THE STUDY OF CULTURE IN BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS AND THE WORK OF SIGRID GLENN

Abstract

Despite its focus in the study of the behavior of individual organisms, Behavior Analysis has dealt for decades with social and cultural phenomena. Only in the 1980s, however, it began more clearly to treat culture as an object of independent study, seeking to assess the variables affecting its evolution even without direct reference to individual behavior. The analysis of culture as a specific subject matter gains more impetus with the proposition by Sigrid Glenn of the concept of metacontingency and with her subsequent works. The concept of metacontingency was changed in successive publications by Glenn, increasing the focus on the recurrence of interlocking behavioral contingencies and its aggregate products. Furthermore, the common consequence to the group was no longer characterized as a necessarily long-term event, suggesting that it could also be an immediate event. The paper entitled Individual Behavior, Culture and Social Change (Glenn, 2004) - whose translation to Portuguese this text introduces - can be understood as a synthesis of many previous discussions on the subject and as a mark of the establishment of many concepts that continue to be employed by those interested in the topic. The concept of metacontingency still underwent some reformulations after Glenn's article published in 2004, but only at the beginning of this century experiments that explicitly employ it began to be conducted. Key words: metacontingency, macrocontingency, cultural evolution, social behavior.