BA200 Unit 5 Selection by Consequences Paper Example

Three Kinds of Selection in One Clinic: A BA200 Unit 5 Selection by Consequences Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA200: Conceptual Foundations of Applied Behavior Analysis

Unit 5 Selection by Consequences Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the clinic, its staff and the child are composite; the sources cited are real.

The Idea

In a short paper in Science, Skinner (1981) argued that human behavior is the product of three kinds of selection by consequences. The first is natural selection, which shapes the features of a species, including its behavior, over many generations. The second is operant conditioning, which shapes the behavior of an individual over a lifetime as actions are strengthened or weakened by their consequences. The third is the evolution of cultural practices, which are selected by their consequences for the group. Skinner proposed that the same causal mode, variation followed by selection, operates at all three levels, and that this mode had been neglected in favor of explanations that looked for a creating mind or an inner initiating agent.

My examples come from the clinic in western Colorado where I deliver therapy sessions. This paper uses examples from the clinic to explain each level and then evaluates the theory.

Natural Selection: Why Consequences Matter at All

Darwin (1859) explained how variation among organisms, combined with differences in survival and reproduction, produces change in species over generations. No designer is required; features that happen to improve survival become more common.

Skinner's point was that natural selection produced not only fixed behaviors, such as reflexes, but also the capacity for behavior to be changed by its consequences. Organisms that could learn from what followed their actions could adapt to environments that changed too quickly for natural selection to track. Every child at our clinic carries that inherited sensitivity. When a five-year-old learns that a card brings a break, he is using a capacity that evolved long before clinics existed.

The phylogenic level also sets limits. Some consequences, such as food, warmth and social contact, are reinforcing without any learning history because of our species' evolution. Others, such as praise or tokens, become reinforcing through learning. Understanding which is which matters for designing interventions.

Operant Selection: How Biting Was Selected

At the second level, behavior is selected during one person's lifetime. Variations in behavior occur, and those followed by reinforcing consequences become more likely. Skinner (1981) described this as a second kind of selection that works on the individual's repertoire much as natural selection works on a population.

Mateo, the five-year-old whose case appears in Unit 3, began biting peers during circle time last fall. A functional analysis showed that biting was maintained by escape from demanding group activities. We do not know exactly how it started. Perhaps he bit once, by accident or in distress, and was removed from the circle. Whatever the first instance, the consequence, escape, followed biting reliably, and biting became more frequent. No one intended to teach Mateo to bite. The behavior was selected.

No one at the clinic taught Mateo to bite, but the circle time routine selected biting as reliably as any lesson could have.

The intervention changed the selecting environment. The team taught Mateo to hand staff a break card and arranged for the card, rather than biting, to produce escape. A new variation, card use, was now selected, while biting was not. Bites fell to near zero within a few weeks.

Cultural Selection: How the Break Card Spread

The third level concerns practices that are transmitted among members of a group and that are selected by their consequences for the group. Skinner (1981) argued that cultural practices evolve when they help the group solve its problems, and that a practice can survive even when the individuals who began it are gone.

The break card offers a small example. After Mateo's results, two other technicians began using break cards with children whose behavior served an escape function, and the clinic's supervisor added a section on functional communication training to staff orientation. Within a year, the practice had become part of how the clinic works. It spread not because every technician understood its theory but because clinics that use it have fewer injuries, calmer group sessions and more satisfied families, consequences that matter for the group's survival as a business and as a service.

Baum (2017) extends this idea, arguing that cultural evolution, like biological evolution, involves variation, transmission and selection, and that behavior analysis can contribute to understanding how practices change. The clinic's session note template, recently changed to prompt descriptions of antecedents and consequences, is another practice now being tested by its consequences.

What the Model Asks of a Technician

Seeing all three levels changes how I work. At the phylogenic level, it reminds me that some reinforcers, such as rest from effort or a parent's attention, need no teaching, so they are often what problem behavior is already getting. At the operant level, it tells me to look at what follows a behavior before guessing at its cause. At the cultural level, it makes me notice which of my own habits I copied from coworkers without checking whether they work.

Evaluating the Theory

The strength of selection by consequences is its unity. It explains how a species acquires the capacity to learn, how a child acquires a specific behavior and how a group acquires a practice, without appeal to a designer or an inner agent at any level. For practitioners, it shifts attention to the selecting environment: if behavior is maintained by its consequences, the environment can be changed.

The theory also has limits. The analogy between levels is imperfect. In natural selection, variation is random and transmission is genetic. In cultural selection, variation is often intentional, people deliberately try new practices, and transmission happens through imitation and instruction. Critics argue that Skinner's framework underplays the role of language, planning and reasoning in how cultures change. The break card spread partly because my supervisor explained its logic in a staff meeting, which is selection by consequences only in a stretched sense.

There is also a risk of using selection as a story told after the fact. Saying that biting was selected by escape is useful because it was tested in a functional analysis. Saying that a cultural practice survived because it was useful can become circular if usefulness is inferred only from survival.

Conclusion

Skinner's selection by consequences offers a single framework for understanding change at the level of the species, the individual and the culture. In one clinic, it explains why children can learn at all, how a five-year-old came to bite and how a break card became standard practice. Its value for practice lies in pointing to the environment that selects behavior; its weakness lies in an analogy that strains when people deliberately design the practices that culture then keeps.

References

Baum, W. M. (2017). Understanding behaviorism: Behavior, culture, and evolution (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection. John Murray.

Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences. Science, 213(4507), 501-504. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7244649