APA Handbook of Behavior Analysis, Vol. 2: Translating Principles Into Practice

More than a decade ago, E. O. Wilson (1998), the founder of sociobiology, an expert in ant societies, and a specialist in evolution, argued that consilience would advance an interdisciplinary and unified science. The term consilience was borrowed from the 19th-century historian and philosopher of science William Whewell (1794–1866). Whewell posited that in the rhetoric of scientific discourse, statements of empirical truth are more convincing if three criteria are met: prediction, coherence, and consilience. In this terminology, coherence extends well-established functional relations to other observations without ad hoc modification, and consilience extends scientific propositions about mechanisms and determinants to phenomena and investigative methodologies different from those originally contemplated (Snyder, 2009). The relatively new field of behavioral economics may represent an example of consilience in which concepts from microeconomic theory are extended to the study of consumption by a range of species in the laboratory and the concepts of operant conditioning are extended to an understanding of demand for economic commodities. The blending of behavioral principles with microeconomic theory has been a fruitful area of research (e.g., Kagel, Battalio, & Green, 1995) and has provided a translational framework for extending principles derived from laboratory studies to an understanding of consumer choice observed in whole communities. Economics and behavioral psychology have several points of convergence. One is a common interest in the value of goods, defined as reinforcers by the behaviorist and as objects of scarce consumption by economists. A second point of convergence is an interest in the process of choice: for the economist, the allocation of limited resources for the consumption of alternative goods (consumer choice), and for the behaviorist, the division of operant behavior among competing reinforcers. One area of divergence is that behavioral economists in the operant tradition have focused very little on hypothetical economic concepts, such as utility functions, indifference curves, and optimal choices. Instead, research efforts have focused on understanding the environmental factors affecting (a) overall levels of behavior that is instrumental in obtaining or consuming a variety of commodities in closed economic systems (Bickel, DeGrandpre, Higgins, & Hughes, 1990; Bickel, DeGrandpre, Hughes, & Higgins, 1991; Foltin, 1992; Hursh, 1984; Lea, 1978; Lea & Roper, 1977; Rashotte & Henderson, 1988) and (b) the allocation of behavioral resources among available reinforcers (Hursh, 1980, 1984; Hursh & Bauman, 1987; Madden, Smethells, Ewan, & Hursh, 2007a, 2007b). Behavioral economics, as practiced by students of operant conditioning and behavior analysis, has