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Generally speaking, behavior analysts study social behavior by placing pairs of subjects in a situation in which one reinforcer is available, but to only one subject at time. Subjects are trained to give the reinforcer to the other subject (cooperation), take the reinforcer for themselves (sharing), or respond simultaneously for it (competition). Such arrangements between responding and reinforcement have yielded useful information about human social behavior. For example, consider the following: As the number of responses required to obtain reinforcement increases, humans prefer sharing to competition (Hake, Olvera, & Bell, 1975; Olvera & Hake, 1976); competitive contingencies generate higher rates of responding than cooperative ones (Weinstein & Holzbach, 1972); cooperative responding is disrupted when subjects can respond to take reinforcers from another subject (Schmitt & Marwell, 1971); when reinforcement in competitive situations is time-based, subjects respond in break-and-run patterns (Buskist, Barry, Morgan, & Rossi, 1984); and competitive behavior results from the limited availability of reinforcers (Buskist & Morgan, 1987, 1988).
A common thread linking each of these studies is that the reinforcer is delivered only to a single individual (Hake & Vukelich, 1972). So far, an important question in the experimental analysis of human social behavior has gone unaddressed: How is individual behavior affected by reinforcement contingencies in which the reinforcer is delivered, not to that individual, but to the team to which that individual belongs? This question is important to two fundamental issues in the experimental analysis of human behavior--how sensitive is individual behavior to team-like contingencies, and to what extent do particulars of the social context modulate the effects of those contingencies on individual behavior? These questions remain unanswered despite ubiquitous real life examples of such team-like contingencies, for instance, team sports, class projects, business ventures, co-authorship of manuscripts, and family activities.
The purpose of the present experiments was to provide an exploratory analysis of the effects of team-like contingencies on individual performance by examining the schedule-controlled responding of two individuals under a single schedule of reinforcement. Dyads were used because they are the most fundamental social unit. Specifically, four experiments explored the way in which a fixed-ratio (FR) reinforcement schedule controlled responding within and between dyad members and examined the extent to which additional reinforcement contingencies altered responding.
Across the experiments, different...