What is wrong with daily life in the Western world?

Abstract

Five cultural practices have eroded the contingencies of reinforcement under which the human species evolved by promoting the effects of the consequences of behavior at the expense of the effects. These practices are (a) alienating workers from the consequences of their work, (b) helping those who could help themselves, (c) guiding behavior with rules rather than supplying reinforcing consequences, (d) maintaining aversive sanctions of governments and religions with longdeferred benefits for the individual, and (e) reinforcing looking, listening, reading, gambling, and so on, while very few other behaviors. Hence, where thousands of millions of people in other parts of the world cannot do many of the things they want to do, hundreds of millions of people in the West do not want to do many of the things they can do. Human behavior in the West has grown weak, but it can be strengthened through the application of principles derived from an experimental analysis of behavior. There are many things wrong with the world today, but they do not disturb everyone. Overpopulation, the impoverishment and pollution of the environment, and even the possibility of a nuclear war are often dismissed as matters to be dealt with in the fairly distant future. Poverty, illness, and violence are current problems, but not for everyone. Many of those who live in the Western democracies enjoy a reasonable degree of affluence, freedom, and security. But they have problems of their own. In spite of their privileges, many of them are bored, listless, or depressed. They are not enjoying their lives. They do not like what they are doing; they are not doing what they like to do. In a word, they are unhappy. That is not the most serious problem in the world, but it could be said to be an ultimate one. Most of the world looks forward to enjoying some approximation of the Western life-style when they have solved their other problems. Is there not something more promising in the future of the species? These are statements about how people feel. It is standard practice to phrase them that way. For centuries, feelings have been accepted as both the causes and the effects of behavior. People are said to do what they do because they feel like doing it and to feel as they feel because of what they have done. Because feelings appear to play such important roles, it has been argued tha t a science of behavior must be incomplete and that it cannot solve the kind of problem I am concerned with here. Feelings, however, are not out of reach of a behavioral science. The question is not what feelings are, but what is felt. Feel is a verb--like see, hear, or taste. We see, hear, and things in the world around us, and we feel things in our bodies. When we feel lame, we are feeling lame muscles; when we feel tired, we are feeling a tired body; when we have a toothache, we are feeling an inflamed tooth. Feeling differs from other kinds of sensing in several ways. Because what we feel is within our skin, we cannot escape from it. The sense organs with which we feel it are not as easily observed as those with which we see things in the world around us. And we cannot report what we feel as accurately as what we see because those who teach us to do so lack information about the body we feel. I need not pursue those epistemological issues further, however, to state the present question: What is felt when we are not enjoying our lives? And, of course, what is to be changed if we are to feel differently? I am suggesting that answers are to be found in something that has happened in the history of the species. The first members of homo sapiens must have been very much like the other primates we see today. They would have had their own ways of gathering or hunting for food, building shelters, finding mates, raising families, and avoiding harm. Their behavior would have been as much the product of natural selection as that of other primates and perhaps no more readily modified through conditioning. Like other species, they would have profited from the experience of others, but only through imitation and modeling. The human species took a unique evolutionary step when its vocal musculature came under operant control and language was born. People could then tell, as well as show, each other what to do. Extraordinarily complex social environments or cultures evolved, and they gave the species its extraordinary power. I shall argue that at the same time many of those cultural practices eroded or destroyed certain relations between organism and environment that had prevailed at the time the process of operant conditioning evolved. The result is easily described as a matter of feelings because the feelings at issue are closely tied to operant reinforcement. Thus, we say that reinforcing things please us, that we like them, and that they feel The association of reinforcement with feeling is so strong that it has long been said that things reinforce because they feel good or feel good because they reinforce. We should say, instead, that things both feel good and reinforce because of what has happened in the evolution of the species. Organisms presumably eat nourishing foods because genetic variations that increased their likelihood of doing so contributed to the survival of the individual and the species, and these variations were selected. In the simpler 568 May 1986 9 American Psychologist Copyright 1986 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/86/$00.75 Vol. 41, No. 5, 568-574 species, we do not often say that the foods must taste good. The issue of enjoyment presumably arose when organisms became susceptible to reinforcement by the same foods. They then ate for two reasons: The behavior was innate and was also reinforced by its consequences. It is the reinforcing effect, not the genetic tendency to eat, that we report when we say that foods taste good. Reinforcement has, however, another effect: Behavior that is reinforced is more likely to occur again. At the risk of being seriously misunderstood by critics of behaviorism, I shall distinguish between the pleasing and the strengthening effects. They occur at different times and are felt as different things. When we feel pleased, we are not necessarily feeling a greater inclination to behave in the same way. (Indeed, when we call a reinforcer satisfying rather than pleasing, as Thorndike did, we suggest that it reduces the likelihood of acting in the same way, because satisJj;ing is etymologically close to satiating.) When we later repeat behavior that has been reinforced, we do not feel the effect we felt at the time the reinforcement occurred. Pleasing appears to be the everyday English word that is closest to reinforcing, but it covers only half the effect. I am arguing that cultural practices have evolved primarily because of the effect of reinforcemont and that much of the effect of the consequences of behavior has been lost. The evolution of cultural practices has miscarried. It is rather like what has happened in the field of health. The species evolved in an environment with a given mean temperature and humidity, a given purity of water, given kinds of food, and given predators, including viruses and bacteria. Cultural practices have vastly changed all that, and because natural selection has been too slow to keep pace, we suffer many illnesses from which the species must once have been free. The world we live in is largely man-mademand nowhere more so than in the Westmbut in an important sense it is not well made. Before looking more closely at the nature of what is wrong, it will be helpful to review five cultural practices that, by promoting the effects of the consequences of behavior at the expense of the effects, have eroded the contingencies of reinforcement.

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