Efeitos da apresentação de diferentes graus de explicitude de regras sobre a seleção de culturantes envolvendo respostas de autocontrole ético

Abstract

In a social environment, verbal behavior is one of the main variables responsible for favoring the acquisition and transmission of new behaviors without previous exposure to contingencies. The formulation of rules is one of the ways by which controlling agencies establish control over the behavior of individuals in any society. In the context of selection of social phenomena, a metacontingency describes a contingent functional relationship between culturants – recurrent interlocked behavioral contingencies (IBCs) and their aggregate products (APs) – and their selection consequences. This research was composed of two experiments with the aims of measuring: (1) the effects of different degrees of explicitness of rules in the selection of culturants and (2) the effects of different degrees of rule explicitness on cultural selection under conditions of competition between individual and cultural consequences. Each experiment consisted of 12 trios exposed to a task in which each participant must choose a row in a colored figure in an ABCABC reversal design (no rule, implicit rule, explicit rule) and CBACBA (explicit rule, implicit rule, no rule). In Experiment 1, cultural selection occurred under virtually all conditions. In Experiment 2, only the rule explicitly allowed cultural selection in situations involving competition between individual and group consequences. The results indicate the selector effect of CCs on the occurrence of culturants and suggest further investigation into the selection of culturants that involve ethical self-control responses to ascertain the extent to which (a) they are related to the selection of culturants even when they imply individual consequences of lesser magnitude and (b) to the lower probability of occurrence of the culturants at random in relation to experimental conditions that do not evaluated ethical self-control responses. In principle, the data suggest at least two important considerations for cultural interventions: (1) the catalytic effect of explicit rules on contingencies, and (2) the need to mitigate the effect of competition between individual and cultural consequences.