RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY A POST-SKINNERIAN ACCOUNT OF HUMAN LANGUAGE AND COGNITION Edited by Steven C. Hayes University of Nevada, Reno Reno, Nevada and Dermot Barnes-Holmes Bryan Roche National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW eBook ISBN: 0-306-47638-X Print ISBN: 0-306-46600-7 ©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow Print ©2001 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers New York All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: http://kluweronline.com and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://ebooks.kluweronline.com To the memory of B. F. Skinner and J. R. Kantor They forged the way toward a naturalistic approach to human language and cognition A PERSONAL PROLOGUE Steven C. Hayes University of Nevada, Reno I have been asked by my coauthors to write a personal prologue to this volume. I am a bit embarrassed to do so, because it seems entirely too self-conscious, but I have agreed because it gives me a chance both to acknowledge a number of debts and to help reduce the harmful and false perception that RFT is a foreign intrusion into behavioral psychology. I would like first to acknowledge the debt RFT owes to Willard Day. I heard Willard speak in 1972 or 1973 as a beginning graduate student. His call to understand language as it is actually used became a lifelong commitment. In some ways this commitment was not just to the field but was a personal one to Willard himself, who was one of the most charismatic, intelligent, and complex human beings I ever met. Later, when Willard happily convinced me to join him at the University of Nevada, we were able to spend a few years together before a heart attack suddenly took away this great man. Ironically, Willard himself was extremely uncomfortable with RFT, but he was trying to understand it to the end because he appreciated its purpose. For me, RFT was a way to rise up to Willard’s challenge, and if any good comes from it, Willard is partly responsible. He gave me the mission. I have been asked where RFT came from. The answer may be disappointingly simple to some: it is a direct application of behavior analysis, as I understood it. I had been encouraged by philosophically oriented people like Jon Krapfl and Hayne Reese (and Willard Day, Scott Wood, my student colleague Bill Myerson, and many others) to think of behavior in the most open and functional way possible. I did not know the word “contextualistic” then, but the wonderful explosion of contextualistic behavior analysis at West Virginia University in the early 1970’s made a mark on me that would last a lifetime. They gave me a form of behavior analysis that could breathe free and that had no limits to its vii viii RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY aspirations. Given that training, it was absolutely normal to think in radically functional terms, even when behavioral events and their contexts seemed to have no shared formal properties. I had also been trained by clinical behavior analysts like John Cone and Rob Hawkins, and by basic behavior analysts like Andy Lattal to insist upon an experimental analysis. They had given me a form of behavior analysis that was rigorous and data oriented. On the one hand, I was taught to love and respect the importance of philosophy of science, but on the other hand, I was taught that this was never to be accepted as a substitute for data. In that odd way, the seeds of my discontent with Skinner’s approach to verbal behavior were sown. An analysis of verbal behavior that was not a rich source of experimental data was functionally false, however elegant it might be. As an academic, I was particularly moved by the work of Charlie Catania and his colleagues Elliot Shimoff and Bud Matthews, with whom I later spent a productive sabbatical year in 1986. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s my students and I looked to the analysis of rule-governed behavior as a way to begin to address Willard’s challenge, but it quickly became apparent that to understand rules one had to understand verbal stimuli. When my late colleague Aaron Brownstein exposed me to the concept of stimulus equivalence in 1982 or 1983, these multiple sources of control clicked together. I believe that I laid out an overarching operant account of equivalence to Aaron in a conversation just a few days later. Aaron was immediately supportive. I was by then running my laboratory with Aaron, who was perhaps the best basic behavior analyst I have ever known. We began working out the conceptual and empirical details, point by point, with students in our lab at that time (especially Rob Zettle, Irwin Rosenfarb, Jeanne Devany, David Steele, Barbara Kohlenberg, Joe Haas, Dan Gunnarson, Elga Wulfert, Terry Olson, Jill Shelby, David Greenway, and several others). Aaron always pushed the work away from issues of form and toward issues of behavioral principles. He was never interested in equivalence for equivalence’s sake. He was interested in what was functionally new and principle-based, and that could be used to understand complex human behavior. The first detailed presentation of the RFT idea was in an invited address jointly authored by Aaron and I at the Association for Behavior Analysis meeting in Columbus, Ohio in 1985 entitled Verbal behavior, equivalence classes, and rules: New definitions, data, and directions. In that paper, we laid out the core of RFT and defined verbal behavior as “speaking with meaning and listening with understanding” very much as is done in the present volume. Aaron’s boldness was reassuring. If such a careful and conservative behavioral scientist could see the sense of it, I knew we must be on the right track. Aaron was a rigorous and creative experimental scientist who saw how to break down an idea into a series of studies. In 1985, Aaron and I listed about 20 studies that needed to be done on RFT. Virtually every study on that list has now been done – usually not by me since I have been distracted by many other administrative, organizational, and research projects – and all were successful in RFT terms. Had Aaron not died suddenly, I’m sure he would have been an author on many RFT studies. Taking RFT from a simple idea to a theory required a mind more careful and analytical than my own. Although I had known my wife Linda for many years, I became involved with her at a 1986 conference in Germany that she had organized and where an elaborated form of RFT and some of the early data was presented and discussed for the first time. When we married a short time later, she helped me with the analysis greatly, smoothing out the rough edges, making it even more contextualistic, giving it its slightly Kantorian feel, and forcing A PERSONAL PROLOGUE ix attention to the issues that needed to be addressed. We ran our lab together for a time, and our students from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s (especially Gina Lipkens, Chris Leonhard, Kelly Wilson, Sue McCurry, and others) bumped the analysis forward. Taking RFT from a theory to an actual living research program required a person with greater creativity, organization, focus, and persistence than I possess. Thankfully, that problem was solved by the miracle of Dermot Barnes-Holmes and his students. Inventive, intense, and fantastically productive, Dermot took this theory and a small set of studies developed by an academic clinical psychologist who did basic research on the side, and helped turn it into an empirical research program that has the potential to transform the field. Nothing in my professional life has ever been more heartening. Dermot is a brilliant light that illuminates all around him. If there is a God, I thank her for Dermot. Where did RFT come from? Putting together these sources of influence – radical functionalism, an experimental orientation, the lead provided by rule-governance and simple equivalence, and the analytic creativity of my basic behavior analytic colleagues – I continue to believe that RFT is a fairly natural extension of the field itself as I was trained to view it. At its intellectual core, RFT is as simple a behavioral theory as one can imagine: think of relating as learned behavior. Yet, in describing these sources of influence over RFT I see that it is more than that – it is a reflection of some of the most able behavior analysts the field has to offer and that I have been lucky to have as teachers and colleagues. Steven C. Hayes Reno, Nevada December 2000 PREFACE Behavior analysis is a field that approaches complex problems by trying to generalize from simpler situations. Inductive, empirical, and fastidious, it is a field that from the beginning aspired to grapple with the most elaborate forms of human behavior, and yet it approached thatcomplexity through the superficially preposterous strategy of focusing on the instrumental actions of rats and pigeons. Even behavior analysts sometimes misunderstood that strategy, others in psychology most certainly did. This strategy was never based on reductionism, or the belief that the behavior of nonhumans must provide a good guide to the analysis of complex human behavior. Rather, it was a strategic course into the complex – one that behavior analysts hoped and prayed, but did not know, would eventually be useful by providing tools for the analysis of complex situations.