Radical Behaviorism and Cultural Analysis

This book shows how the three-term contingency paradigm created by B.F. Skinner can be applied to describe and explain cultural practices phenomena produced by complex relations between behavior and environment. It updates the academic debate on the best paradigm to analyze complex social interactions (contingency or metacontingency), arguing that Skinner's three-term contingency - the conceptual tool created to analyze human behavior by decomposing it in three parts: discriminative stimulus, operant response and reinforcement/punishment - is the best unit of analysis since what is selected in social interactions are not the actions of the group but of individuals gathered in a group situation to form an articulated and interlocked behavioral practice.