Efeito da alternância entre o gerenciamento de um recurso comum e a produção destes sobre a seleção e manutenção de respostas entrelaçadas eticamente autocontroladas

Abstract

Metacontingency describes a selection of culturants (sets of individual interrelated responses plus aggregate product derived responses) by their cultural consequence. In this concept, can study ethically self-controlled behavior. Ethical self-control occurs when individual choices benefit the culture, with greater reinforcer in the long run, while the individual receives a smaller magnitude reinforcer in the short term. Such behavior has gained prominence in the field of sustainability, since it allows the understanding of effective contexts for the preservation of reserves of common goods such as natural and economic resources. The present study had the objective of evaluating the effect of a reserve of common goods in the interweaving of ethically self-controlled responses. The experimental task was to choose one of eight colored and numbered lines. School items to be donated to a public school were used as cultural consequences and tokens exchangeable for money as individual consequences. The experiment had an ABCBC and ACBCB design. In Condition A, composed only of individual consequences, choices on even lines generated one token, and odd, three. In condition B, a reserve of items was introduced and thus competition between cultural consequences (management of a reserve of items) and individual (production of tokens). In condition C, the item reserve was withdrawn and instead a metacontingence of item production was introduced, the individual consequence, in this condition, started to compete with the production of 4 items for coordinated responses and no item for impulsive responses . There was a selection of ethically self-controlled responses in three of the six microcultures. In two of them, the number of ethically self-controlled responses was sufficient to maintain the reservation in its second presentation. In microcultures where the reserve did not select ethically self-controlled responses, microcultures that were initially exposed to the condition of item production, ACBCB delineation, the absence of feedback for participants when there was no production of items in condition C could have made it difficult to produce interlacing. It is also suggested that the reservation of items, condition B, provides an environment for greater variability of choices than condition C.