The willingness to trade off large but ill-defined future consequences for immediate work characterizes social problems such as environmental sustainability. This commentary argues that important applications of behavioral models of self-control are being overlooked in the experimental literature. Tying the experimental literature to longterm health, environmental, and other risks makes the experimental work more germane, and raises new research questions for experimental modeling.

In this paper we attempt to understand the intellectual origins of Albert Ellis' Rational Psychotherapy (now known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy). In his therapeutic practice Ellis used a 'lumper' argument to replace the focus of change in psychoanalysis: not the lengthy uncovering and reworking of the individual's personal history, but the demands in self-talk through which the client is currently dis turbed. In constructing around this the persuasive (rhetorical) package that became his therapy, Ellis drew on a number of (...) popular intellectual movements, operationalism, General Semantics, the holistic theory of emotion, cognitive psychology, and psychoanalysis itself. (shrink)

Abstract Psychology's goal has been to become a science, taking the modern natural sciences as the model. It has not been understood that each science undergoes a transition from early disunification to later unification, that a fundmental dimension is involved that differentiates sciences. Psychology is a modern disunified science, distinguished by its chaotic knowledge and ways of operating. A philosophy of science based on modem unified science, as philosophies generally are, is inappropriate as a means of understanding psychology or of (...) guiding its development. We need a philosophy to describe the special problems of theory construction of modern disunified sciences, and to advance paths by which to work on those problems. Theory tasks to be undertaken in large quantities range from articles to reduce artificial diversity to the construction of grand unified theory. Psychology must begin those tasks, and it must understand its characteristics as a modern disunified science, if it is to make good decisions concerning its development and organization. Otherwise it will continue on its path towards fragmentation, an impenetrable obstacle to full development as a science and a profession. (shrink)

The notion of optimality is often invoked informally in the literature on metacognitive control. We provide a precise formulation of the optimization problem and show that optimal time allocation strategies depend critically on certain characteristics of the learning environment, such as the extent of time pressure, and the nature of the uptake function. When the learning curve is concave, optimality requires that items at lower levels of initial competence be allocated greater time. On the other hand, with logistic learning curves, (...) optimal allocations vary with time availability in complex and surprising ways. Hence there are conditions under which optimal strategies will be relatively easy to uncover, and others in which suboptimal time allocation might be expected. The model can therefore be used to address the question of whether and when learners should be able to exercise good metacognitive control in practice. (shrink)

The examples and concepts that Shoemaker cites are rather heterogeneous. Some distinctions need to be drawn. An optimality thesis involves not just an ordering of options, but a value judgment about them. So let us begin by distinguishing minimality from optimality. And the concept of minimality can play a variety of roles, among which I distinguish between extremum descriptions, statements hypothesizing an optimizing process, and methodological recommendations. Finally, I consider how the three categories relate to Shoemaker’s question that “Who is (...) optimizing: the scientist or nature?” . (shrink)

Operant psychologists are looking for alternatives to radical behaviorism. Rachlin offers teleological behaviorism, but it may pose as many difficulties as radical behaviorism. There is, however, a less drastic way to defend Rachlin's thesis of It portrays operant principles as relating distal efficient causes to behavioral effects.

Each of us is uniquely subject to certain kinds of stimulation from a small part of the universe within our skins. Mentalistic psychologies insist that other kinds of events, lacking the physical dimensions of stimuli, are accessible to the owner of the skin within which they occur. One solution often regarded as behavioristic, granting the distinction between public and private events and ruling the latter out of consideration, has not been successful. A science of behavior must face the problem of (...) privacy by dealing with events within the skin in their relation to behavior, without assuming they have a special nature or must be known in a special way. (shrink)

What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter-action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be (...) found anywhere (Mol & Law, 1994)—a flow of events within which we ourselves are also immersed. We thus become involved in activities within which we find things happening to us, as much as we make things happen in our surroundings—in other words, our surroundings are also agentive in that they can exert “calls” upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways. Consequently, what we can learn in such encounters is not just new facts or bits of information, but new ways of relating or orienting ourselves bodily to the others and othernesses in the world around us—although much can “stand in the way” of our doing this. My concern below is to explore events happening on the (inter)-subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object divide which “shape” our spontaneous ways of acting in, and reflecting on, the “worlds” within which we live out our lives. (shrink)

The costliness of disrupting a pattern may not be a useful criterion for distinguishing between acts and patterns; there are instances in which omitted components of patterns are hard to detect (e.g., typographical errors), or in which distortions are easily introduced (e.g., slurred words in a trite phrase). Are there behavioral criteria for distinguishing between acts and patterns?