Abstract
This chapter explores how systemic approaches to science enable behaviorists and those of other disciplines with whom we collaborate to understand and intervene in larger social and cultural processes. In work with virtually all cultural and community issues, behavior science needs to plan and act in concert with specialists of other disciplines—and with members of, and cooperating and competing organizations within, the community systems involved. Such partnerships with community systems offer unique expertise regarding the variables and ecological conditions that are most involved in community issues—and solutions. This work requires attention to interlocking disciplinary systems, community systems, and their connections in terms of behavioral and cultural systems dynamics. In this chapter, core concepts of systems science as applied to Skinner’s third level of selection, and some of the controversies involved, are introduced and clarified, and examples of cultural (or—as some prefer—“culturo-behavioral”) analysis are provided and explored in depth. This content provides grounding for many of the chapters that follow.
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Notes
- 1.
Metacontingency: A contingent relation between (1) recurring interlocking behavioral contingencies having an aggregate product and (2) selecting environmental events or conditions (Glenn et al., 2016).
- 2.
Self-organization and autopoiesis are commonly used interchangeably in contemporary systems science, although autopoietic systems were originally defined to require self-generation (Mobus & Kalton, 2015).
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Mattaini, M.A. (2020). Cultural Systems Analysis: An Emerging Science. In: Cihon, T.M., Mattaini, M.A. (eds) Behavior Science Perspectives on Culture and Community. Behavior Analysis: Theory, Research, and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45421-0_3
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