The social control of behavior control: Behavior modification,individual rights, and research ethics in America, 1971–1979

Abstract

In 1971, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights began a three-year study to investigate the federal funding of all research involving behavior modification. During this period, operant programs of behavior change, particularly those implemented in closed institutions, were subjected to specific scrutiny. In this article, I outline a number of scientific and social factors that led to this investigation and discuss the study itself. I show how behavioral scientists, both individually and through their professional organizations, responded to this public scrutiny by (1) self-consciously altering their terminology and techniques; (2) considering the need to more effectively police their professional turf; and (3) confronting issues of ethics and values in their work. Finally, I link this episode to the formation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, whose recommendations resulted in changes to the ethical regulation of federally funded human subjects research that persist to the present day.

The science of ethics: Deception, the resilient self, and the APA code of ethics, 1966–1973

“…This argument extends from the work of scholars who have shown that, in the twentieth century, the thorniest moral questions in science are commonly recast as technical puzzles that experts can solve, even as that recasting is challenged (Evans, 2002;Rose, 2007;Rutherford, 2006). As I have shown, when ways-of-knowing combine with…”

“…114-117;Robins, Gosling, & Craik, 1999). But, as Alexandra Rutherford (2006Rutherford ( , 2009 has argued, the remaining pockets of neobehaviorists were nonetheless ardent and vocal in their views.…”

Alone Again: John Zubek and the Troubled History of Sensory Deprivation Research

“…This would change in the early 1970s, as research methods in behavioral modification fell under scrutiny. This criticism centered on the coercive aspect of subject participation, particularly in studies and interventions carried out on vulnerable populations, and in particular, prisoners (Rothman, ; Rutherford, ). Yet even so, this debate would not have been seen relevant at the time to Zubek's work, which focused in the 1970s on charting physiological variation in response to changes in environmental factors.…”

Editorial: What We Can Afford and What Counts

“…They argue that if prison is punishment, it is an ineffective punisher. Their paper provides a preliminary behavioral analysis of the problem and suggests that a solution must be a multidisciplinary effort, which may avoid some of the problems that arose in past behavioral applications in corrections (Rutherford, 2006). Their recommendations are very much in line with advances in behavioral systems analysis (Diener, McGee, & Miguel, 2009;Ludwig & Houmanfar, 2009;Malott, 2016;McGee & Diener, 2010;Reimer & Houmanfar, 2017;Sigurdsson & McGee, 2015), so perhaps this paper may occasion some synergy.…”