dead
(Hernstein & Murray, 1984).
From nineteenth-century phrenology to the present day, the history
of biological determinism is littered with the corpses of studies
scientifically proving the innate, largely genetic basis of complex
human behavior and the largely genetic basis for the behavioral differences
among human being. And these studies always evoke much enthusiasm
and headline press notice when announced. But, with impressive regularity,
these biological-deterministic studies are later disproven or fond
unreplicable, with little press notice. In spite of the checkered
past of such notions, psychologists have not lost their penchant for
explanations in terms of biological determinism. In fact, psychology
has created and formalized an entire subdiscipline devoted to biological
determinism—behavioral genetics. First, our ancestors placed
the causal agent for things unexplained within spirits, then the soul,
and now the gene. In terms of complex human behavior, the gene is
now serving the same function as the spirits and the soul of earlier
days and with little more justification.
None of this is to argue against biological psychology nor the gene
(or spirits and the soul, for that matter). None of this is to argue
against searching for the biological bases of behavior. For example,
clearly there is a biological basis for the effectiveness of reinforcers.
And clearly, there is a biological basis stimulus discrimination and
generalization. Clearly, there is a biological basis for all of the
basic behavioral processes. But performance on an IQ test does not
reflect a basic behavioral process, nor does a high frequency of acting
in a responsible, proactive, reliable manner, nor does learning tantruming
and self-injurious behavior to the point where it interferes with
learning language behavior with the resultant label of “autistic.”
Instead, these behavioral repertoires and values reflect the somewhat
idiosyncratic learning histories of the different individuals; they
reflect the complex interactions of the basic behavioral processes,
such as reinforcement, discrimination, and generalization. So, what
I am arguing against is not the biological basis of behavior, but
rather the biological/genetic basis of complex behavior, as if there
were an IQ gene, a responsibility gene, an autism gene, or collection
of genes. And saying that a person’s responsible behavior really
results from an interaction between the responsibility gene and the
environment just clouds the issue, as does saying that the responsibility
gene only determines a “tendency” to behave responsibly.
Conclusions
I have gradually come to recogniaze a phenomenon even more depressing
than preschool fatalism; that phenomenon is pre-PhD fatalism--the
beliefs, values, and ideas we have acquired by the time we are 26
shall be with us forever, never to be changed by logic, data, epiphany,
divine revelation, PowerPoint slideshows, nor closely reasoned, sarcastic
articles. So, at best, articles such as this only affect the choir
to which they are preaching and that merely by articulating and confirming
pre-existing biases. But I hope, perhaps naively, that one or two
OBMers will now look a little more critically at behavior-analytic
interventions that purport to change the adult to the point that we
can eventually eliminate the performance-management contingencies.
And maybe a reader or two will be slightly more inclined to consider
implementing the intensive preschool interventions needed to positively
impact ontogenic behavioral continuity. But, to me an even more delightful,
though perhaps even more improbable, outcome would be that some behavior
analyst master the personality literature of “trait” stability
to the point that he or she can provide an analysis of that literature
from a radical-behavior-analytic, ontogenic-continuity perspective,
not a mere translation, but an analysis that results in new insights
and new understanding for scholars on both sides of the great conceptual
divide. At least as delightful would be that a trait theorist master
radical behaviorism to the point that he or she can provide such an
analysis. In any of these cases, I would be happy to hold the participants’
coats, occasionally wipe the sweat from their furrowed brows, and
even lend an occasional hand.
As always, this article is only my humble opinion; and there is a
slight chance that I am wrong.
References
Barlow, D. H., Reynolds, E. J., & Agras, W. S. (1973). Gender
identity change in transsexuals. Archives of General Psychiatry, 28,
569-579.
Geller, E. S. (2002). Should organizational behavior management expand
its content? Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 22(2).
Gould, S. J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: W.W. Norton
& Co.
Hernstein, R. J. & Murray, C. (1984). The bell curve. New York:
Free Press.
Lovaas, O. I. (1987). Behavioral treatment and normal educational
and intellectual functioning in young autistic children. Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 55, 3-9.
Roberts, B. W. (2002). Organizational behavior management and personality
psychology: Reunited and it feels so good? Journal of Organizational
Behavior Management. 22(2).
Roberts, S. (2002). Integrating person factors in the OBM framework:
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Staats, A. W. (1977). Child learning, intelligence, and personality.
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