Trait-based Personality Theory, Ontogenic Behavioral Continuity, and Behavior Analysis

Behavior analysts can and should but rarely do account for the ontogenic continuity of behavior, thus leaving the field open to the reified, biological-deterministic traits of personality theorists.

Circular Reifications

The well-written, carefully reasoned article by B Roberts (2002) pulled my chain almost as violently as did the articles by Geller and S Roberts (2002). B Roberts suggests that, at last, organizational behavior management (OBM) and personality psychology are reunited. Fortunately, that is an overstatement; the reuniting is occurring but only in the worldview of a small number of OBM behavior analysts (e.g., Geller and S Roberts).

Indeed, I think we must diligently avoid B Robert’s suggestion of “opening … OBM to other models of human nature beyond behaviorism.” And though I agree “that the idea of consistent human behavior …is (not) intellectually indefensible,” I would argue that what is intellectually indefensible is “that the idea of consistent human behavior (must be) embodied in the notion of a trait,” with all the baggage accompanying the term “trait.” And, though I do not want us to “open . . . OBM to other models of human nature,” I do want us behavior analysts to be open to the large amount of excellent data collected by non-behaviorists. I also agree that, with the impressive exception of Staats (1977), unfortunately most behavior analysts, have ignored “the idea of consistent human behavior,” thus leaving the field open to the mentalistic reifications of trait-based personality theory.

Reifications are usually circular explanatory fictions invented to explain observable behavior, behavior that itself is cited to prove the existence of those reifications: Why does this manager behave in such a responsible manner? Because of her personality, one of her personality traits is high responsibility. How do you know she has the high-responsibility trait? Because she acts in a responsible manner. The fact that a trait psycho-diagnostician may have sampled some of her behavior on a paper-based personality test and then assigned to her the high-responsibility trait does not remove the circularity of the trait as a reified explanatory fiction; it merely obfuscates that circularity.

In no way does consistent human behavior (I like “ontogenic behavioral continuity”) demand that we invent reified explanatory fictions such as personality traits. For example, essentially all people who learn a second language after they have become adults will always speak that language with the accent of their first language. So, for the rest of my life, I will speak Spanish like the gringo I am. But this ontogenic behavioral continuity, my behaving in that consistently gringo manner throughout my life, does not mean I have the gringoism trait. Instead, it means I did not have the preschool opportunity of learning Spanish at the same time and in the same way I learned English (nor does it mean my language-learning synapses have calcified, for that matter).

Similarly, the manager’s consistently behaving in a responsible manner does not mean she has the responsibility trait. Instead, it means she did have the opportunity (and I would suggest largely a preschool opportunity) to learn the complex behavioral repertoire and values (reinforcers and aversive conditions) that results in her behaving responsibly. Furthermore, that complex repertoire and those values are not reifications.

In addition to being intellectually indefensible, the circular, reified notion of personality trait is intellectually stultifying. Why does she consistently behave responsibly? Because she has the responsibility trait. QED. End of questions. End of analysis.

However, consider this question-answer sequence: Why does she consistently behave responsibly? Because she has learned the complex behavioral repertoire and values that support behaving responsibly. Certainly not the end of discussion and analysis. Instead, that question-answer sequence leads to more questions: What are those repertoires and values? How did she learn them? And how do they support her consistently behaving responsibly? What happens when people do not learn the repertoire and values you suggest are so crucial for supporting responsible behavior? Furthermore, those questions are answerable by empirical research. And there remains the possibility of empirically disconfirming the entire notion that such repertoires and values account for her responsible behavior, the notion that they account for the ontogenic behavioral continuity (essentially lifetime continuity) of her responsible behavior.

Ontogenic Behavioral Continuity

Years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a summer remedial classroom for the most rotten, vicious, killer grade-school students of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (actually, they were tame by more-global standards). And, in addition to those remedial students, some of the teacher and staff children were in the classroom. The same performance-management contingencies and rules applied to all the kids, but the teacher/staff kids were much more on task, much more obedient, and much less disruptive than the remedial kids were. Neither group of kids came to us as little tabula rasas; instead, their behavioral histories had written all over their slates by the time we saw them. Each came to the playing table with his or her own stacked deck. The playing field was level, but each kid’s ball bat was a different weight.

Since then, in every setting where I have done performance management, this question has intrigued me: How much of the person’s performance is determined by the current natural and performance-management contingencies and how much is determined by that person’s pre-existing behavioral repertoire and values (often reflected in covert behavioral contingencies).

For example, I also see the effects of the pre-existing repertoire and values in my university courses, which are highly structured and loaded with performance-management contingencies. Although my goal is that all students do the hard work needed to learn enough to earn an A, rarely do we achieve that goal; and an occasional student will do quite poorly. In other words, some students (actually the majority of the students) enter the university and my courses with the pre-existing repertoires and values that will result in their working hard and learning an A’s worth of behavior analysis, at least in my highly-structured courses loaded with performance management contingences; a few do not. In spite of our best efforts, we never manage to create equality heaven.

(As a side observation, essentially all my students do much better in my behaviorally designed courses than they do in traditionally taught courses. And though we never achieve equality heaven, we greatly reduce the achievement disparity among students. This means the poorer students benefit more from the structure and added contingencies than do the better students [e.g., a student who would achieve 90% in a traditional course will achieve 95% in my course {a 5% improvement}]), while a student who would achieve 60% in a traditional course will achieve 85% in my courses {a 25% improvement}; do not take the numbers literally].)

Both the example of the grade-school classroom and the example of the university classroom illustrate ontogenic behavioral continuity: The repertoires and values that cause students to perform and thereby learn at a particular level in one classroom will cause them to perform and learn at much the same level in subsequent classrooms. And though performance management can have a major impact on that performance and learning, it rarely eliminates all traces of the ontogenic behavioral continuity that causes consistent performance and learning differences among the students.

This doesn’t mean we could not eliminate those differences by bringing everyone up to the level of the top performers; but it would require a Lovaasian intensity and commitment that may rarely seem cost effective with populations other than preschool children labeled “autistic”. Furthermore, even Lovaas fails to normalize all of his autistic children; for some of the children, even Lovaas (1987) fails to eliminate the ontogenic behavioral continuity maintained by the children’s pre-existing repertoires and values (or for the biological determinists, maintained by the autistic genes and bad blood).

Ontogenic Behavioral Continuity and Preschool Fatalism

B Roberts suggests that, in addition to changing behavior, behavior analysts should concentrate on changing traits. And I agree that behavior analysts should concentrate more on changing the repertoires and values that result in ontogenic behavioral continuity, changing them in such a manner that people will behave in healthier, happier, more productive, less harmful ways in the absence of optimal behavioral contingencies later in life (e.g., that they will behave responsibly, even when the boss is not looking). And I also agree that affecting ontogenic behavioral continuity can be a long-term investment in positive change. But, in addition to the difficulty of affecting ontogenic behavioral continuity, there is a big catch, what I call “preschool fatalism”--before we enter grade school, we learn most of the repertoire and values that will result in ontogenic behavioral continuity. And psychologists, including behavior analysts, have not developed the technology nor gained access to the resources needed to change the crucial repertoire and values once people have become adults and perhaps even teenagers.

Preschool fatalism is illustrated by our failure to speak a late-learned second language without an accent, in spite of years of immersion in the second-language verbal community. The inability to combat preschool fatalism is illustrated by our failure to normalize the repertoire and values of children labeled “autistic” when we intervene after they are six years old. The extent of this inability to change the pre-existing repertoire and values is illustrated by the fact that I know of only one documented example where anyone, psychologist, behavior analyst, or whoever, has been able to achieve such a post-preschool change; this was the case of an 18-yearold, male transsexual who acquired a male-heterosexual repertoire and values (Barlow, Reynolds, & Agras, 1973); and that case study has not been extensively replicated.

Of course, many people claim to make such changes in the repertoire and values of adults, but the absence of convincing data leaves me skeptical, whether the claim makers are clinical psychologists touting the impact of a few one-hour sessions of talk therapy, educators touting the benefits of workshops teaching high-risk college students to self-manage their study time and study behaviors, or motivational OBM speakers. And my own experience running behavioral interventions for high-risk entering college students and students on academic probation leaves me equally skeptical.

However, preschool fatalism does not prevent us from learning a foreign language as an adult; but it does prevent us from ever speaking that language with a convincing accent. And, more to the point of this article, preschool fatalism does not prevent us from learning how to drive a car as an adult; but it does prevent us from driving it safely (i.e., cautiously, soberly, and within the speed limit) when the cop isn’t there. In other words, if we have not grown up with a set of values that make drunken speeding unthinkably aversive, no amount of smiley-face stickers and no amount of thank-you-for-not-driving-like-a-complete-idiot tickets is likely to help us acquire those crucial aversive values as adults.

If this pessimistic preschool-fatalistic view is correct, how are we going to save the world with behavior analysis? Two ways? First, take seriously the claims from long ago, those claims of the Catholic priests, who said they could permanently mould a person’s character, if they could provide that person with moral and religious training from infancy, and the claim of John B. Watson, who said he could raise any infant to be a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief, not that either set of claims have been experimentally demonstrated. To date, our most impressive data come from behavior-analytic work with preschool autistic children (Lovaas, 1987).

The second way to save the world with behavior analysis is to do performance management with adults. We cannot change the early repertoires and values of those adults; but we can set up effective performance-management contingencies, such as pay for performance contingencies; and JOBM is full of successful OBM examples of performance-management contingencies with adults. Although we cannot change their early repertoires and values so that an adult will act in a responsible manner in the absence of supervision, we can set up performance-management contingencies so that adult will act in a responsible manner, as long as those contingencies are in place and make contact with specific instance of the responsible behavior. But we should not expect the responsible behavior to maintain once we remove those contingencies, no matter how carefully we “fade” them out. And we should be prepared for the likelihood that a very small number of those adults will come to us with such deficient preschool repertoires and values that it will not be cost effective to provide the detailed performance management need to get them to act responsibly.

So, even if we never manage to develop reliable ways of changing the course of well-established ontogenic continuity, we still have two powerful world-saving tools, intensive preschool training and adult performance management. But such interventions will always be much more costly than the pathetically inadequate, ineffective, lightweight interventions currently practiced in education, clinical psychology, and organizational psychology. It takes more than motivational speakers to save the world.

A caveat: B Roberts (this issue) mentions that social reformers find the biologically wired traits of personality theorists to be unpalatable. And unfortunately, this behavior-analytic preschool-fatalistic view of the ontogenic continuity of behavior may be only slightly more palatable to us social reformers. This behavioral view may be slightly more palatable because it suggests a solution to social problems considerably short of eugenics; and it may still be a little difficult to swallow because this behavioral solution is almost stultifyingly hard to implement, much harder than the inadequate solutions proposed by most social reformers (e.g., school uniforms will not turn concrete jungles into pre-Harvard prep-schools).

Biological Determinism

The dominance of circular, reified explanatory fictions, such as personality traits, is the major reason why psychology has had such limited success as a natural science. Almost as destructive is psychology’s penchant for biological determinism—the explanation of complex human behavior and the explanation of the behavioral differences among human beings in terms of innate, largely genetic causes.

Unfortunately, the shady history of biological determinism has done little to dampen psychology’s enthusiasm for biological determinism. The nineteenth century saw the rise of scientific racism and scientific sexism where the world’s foremost scientists scientifically proved the biological basis for the obvious moral and intellectual inferiority of women, Africans, Orientals, Italians of course, and to a lesser extent, the French. A major reason for this inferiority was that all of those lower forms of humanity had smaller brains than did western European men, especially smaller than the brains of those world’s foremost scientists, except for some embarrassing exceptions. Overt expressions of scientific racism and sexism are less popular than in the good old days, but scientific racism is far from dead (Hernstein & Murray, 1984).

From nineteenth-century phrenology to the present day, the history of biological determinism is littered with the corpses of studies scientifically proving the innate, largely genetic basis of complex human behavior and the largely genetic basis for the behavioral differences among human being. And these studies always evoke much enthusiasm and headline press notice when announced. But, with impressive regularity, these biological-deterministic studies are later disproven or fond unreplicable, with little press notice. In spite of the checkered past of such notions, psychologists have not lost their penchant for explanations in terms of biological determinism. In fact, psychology has created and formalized an entire subdiscipline devoted to biological determinism—behavioral genetics. First, our ancestors placed the causal agent for things unexplained within spirits, then the soul, and now the gene. In terms of complex human behavior, the gene is now serving the same function as the spirits and the soul of earlier days and with little more justification.

None of this is to argue against biological psychology nor the gene (or spirits and the soul, for that matter). None of this is to argue against searching for the biological bases of behavior. For example, clearly there is a biological basis for the effectiveness of reinforcers. And clearly, there is a biological basis stimulus discrimination and generalization. Clearly, there is a biological basis for all of the basic behavioral processes. But performance on an IQ test does not reflect a basic behavioral process, nor does a high frequency of acting in a responsible, proactive, reliable manner, nor does learning tantruming and self-injurious behavior to the point where it interferes with learning language behavior with the resultant label of “autistic.” Instead, these behavioral repertoires and values reflect the somewhat idiosyncratic learning histories of the different individuals; they reflect the complex interactions of the basic behavioral processes, such as reinforcement, discrimination, and generalization. So, what I am arguing against is not the biological basis of behavior, but rather the biological/genetic basis of complex behavior, as if there were an IQ gene, a responsibility gene, an autism gene, or collection of genes. And saying that a person’s responsible behavior really results from an interaction between the responsibility gene and the environment just clouds the issue, as does saying that the responsibility gene only determines a “tendency” to behave responsibly.

Conclusions

I have gradually come to recogniaze a phenomenon even more depressing than preschool fatalism; that phenomenon is pre-PhD fatalism--the beliefs, values, and ideas we have acquired by the time we are 26 shall be with us forever, never to be changed by logic, data, epiphany, divine revelation, PowerPoint slideshows, nor closely reasoned, sarcastic articles. So, at best, articles such as this only affect the choir to which they are preaching and that merely by articulating and confirming pre-existing biases. But I hope, perhaps naively, that one or two OBMers will now look a little more critically at behavior-analytic interventions that purport to change the adult to the point that we can eventually eliminate the performance-management contingencies. And maybe a reader or two will be slightly more inclined to consider implementing the intensive preschool interventions needed to positively impact ontogenic behavioral continuity. But, to me an even more delightful, though perhaps even more improbable, outcome would be that some behavior analyst master the personality literature of “trait” stability to the point that he or she can provide an analysis of that literature from a radical-behavior-analytic, ontogenic-continuity perspective, not a mere translation, but an analysis that results in new insights and new understanding for scholars on both sides of the great conceptual divide. At least as delightful would be that a trait theorist master radical behaviorism to the point that he or she can provide such an analysis. In any of these cases, I would be happy to hold the participants’ coats, occasionally wipe the sweat from their furrowed brows, and even lend an occasional hand.

As always, this article is only my humble opinion; and there is a slight chance that I am wrong.

References

Barlow, D. H., Reynolds, E. J., & Agras, W. S. (1973). Gender identity change in transsexuals. Archives of General Psychiatry, 28, 569-579.

Geller, E. S. (2002). Should organizational behavior management expand its content? Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 22(2).

Gould, S. J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Hernstein, R. J. & Murray, C. (1984). The bell curve. New York: Free Press.

Lovaas, O. I. (1987). Behavioral treatment and normal educational and intellectual functioning in young autistic children. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 55, 3-9.

Roberts, B. W. (2002). Organizational behavior management and personality psychology: Reunited and it feels so good? Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. 22(2).

Roberts, S. (2002). Integrating person factors in the OBM framework: Perspectives from a behavioral safety practitioner. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. 22(2)
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Staats, A. W. (1977). Child learning, intelligence, and personality. Kalamazoo: Behaviordelia.