What OBM Needs is More Jewish Mothers

E. Scott Geller’s main problem is that he’s a mentalist in behavior-analyst clothing. And his main virtue is that he’s a mentalist in behavior-analyst clothing. I disagree with everything Geller (2002) and Steve Roberts (2002) wrote. But I agree with their main point. Their main point is not that we would better sell behavior analysis to mentalists, if we too became mentalists; that was just an excuse for Scott and Steve to hop on their soap box and preach mentalism in the guise of Scott’s active-caring model. Their main point is that we would be better OBMers, if we became mentalists.

What I agree with in their main point is not that we should become mentalists but that we should follow Skinner’s lead by abandoning methodological behaviorism and by adopting radical behaviorism. In other words, we should concern ourselves with private (covert) events in our natural science of behavior analysis. (By the way, I would like to thank Scott and Steve for sharing their soap box and allowing me to preach radical behaviorism, especially as they knew in advance that I would bite the hand that helped me onto their box.)

Don’t Drown the Baby in the Bathwater
It is worthwhile to explore other sub-disciplines in psychology in order to discover phenomena we behavior analysts have overlooked, as Geller and Roberts have done. But such exploration is risky, because it is too easy to allow our behavior-analytic world view to drown in the mentalistic bath water of those other sub-disciplines, as Geller and Roberts have done. Only the paranoid should attempt such explorations and not unsupervised.

Our Enemy is Simplistic Analyses
We should beware of two types of simplistic, erroneous analyses. The most common in behavior analysis involves treating phenomena as if they were the same when they are not (e.g., over-extrapolations from the Skinner box such as treating the delayed delivery of a reinforcer as if it were reinforcement). (Malott [1993] and Malott, Malott, & Shimamune [1993 a &b]).

The other type of simplistic analysis involves treating phenomena as if they were different when they really are not (e.g., under-extrapolations from the Skinner box such as treating covert phenomena as if they were mental events rather than examples of operant behavior to which we can apply the principles of behavior). Scott and Steve commit both types of erroneous analyses.

Words are Important Analytical Tools

To Reward vs. To Reinforce
To substitute to reward for to reinforce is to descend to the depths of intellectual sloth, when used in lieu of a more careful analysis of the relevant behavioral contingencies. One OBM misuse involves the case of the delayed delivery of a reinforcer. In such cases, the receipt of the reinforcer is too delayed from the behavior to have actually reinforced that behavior (e.g., an end-of-the-month bonus contingent on completing a task a few weeks before); the wary slothful will say the bonus rewarded the task completion, thus avoiding the more obvious, though more common, error of saying the bonus reinforced the task completion. Such a use of to reward is a sneaky way of implying reinforcement, without being held accountable for the misuse of the term to reinforce. But, if it ain’t reinforcement, what the heck is it? The wary slothful skate around that issue; but, gentle reader, I shall soon rush in with an answer, in this conceptual miasma where wise men (yes, and wise women too) fear to tread.

The intellectually slothful then talk about rewarding the group with the implications that we are reinforcing the group. But we should reinforce behavior, not people, let alone groups. The failure to insist that we reinforce behavior, not people, leads to the intellectually sloppy way of talking about reinforcing groups and thereby leads away from the sort of careful analysis that would help us understand how group contingencies generate contingencies that control the behavior of the individual.

Reward vs. Reinforcer
Beware of operational definitions. Here is an example of a common type of operational definition in psychology: “By intelligence, all I mean is the score on an IQ test. So, you see, I’m not really reifying intelligence; I’m not using it as an explanatory fiction. I’m clean.”
Here is the problem with that operational definition of intelligence: Within 5 seconds of reading the operational definition, it loses control over the reader’s behavior and the commonsense definition retakes its rightful seat at the controls: The reader is reading intelligence as the cause (probably innate) of intelligent behavior. And with in 5 minutes of its being written, that operational definition also loses control over the original writer’s thinking and writing.

Operational definitions that redefine common terms fail to win the battle with the banned, commonsense definitions. And that is the problem of stating, “When I write that a thing is a reward, I don’t really mean is a reward; what I mean is a thing I hope might be a reward. In other words, when I write that a thing is a reward I don’t really mean reinforcer; what I mean is a thing I hope might be a reinforcer.” Very soon, everyone is reading, if not writing, reward as if it were reinforcer.

Others have proposed that we use putative reinforcer, when we do not have experimental proof that the thing, event, or condition is a reinforcer. Perhaps this has failed to catch on because putative sends too many of us scrambling for the dictionary.

Generally, I recommend common, everyday English, when possible. In most cases, presumed reinforcer would work. If need be, occasionally we can be a little more loquacious and protect our rear end with something like what I hope is a reinforcer.

Pedantic fear of commonsense. But, to some extent the whole issue is merely pedantic. With a bit of introspective common sense, we can usually tell if something will be a reinforcer. Otherwise, it’s a little like Newton saying, “Well, that particular putative apple may fall off this putative tree, as described by the law of putative gravity; but we won’t know for sure until we see it; and I won’t know for sure that’s an apple, until I taste it.” While psychology, even behavior analysis, is still a far cry from physics, we know water will be a reinforcer for a healthy, water deprived rat. So, if the rat is not pressing the lever that produces water, something else is amiss. And we know money will be a reinforcer for a healthy worker or executive, regardless of their state of money deprivation. If the person is not pressing the lever that produces money, something else is amiss—probably the behavioral contingencies.

Now it certainly is the case that failure to use effective reinforcers is a major problem in working with children labeled autistic; however, I see no evidence that using the terminology putative reinforcer or reward will decrease the frequency of such futile endeavors. More heavy-duty staff and systems interventions are needed to fix such problems.

And, although one can come up with OBM examples where the presumed reinforcer is not a reinforcer, they are relatively rare; and, again, I see no reason to think that calling presumed reinforcers rewards will decrease the frequency of the futile use of such non-reinforcers.

The danger of worrying about putative reinforcers. Furthermore, concern for the effectiveness of reinforcers often sends people in the wrong direction when trying to manage the performance of normal people in normal settings (e.g., managers and workers in OBM settings). If the person fails to do what it takes to get the reinforcer or to avoid losing the reinforcer or to avoid losing the opportunity to get the reinforcer, laymen and behavior analysts alike, tend to assume that the person does not really care; they tend to assume that the reinforcer is not really a reinforcer. They assume that grades are not a sufficient reinforcer for a student who fails to study, that a PhD degree is not a sufficient reinforcer for the student who fails to complete his dissertation, that tenure is not a sufficient reinforcer for the assistant professor who fails to publish enough articles, that money is not a sufficient reinforcer for the salesman who fails to make enough sales calls. The layman and the behavior analyst alike are far too likely to blame the reinforcer or “motivation,” when the problem is really the behavioral contingency connecting the behavior to a powerful reinforcer. (I consider ineffective and effective contingencies later in this article.)

Reinforcement vs. Reinforcer
Rather than trying to distinguish between reward and reinforcer, we would better invest our energy in distinguishing between reinforcement and reinforcer and avoid the tendency to call reinforcers reinforcement. I suggest that a reinforcer (positive reinforcer) is any stimulus, event, or condition whose presentation immediately follows a response and increases the frequency of that response. A reinforcement contingency is the immediate, response-contingent presentation of a reinforcer resulting in an increased frequency of that response. This allows us to talk about contingencies where the reinforcer (e.g., money) is presented one month after the causal behavior. Yes, the money is still a reinforcer, even though the delay is too great for the money to reinforce the behavior that produced it, even though this is not a reinforcement contingency but merely an analog to a reinforcement contingency (and it is the most chicken-hearted form of pedanticism to say, we don’t really know if the money is a reinforcer until we’ve shown that it will work as a reinforcer in a reinforcement contingency with this person).

English and English
For anyone proposing a new term or a new use of an old term (like reward, either as a noun or verb), I wish we could require that they some how get a hold of English and English’s (1958) A Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms. I have never read such a thoughtful and wise consideration of terminology. Pay special attention to bogus erudition, arbitrary definition, neologism, rational coinage, theory begging and their critiques of phobia, reinforcement, and reward.

The Delayed Delivery of Reinforcers

Geller points out that, “A reward given long after the desired behavior has occurred is unlikely to have a direct effect on that behavior. Some rewards are not even associated with specific behaviors. For example, the behavior most often reinforced by a group recognition ceremony is attending the ceremony.” Yes, but it still might work. Recognition at a group ceremony is a reinforcer for most of us, no matter how jaded we might be. And, though the delayed delivery of such a reinforcer is not a reinforcement contingency, it can still reliably control behavior, if two conditions are met. First, the contingency must be the right sort: It must involve only a small unit of behavior (e.g., writing and submitting a brief proposal that an elaborate project be considered for special recognition). A single outcome, no matter how large and no matter how immediate, by itself, will not control a large unit of behavior (e.g., doing the elaborate project that requires 500 hours of behavior). In addition, there must be a deadline (e.g., the person will avoid the loss of the possibility of the special recognition, if they write and submit their brief proposal by 5 PM Friday).

Here is the second condition that must be met, if the delayed-delivery contingency is to reliably control behavior: The person must know the contingency; the person must be able to state the rule describing that contingency. In other words, such behavior is rule-governed. (For a more general, compatible treatment of rule-governed behavior see Malott, Malott, and Trojan, 2000).

OBM does not usually fail because the reinforcers are ineffective or their delivery too delayed. OBM fails because units of behavior are too large and the deadlines are too vague or non-existent.

Radical Behaviorism Expands Behavior Analysis

Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism
One of Skinner’s most important and, perhaps, most underappreciated contributions is the development of radical behaviorism, where he argued that covert psychological events are behavioral just as are overt psychological events, with the implication that the principles of behavior apply to covert behavioral events just as they apply to overt behavioral events (Skinner, 1953). Unfortunately, he generally limited his analysis to the role covert, private stimuli play as SDs in controlling overt tacting behavior (e.g., when someone describes a covert event such as a toothache). Perhaps as an overreaction to the mentalism that still dominates psychology, a mentalism where explanatory fictions are invented as circular reifications for overt behavior, in describing the role of private events in a natural science, Skinner did not deal with phenomena like mental arithmetic, covert behavior and covert behavioral chains that started with an extroceptive stimulus, ended in an overt response, and involved several covert links in between.

An Expanded Radical Behaviorism
As one of our foremost Skinnerian scholar and occasional Skinnerian apologist has said, “Although that’s what Skinner wrote, what he really meant is . . .” and “Although that’s what Skinner wrote, if he were writing on the topic today, he would agree with what I’m saying.” In the present context, I am sure Skinner would have followed his own advise to recognize that all private psychological events play an important role in our natural science of behavior analysis, though he relegated private states, such as feelings, to the status of mere epiphenomena of no causal significance; I am sure he would have considered mental arithmetic a real phenomenon and not have denied its existence, as classical behaviorists do, nor would he have declared it not part of the subject matter of behavior analysis, as methodological behaviorists do on the grounds of the difficulty of obtaining inter-observer reliability. So, in this slightly expanded radical behaviorism, Skinner would not have declared mental arithmetic (or covert arithmetic, if you insist) to be a mental way station, but rather just the covert links in a behavioral chain that typically begins with an overt SD and ends with an overt terminal response and overt reinforcement.

And this expanded radical behaviorism can incorporate the concepts and issues Scott and Steve propose, some of which I will address in the following sections.

Are Geller’s Feelings Merely Skinner’s Epiphenomena?

Geller argues that social rewards (aka social reinforcers) make us feel better, a worthwhile outcome in its own right; and I agree. He further argues, “…, it’s likely that improving internal person states [as a result of the social reinforcers] will have beneficial indirect impact on desired behavior.” I agree with that, as well, at least to some extent.

Empathy
As that most insightful of behavior analysts, Dale Carnegie, pointed out, in his 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People, you win friends and influence people by being a source of social reinforcers for them, though the process is not necessarily response contingent social reinforcement. He said, we want to do things for people who have made us happy, especially people who give us social reinforcers; we want them to be happy and not sad. (Of course, he did not use our terminology.)

Now it is easy for behavior analysts to interpret this concern for those who are concerned for us as a simple quid-pro-quo, back-scratching, reciprocal contingency, where the behavior is maintained by instrumental learned reinforcers, where we must maintain the approval and concern of the other person by reciprocating, because that other person is instrumental in (necessary for) our obtaining our own reinforcers—a self-centered concern for numero uno. And that certainly accounts for many, if not most instances of our concern for those who have been concerned for us and our concern for those who have followed Carnegie’s advice to “shower us with lavish praise.” But I think there is more.

The concern for those who have shown concern for us is also maintained by empathetic reinforcers and empathetic aversive conditions. Their well being makes us happy (is a reinforcer for us), and their problems make us unhappy (are aversive conditions for us). We truly experience empathy for those who provide us with social reinforcers. And, by empathy, I mean we are concerned for their wellbeing, even when they will not be instrumental in our own wellbeing, even when we will never, ever see them again; our happiness is mirrored by theirs.

And, Carnegie thoughtfully argues for the importance of social-reinforcement-based empathy (again, not his terminology) with many persuasive case studies illustrating its crucial role in winning friends and influencing people. In fact, Carnegie went way beyond a simplistic applied behavior analysis, long before a simplistic applied behavior analysis had evolved.

The Fragility of Empathy
But empathy can be fragile and transient, transient much like our resolve to drive more safely just after we have seen a horrible highway accident, transient much like the resolve of our clients to use performance management after attending one of our inspirational OBM workshops. Commitment is easy to achieve but transient; maintenance is hard to achieve but lasting.

In my 39 years as a faculty member, I have seen empathy cave in to instrumental expedience with disappointing regularity, almost to the point of treachery among people of good will, to the point that only the naive would rely on anything more than the transient effect of Geller’s “willingness to look out for the welfare of others,” when that willingness is based on the prior receipt of social reinforcement from those others. But this is not to argue against the powerful, even though transient, effects of empathy that Carnegie documents. However, I doubt that, to understand or use empathy, we need Geller’s cognitive constructs of “self-esteem, personal control, optimism, or sense of belonging.”

Incidentally, Skinner made an especially insightful point concerning empathy: Empathy, sympathy, and compassion constitute a rarefied sensitivity resulting from a high level of socialization, not a natural, automatic result of being a human being. We are not born with the ability to feel empathy, sympathy, and compassion; we learn it.

Empathetic Behavior
In addition to empathy as a state or condition of being (empathetic feelings), we should consider empathetic behavior, the behavior of acting in an empathetic manner, the behavior of expressing sympathy and concern for the wellbeing of others and the behavior of working toward the wellbeing of others, even when the condition of others generates no empathetic feelings, even when other’s being happy or sad does not cause us to be happy or sad. Just because empathetic behavior does not always reflect feelings of empathy, it need not reflect a simple quid-pro-quo, back-scratching, reciprocal contingency. Instead, empathetic behavior can have its roots in Jewish-mother-induced guilt.

Enter the Jewish Mother
“What kind of son would not call his mother every evening to see how her arthritis is doing, a mother who sacrificed so much for her son?” “What kind of aunt is too busy to attend her nephew’s bar mitzvah?” “What kind of person won’t do the right thing by their family, their friends, their neighbors, their employer, their employees?”

Well, it may not be clear what kind of person that would be; but we certainly do not want to be one. And we feel shame and guilt when we run the risk of becoming that kind of person either by failing to act for the wellbeing of others or by acting in a way that will harm the wellbeing of others. And that aversive guilt can generate a lot of empathetic behavior, even though we may not feel empathy for the other person: We visit the colleague laid up in the hospital, not because we are feeling her pain but because it is the right thing to do, the thing to do that will help us avoid feeling the guilt of the calloused and uncaring. We clean up at the end of our shift, not because we empathize with the inconvenience our thoughtlessness will cause the next shift, and not because we can be identified as the person who failed to clean up and thus be reprimanded, but because the end-of-shift clean up will avoid the feelings of guilt we will suffer, at least that we will suffer if our Jewish mother has done her job, her early childhood programming. Of course managers and supervisors may well bemoan the dearth of effective Jewish mothers in the Jewish culture as well as the gentile culture.

However, beware the person who does not have a Jewish mother, beware the person who is not highly motivated by the aversiveness of guilt, if not by empathy, because, realistically, you will not be able to implement OBM-type performance-management contingency with sufficient comprehensiveness to reliably control the behavior of such a sociopath.

Therefore, on the basis of extensive, behavioral introspection and extrospection, I conclude that feelings are not merely Skinner’s epiphenomena; I conclude that Geller’s concern for the importance of people’s feelings is well placed, though I think guilt, fear, and shame are more effective workplace motivators than the happiness and joy or Geller’s “self-esteem, personal control, optimism, [and] sense of belonging.” However, I will concede that letting down the group with which you have a sense of belonging will generate more guilt than letting down the group from which you feel estranged; and in that way, a sense of belonging may indirectly support more responsible group-oriented behavior, more “active caring” behavior.

The Jewish-Mother Syndrome

Case study: Portnoy’s Complaint. In Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1967), Portnoy complains to his psychoanalyst, “No matter how hard I try, I can never please my mother. All of my successes, all of my achievements are marred by a nagging sense of guilt.”

Portnoy had a nagging sense of guilt for never being able to please his Jewish mother. And trying to escape this guilt is what sent Portnoy to the psychoanalyst. But I think trying to escape the guilt is what made Portnoy a professional success. Portnoy worked hard at his profession, to escape the guilt of being a disappointment to his mother. Guilt.

Case study: Bar Mitzvah sweater. Elaine Mae tells this story: The boy receives two sweaters for his bar mitzvah. The next morning he comes downstairs wearing one of the sweaters. His mother accuses, “So, you didn’t like your other sweater?” Guilt.

Case Study: A Hillbilly Story. He grew up in the mountains of West Virginia. His daddy was a builder. He helped Daddy. Daddy insisted that they always complete each project one week ahead of schedule.

A few times the boy failed to get up when the alarm rang. Then his mother would throw a bucket of cold water on him and stand there laughing. So, generally the boy got up as soon as the alarm rang.

The boy practiced his basketball free throws. Mom required him to hit 19 out of 20 shots. If he missed two, he’d have to finish the 20 and then start all over again. Sometimes he would have to shoot 500 baskets. Because Mom sat there keeping score. The boy got a basketball scholarship to college. And the man, Al Poling, publishes more articles each year than the combination of the rest of his colleagues in our psych department.

Why? Because he is always looking over his shoulder in case Mom comes up with a bucket of water. Fear.

Case Study: La Chica Latina. She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. Students didn’t have to take the final exam, if they were among the elite who scored 19 or 20 throughout the semester. She had never had to take an exam. But in the 9th grade, she got an 18. She came home crying. And Seniora Garcia said, “That’s OK, Chica; don’t be so hard on yourself.”

When Senior Garcia came home, la Seniora cautioned, “Chica is very upset about her 18; so don’t say anything.” But, as soon as dinner started, el Senior said, “So, Chica, you’re going to have to take the final exam with the other donkeys.” The little girl ran to her room, locked the door, and cried for three days.

Because she is still avoiding becoming a donkey again, Maria Malott has is now one of the best OBMers I know. And, as with other highly successful professionals, fear is Maria’s friend.

The Jewish-Mother Syndrome: Details. You can never do it right; no matter how hard you try. So you try harder and harder, because, if you don’t, you’ll feel even more guilt. Successful people seem driven by this guilt, fear, and anxiety.

Without his own Jewish-mother syndrome, we would never have had the world’s most brilliant, insightful psychotherapist—Sigmund Freud. But, without their Jewish-mother syndromes, Dr. Freud’s patients wouldn’t have needed the world’s most brilliant psychotherapist. Nothing is free.

You do not have to be Jewish to be a Jewish mother; you can be Jewish, Baptist, Catholic, or whatever. And you do not have to be a mother to be a Jewish mother; you can be a mother, a father, or whatever. But a person’s chances of being highly successful in a career are much higher if they have had some sort of Jewish mother. Otherwise, their chances are slim. A highly successful person must be very self-critical; a highly successful person must have heavy fear, guilt, and/or shame.

The one secret of highly successful people. Though Covey may need seven secrets for his people to be highly successful, I only need one: “No matter how hard you try, you will never live up to your Jewish mother’s expectations; so try harder.”

Of course this sort of aversive control is delicate; trying as hard as you can must attenuate the aversiveness enough to negatively, differentially reinforce that hard trying behavior; but it must not attenuate the aversivness so much that there is not enough guilt, or fear, or shame to maintain more escape/avoidance behavior.

Fear of failure -> success. Contrary to the common counseling-psychology dogma of enablement, empowerment, etc., my observation is that fear of failure is not why people fail to achieve, but rather fear of failure is why people do achieve. Poor students are convinced they will ace the next test without studying, even though they have never gotten more than a C in their life; so they do not study and get less than a C on the next test. And highly successful students are convinced that they will fail the next test no matter how hard they study, even though they have never gotten less than an A in their life; so they study unreasonably hard and get an A. And once they graduate summa cum laude, they bring their fear of failure into the work place and become highly successful professionals.

Highly successful people got that fear of failure, that fear that they would never live up to expectations, from their Jewish mother. And I suspect these foundations were well laid before preschool and certainly cast in concrete before junior high school. My observation is that, if the person has not acquired this unreasonable fear before they enter college, they never will. I have seen no convincing evidence that any of us have the technology to become their later-day Jewish mothers.

The Missing Jewish Mother. So what happens to the unfortunate who have not had a good Jewish Mother? They will have a low rate of empathetic behavior, and they will also have a low rate of other productive professional or work behavior.

How do you manage such people? You set up explicit performance-management contingencies with explicit deadlines for desirable behavior, either empathetic behavior that will help others (e.g., clean up after your shift) or production behavior (e.g., complete the 500-hour project). And you describe those contingencies with explicit rules.

Suppose you yourself are one of those unfortunates who did not have a good Jewish mother. To achieve your optimal personal and professional success, you will have to use a set of self-management contingencies, ideally with a surrogate Jewish mother who will manage your behavior. But never fall victim to the fallacious fantasy that after enough self-management experience you will acquire the automatic fear that will allow you to dismiss your surrogate Jewish mother. If you did not get it as a child, you never will; you and I will always need these extrinsic performance-management contingencies.

The Fear Continuum. Of course, fear of failure is not dichotomous, not all or none. We all have it to various degrees. Look at procrastination on starting to work on a task that has a deadline, let us say, a deadline of one month. The person who has been so fortunate as to have had a highly effective Jewish mother in early childhood, will begin worrying about the task, even before the beginning of the month when the task will be assigned. That person will be trying to find out in advance what the task is so he or she (usually she) can begin preparing even more than a month in advance. Such people are highly, highly successful.

Those who have had moderately effective Jewish mothering will start fearing failure at the beginning of the month when the task is assigned and will start to work on it right away, with the immediate results of a mild decrease in their fear, and with the long term results that they complete a high quantity of high-quality tasks on a timely basis.

The less effective the Jewish mothering, the closer we get to the deadline before we break into a cold sweat and start working on the task, and therefore, we complete fewer, if any, high-quality tasks, and perhaps none by the deadline. (I note that in spite of weeks of gentle, gentile pleading by Tim Ludwig, the action editor for this issue of JOBM, three of us have not yet gotten our manuscripts in, in spite of having promised to do so by a date way before the pleading started.)
A few people have had such an unfortunate early childhood history that they never get anything done, let alone anything of high quality or by the deadline. And, even fewer people have had such a fortunate early childhood history that they can be highly productive without deadlines, for example people like some scholarly and literary writers, though, if you look closely, you will usually find some sort of hidden deadline (often self-imposed) even for them.

Performance management as a substitute for the Jewish mother. Performance management contingencies, with explicit deadlines can be considered prosthetic devices for those of us who suffer the early-childhood handicap of inadequate Jewish mothering. And the immediacy of the deadlines needed to effectively control productive behavior is a function of the degree of the handicap. A few highly successful people have a sufficiently high fear of failure that they can start right away on a project that has a one-year deadline; and they can maintain productive behavior throughout the year until the project is completed (e.g., a dissertation).

But my observation is that such long-term work not divided into weekly sub-goals with weekly deadlines will turn into feces. In other words, most people will start fearing failure soon enough to start working on substantial tasks in a timely manner, if the deadline is no longer than a week a way. However, some people may need daily deadlines. And some people may need hourly or minute-by-minute deadlines, depending on their fear continuum.

Again, as a result of early-childhood Jewish mothering, simply stating the goals and deadlines may be enough, because some people fear looking bad in the eyes of their Jewish mother, even if that mother has long since passed away. But, because of their lack of adequate early-childhood fear inducement, others will need to be accountable to a real, live person before fear of failure will kick in. And still others will need an additional consequence contingent on failure to make the deadline, a consequence like loss of the opportunity to get a bonus.
What all managers want is workers (e.g., line workers, middle managers, secretaries, students, children) who start working on the task right away and passionately stay on task until that task is done.

They want workers who do not need to be managed. They want workers for whom fear of failure kicks in at the earliest possible moment. But managers rarely get what they want. And the closer to the deadline a person must be before starting to work, the smaller the sub-goals, the more frequent the deadlines, the more frequent the monitoring, the heaver the added consequence, the greater the expense of managing that person.

In theory, we might be concerned with managers investing too many resources in the management of the performance of workers with inadequate childhood implantation of fear. But, in fact, managers almost always fail to provide enough performance management, with the result that they grudgingly accept low productivity or they incur the expense and the sleepless nights of firing the worker. However, a moderate amount of performance management would have more cost effectively and more humanely saved the day and the worker.

Unfortunately, the more successful the manager as a professional, the less tolerance they have for those who have not been as fortunate as they in the early-childhood Jewish-mothering department. In other words, they apply the same take-no-prisoners, hyper-critical standards to the less successful that, early on, they learned to apply to themselves. And they exemplify Robert Mager’s traditional manager who objects to performance management with the pseudo-moralistic pronouncement, “They should ought to want to do it (with out the codling of added incentives and added performance-management contingencies).”

Rapprochement

I think Geller and Roberts are on the money when they point to the importance of private events such as feelings, in the management of human performance. If our workers were food deprived and we put pellets of food in their mouths immediately after they performed appropriately, we could ignore their inner lives. But our performance-management outcomes are almost always delayed, by hours, days, or weeks. So the worker needs to know the rule describing the performance management contingency. And the point of this article, the worker needs to have had an early-childhood behavioral history such that knowing the rule and not being in compliance with that rule produces a condition that is sufficiently aversive to maintain the appropriate behavior specified by the rule or sufficiently aversive as to suppress the inappropriate behavior specified by the rule. For all but the most pedantically methodological in their behaviorism, that aversive condition is essentially what everyone means by the everyday terms fear, guilt, and shame. To ignore these private events is to produce a superficial, simplistic explanation of the effectiveness of OBM, an explanation that fails to intellectually satisfy our consumers, our clients. Our clients know the contingencies controlling human work-place behavior are much more complex and much more private than those controlling the behavior of the rat in the Skinner box from which OBMers so often over-extrapolate. And this leads to a final point.

How Can We Sell OBM?

Though the question of how to sell OBM was just window dressing for this series of articles, it is addressing an important window. So please indulge my also giving an answer to that question: We best sell OBM by doing two things:

First, by telling our students and clients the whole story, the inside truth, as indicated in earlier sections. By abandoning our catch-them-being-good mentality, by abandoning our simplistic extrapolations from the Skinner box, and by going for a radical-behavioral emphasis on the importance of aversive control and private events, while never abandoning the Skinner box. We need to make clear that how the player plays the game is determined not only by the rules of the game (the current behavioral contingencies, both natural and performance management) but also by what the player brings to the game (the readiness with which non-compliance with the rules will generate guilt, fear, and shame [examples of Geller and Roberts’ personal factors], as well as their specific game-related skills).

And second, we best sell OBM by training more OBM practitioners. In the whole field of applied behavior analysis, we have trouble arranging the contingencies so that enough faculty are willing to train the needed large numbers of students to be practitioners, rather than restricting the graduate students they accept only to those who can help the faculty members advance their professional careers of publishing articles in our scholarly journals (Malott, 1992).

Therefore we need more behavior-analytic curricula specifically designed to train our students to be practitioners (which most of them end up being anyway, in spite of our best efforts), rather than curricula designed to train our students to be scholars (which few end up being). We need to emphasize the training of practitioners, rather than expediently rationalizing that training to be scholars is the best way to train our students to be practitioners and thereby sinking to the intellectual dishonesty of abandoning everything we OBMers have learned and preach to others about designing curricula that effectively train what needs to be trained to a high level of fluency, rather than diluting our training with so much emphasis on what is merely nice to know, but far from essential.

Summary

• Always keep one foot in the Skinner box.
• Do not make these erroneous, simplistic assumptions:
  • Psychological phenomena need non-Skinner-box concepts for their understanding.
  • All natural and performance-management contingencies are the direct-acting contingencies of the Skinner box.
  • The delayed delivery of a reinforcer is reinforcement.
  • A contingency will be ineffective, if it involves a delayed outcome. (Such contingencies can be indirect-acting rule-governed analogs to the direct-acting behavioral contingencies.)
• Such delayed-outcome performance-management contingencies can be quite effective,
  • if their outcomes are sufficiently sizeable and probable,
  • if they involve deadlines (in the case of performance maintenance contingencies),
  • and if the performer knows the rule describing the contingency.
• The main function of rules describing delayed-outcome performance-management contingencies is their creation of non-compliance as an aversive condition (conveniently called, fear, guilt, shame, etc.). The performer then escapes or attenuates the aversive condition by complying with the rule.
• However, the aversiveness of non-compliance is a function of our preschool behavioral history. For example, such early childhood training determines the proximity to the deadline before non-compliance becomes aversive enough to motivate compliance. Thus, early childhood training determines the amount of performance management needed to obtain reliable performance.

A Humble Caveat

Of course, this entire diatribe is only my opinion; and I could be wrong, though not likely.

References

Carnegie, D. (1936). How to Win Friends and Influence People. Riverside, NJ: Simon and Schuster.

English, H. B. & English, A. C. (1958) A comprehensive dictionary of psychological and psychoanalytical terms. New York: David McKay.
Geller, E. S. (2002). Should organizational behavior management expand its content? Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. 22(2), 13-30.

Malott, R. W. (1992). Should we train applied behavior analysts to be researchers? Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 25, 83-88.

Malott, R. W. (1993). A theory of rule-governed behavior and organizational behavior management. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 12, 45-65.

Malott, R. W., Malott, M. E., & Shimamune, S. (1993 a). Comments on rule-governed behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 12, 91-101.

Malott, R. W., Malott, M. E., & Trojan, E. A. (2000). Elementary Principles of Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Malott, R. W., Shimamune, S., & Malott, M. E. (1993 b). Rule-governed behavior and organizational behavior management: An analysis of interventions. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 12, 103-116.

Roberts, S. (2002). Integrating person factors in the OBM framework: Perspectives from a behavioral safety practitioner. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. 22(2), 31-39.

Roth, P. (1967). Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan.

Comments on this article:

• Dick,

  I ran across your web site today and was disappointed to find that you'd developed two PowerPoint presentations on Jewish mothers without asking me about them. I know you have the behaviorism end of the topic covered very well, but I grew up with the real proverbial Jewish mother. Therefore, I have much first-hand experience with the topic. Although I intended to run away from that level of supervision, I managed to marry a nice Irish-Catholic girl who also turned out to be a Jewish mother. Go figure!

  In all seriousness, I enjoyed the web site and especially the photos, including the ones from Jack Michael’s retirement party (here and here). I think that was the last time you and I saw each other, although I see Jack quite regularly. At any rate, I hope all is well with you.

  Seeing the "Behavior Babes" reminded me of at a party at the Snapper's about 23 years ago. That evening, shortly after our son, Josh, was born, you gave him a stuffed animal (a duck as I recall) and held and played with him. Josh is now finishing his last quarter of college and will be moving to Chicago in December to work on the Chicago Board of Trade. He did not take after his father (or mother) and instead became a finance and economics major. At least he's happy with his chosen field.

  I've retired from Palisades and am splitting my time between developing training material for a consulting company and working as a school psychologist two-days a week at the Bangor High School. (I was a school psychologist before moving to Kalamazoo 25 years ago!)

  Ellen is still working for the Van Buren ISD splitting her time between being an OT and an autism consultant.

  Keep up the good (behavioral) work and hope to catch up with you soon. Write back if you have the time.

  Henry Winter