Students interested in applying behavior analysis to social issues, advocacy, and systems-level change often encounter unclear professional pathways during training. Although behavior analysis provides a strong foundation for understanding behavior, many students interested in culturo-behavior science (CBS) and social justice-related work receive limited formal guidance on how to pursue these interests within existing training models. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences navigating behavior analysis and social issues as students and early-career professionals. We discuss barriers related to coursework, practicum experiences, interdisciplinary collaboration, mentorship, and professional identity development while pursuing values-aligned work both within and outside traditional behavior-analytic spaces. We also offer recommendations for students interested in advocacy-oriented and culturally responsive applications of behavioral science, including strategies for identifying resources, building collaborative communities, and sustaining momentum while navigating uncertain professional pathways. Our goal is to provide guidance and encouragement for students seeking to engage in socially responsive and systems-level applications of behavior analysis.
This essay analyzes faculty self-censorship behavior amid political interference in Florida public higher education. Political interference increasingly regulates faculty behavior through statutes, administrative policies, and institutional directives that alter teaching, research, and scholarly discourse. We examine faculty self-censorship as rule-governed behavior using an established taxonomy of rules (Pelaez, 2013; Pelaez Moreno, 1998) as its primary theoretical framework. The taxonomy articulates five interacting dimensions of rules: (a) explicitness, (b) accuracy (correspondence), (c) complexity, (d) source, and (e) temporal relations. These five dimensions are used to explore how legal and organizational rule systems influence individual faculty behavior under conditions of political intimidation. Recent concepts from higher education and political philosophy scholarship, including anticipatory obedience and repressive legalism, are integrated within this behavior-analytic framework. Florida’s public higher education system and the Eleventh Circuit’s decision affirming the injunction against the Stop WOKE Act serve as a contemporary case study illustrating how ambiguous, incongruent, and externally imposed rules may generate self-censorship despite changing legal contingencies.
Responsible for more global CO2 emissions than aviation and shipping combined, climate impacts from the fashion industry are a global challenge. While there is increasing pressure to reduce post-consumer waste, interventions lack fulsome consideration of the functional relations underlying textile consumption and disposal behaviours. Cultural systems analysis offers a promising means to examine the contingencies impacting textile waste, allowing researchers to pinpoint key variables to bring about meaningful behavioural change. A series of interviews, surveys, and focus groups with design stakeholders and members of the general public were conducted to examine the metacontingencies surrounding textile waste at end-of-life. The three processes of selection within the metacontingency (manufacture and design practices, aggregate product available to purchase by consumers, and group rules surrounding textile consumption) are addressed as they relate specifically to textile production in an effort to support the development of effective interventions at each level. By better understanding the selection and reinforcement of stakeholder behaviours fuelling waste in the textile industry, we can better address these practices effectively through targeted intervention.
Honesty is fundamental to interpersonal relationships and civil society. Although immediate contingencies often favor lying, many individuals respond honestly even when lying would be more efficient for contacting reinforcement. Across two experiments, we evaluated strategies for increasing honest responding by young children through exposure to social contingencies and emotionally evocative stimuli when material contingencies continued to reinforce lying. The stimuli were pictures of faces of children displaying happiness and sadness. The first experiment found that presession pairing of happy faces with honesty and sad faces with lying did not affect behavior; however, pairings combining verbal rule statements and faces contingent upon honesty during sessions resulted in increased honesty. In the second experiment we examined pairing emotionally evocative images with honesty and lying, with increasing intensity of providing a verbal rule linking emotions with honesty. Pairing was effective only when combined with the presentation of a rule linking honesty and emotions. For two participants it was possible to fade treatment with a return to baseline, during which honesty persisted. These results suggest that it may be possible for behavior analysis to develop new interventions to support honesty that do not require changing immediate environmental contingencies.
