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A number of social factors are combining to raise the profile of ethical issues for behavior analysts and behavior-modification professionals, as for all psychologists. Some popular misconceptions have led to behavior modification being seen as coercive. These misconceptions are rebutted, and the ethical basis of behavior modification in behavioral analysis is examined. The key features of contemporary behavioral analysis and behavior modification are the public specification of objectives and methods, and the use of functional analysis. However, current problems with functional analysis may make the use of higher order principles such as professional codes of ethics appropriate. Ethical concerns raised by the particular examples of social validity measures and parent training programs are reviewed. These emphasize the importance of putting behavior modification into its social context and thus ensuring that the values of the wider community are acknowledged.
According to the "folk psychology" of Western societies, individuals are generally held to be responsible for their own actions. Occasionally, however, behavior is said to be caused by other, external, factors, or responsibility is attributed to other individuals. This is a "mixed model;' and it could be said to be either philosophically sophisticated or even confused. Is it reasonable to state that one general class of cause (for example, the external environment) is sometimes effective but otherwise not? Hineline (1992) suggests that this tendency to vary our explanatory model derives from our using "bipolar causal talk" in the explanation of psychological phenomena (and thus mimicking the sort of bipolar explanation common in many other areas of discourse) even though three entities, the environment, the person, and his or her behavior, are involved. It certainly seems to be true that we switch from time to time between speaking of a one-way causal link between the individual and behavior to speaking of a one-way causal link between the environment and behavior. Western traditions, and the legal systems that reflect them, do not generally distinguish between cause and responsibility, so once an agency is said to be the cause of an event, it is also said to be responsible for that event. Consequently, we switch between generally holding people-including ourselves-responsible for their own actions to occasionally attributing the responsibility to external factors, including other people.
It may be that...