Efeitos da interação verbal na seleção de culturantes autocontrolados

Abstract

Self-control refers to a response pattern that can occur in situations of concurrence between contingencies, under which a response produces immediate reinforcers of smaller magnitude (impulsive response), while a concurrent response produces delayed reinforcers of greater magnitude (self-controlled response). At the cultural level, self-control refers to concurrence between an impulsive culturant, which produces immediate and minor cultural consequences, and a self-controlled culturant, which produces delayed and larger cultural consequences. For the study of cultural phenomena, behavior analysts have adopted metacontingency as a unit of analysis. Metacontingency describes functional relationships between intertlocked behavioral contingencies (IBCs) with their aggregate products (APs), and environmental selecting events. The IBCs + AP unit is defined as a culturant. Taking as reference previous works on verbal behavior and cultural selection, the objective of the present study was to test the effect of verbal interaction on the selection of self-controlled culturants. Twelve people were divided into 4 microcultures of 3 participants each. Microcultures 1 and 2 were exposed to the ABAB experimental design and microcultures 3 and 4 to BABA. In condition A was allowed verbal interaction among the participants, already in condition B such interaction was not allowed. Free Mtrix software was used for data collection. The task consisted in choosing colored lines numbered from 1 to 10 in a figure. Odd or even line choices always produced 1 token in all conditions. The individual gains were exchanged for money at the end of the experiment. There were two scheduled metacontingencies. In Metacontingency 1, impulsive culturants (choices of line green + yellow + purple, or green + yellow + blue, or green + yellow + red) produced as a cultural consequence 1 school item for donation to a school 1 day after the experiment. In Metacontingency 2, self-controlled culturants(choices of lines blue + red + purple, or blue + red + yellow, or blue + red + green) produced 10 school items for donation to a school 10 days after the experiment. There was a greater occurrence of self-controlled culturants under the conditions in which verbal interaction was allowed. In the microcultures where the experiment started with allowed verbal interaction, the selection of self-controlled culturants occurred more quickly. This study demonstrated that the possibility of verbal interaction favors the selection of self-controlled culturants in laboratory microcultures. We hope that such findings contribute to a better understanding of cultural self-control.