Occupational Safety and Response Maintenance

Abstract

I commend Boyce and Geller's concern for one of the most important and most ignored areas of application in behavior analysis -highway and occupational safety. And I commend their concern for one of the most important and most ignored areas of theory and technology -performance maintenance. My critical comments reflect my additional concerns -concerns about the unspoken values, attitudes, and theoretical biases I think underlie much of the applied work in behavior analysis, and may also underlie much of the empirical research and theoretical analysis presented in Boyce and Geller's excellent article. Here are those additional concerns:

1. (a) (the cult of the natural contingency

2. (b) the error of naïve performance management

3. (c) the myth of intermittent reinforcement

4. (d) the obfuscation approach to performance maintenance

5. (e) the mythical cause of poor self-management

6. (f) the nature of effective performance-management contingencies

7. (g) the limitations of say-do commitment

8. the failure to distinguish between the direct-acting behavioral contingencies of the Skinner box and the indirect-acting, rule-governed, analog contingencies of most applied behavior analysis

9. the fear of aversive control

10. the myth of perpetual-behavior interventions.