Something I should have known...
Behavioral control? Yeah, not exactly the most popular approach to American foreign policy.I feel like explaining (as a means of avoiding my paper for my research methods class!). I had to take an upper-level political science class in order to graduate with honors. I haven't taken a class in political science since high school. And I ignored it there. So, not really my area (complete understatement :) ).
All semester, I've just related every concept back to psychology and pretended I was adding something valuable to the class. (It's not difficult, really. I just call it "political behavior" and everything springs up from there. :) ) Problem is, that with a full one-third of the psychology department here being behavior analysts, I've become somewhat of a goose-stepping behaviorist myself. And one of the professors of this political science class is quite fond of his free will. I mean, he claims he used his copy of Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity as a prop to keep a picture hanging straight on his living room wall. We have been at intellectual war all semester. Oddly enough, I've enjoyed it immensely.
Tonight in class, five of us presented our papers on the approach we thought would be the best direction for American foreign policy. Mine was an experimenting society (yay, Walden Two!). After ten minutes of presenting and thirty minutes of intense questioning, I thought I defended it rather well, but we'll see how my grade bears me out on that one.
posted by Psychobunny at
9:53 PM
3 comment(s):
Those of us in political science often wish that we could have a society to experiment with. There's so much about political behavior that we can't explain because it wouldn't be legal to experiment on people that way.
According to one of my professors, the people at a very fancy university considered using the money that went toward their public policy school to buy a small country where we could change their institutions, political parties, etc.
By
Anonymous, at
November 28, 2006 11:07 PM
(Forgive me, Anonymous, for this is going to be a very long comment.)
Interesting! I have to wonder what a small country goes for nowadays. :)
Honestly, it never occurred to me to try to change a region's political parties and such, though that would be really interesting if you were allowed to do it. I was actually looking at the examples of environmental protections and public health education for disease prevention. I could definitely have been more clear in the post (if not for fear of the Googlebots). What we've been doing all semester is discussing the foreign policy challenges in the post-Cold War United States, including four theoretical policy approaches and their means and intended ends.
Imagine eleven students and two professors bickering for three straight hours each week about which theory has the most merit and never agreeing on where to actually start doing something. The only things we even really come close to agreeing on are that we think (A) something needs to be done, and (B) we would need a majority decision before we were to attempt any of the approaches. And at that rate, nothing is likely to change.
By "experimenting society", all I wanted to convey was just starting somewhere (probably somewhere small, and of course following the suggestions of scholars in the relevant fields) and keeping data on what has changed and whether the changes have measurably improved conditions either objectively or subjectively. If so, keep them and try other new changes. If not, try something else.
There wasn't any objection to that. What got everyone hot under the collar was my insistence that behavioral control always exists and the related suggestion that we should favor positive reinforcement contingencies over the current, largely-coercive practices (which generate countercontrol, escape, avoidance, and rebellion) on both an interpersonal and an international scale.
By
Psychobunny, at
November 29, 2006 12:15 AM
Same anonymous as before, and I've also commented as anonymous a few times on your other blog. I need to start using some consistent name when I make comments here, because somehow your entries always leave me with something to say.
I think your approach would be reasonable. In Mexico, for example, the government wanted to see if free or cheap health insurance would medical costs, because people wouldn't wait until they were very ill to go to the doctor. So, the government offered a group of people low-cost health insurance and compared them with people who did not get the offer. I wish I knew the results of this study (either it's not done yet, or the person who presented the methodology to us didn't care about the results), but experiments are being used to try to change something.
I don't know much about Skinner, but I'm still surprised that your suggests were so controversial. One of the main theories of political behavior is that actors consider the costs and benefits of possible actions and then choose the one that will give them the best outcome. So, if you want to control what someone does (and you have some power over them), you change their costs and benefits. The government wants to promote home ownership or wants people to have more children, so they give tax credits for that, and they don't want us to drive too fast, so they give us tickets. We discuss whether punishments or rewards are better fairly often.
Political science definitely owes a lot to psychology, so they should welcome you with open arms.
By
Anonymous, at
November 30, 2006 1:39 AM
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