The Task for Behavior Analysis When It Comes to the Concept of Goals

The first question before we continue to delineate a behavior-analytic account of what it means to have a goal is why we should do it. As pointed out by Moore (2001), there is a challenge for behavioral theorists to make sense of psychological terms that appeal to the mental. When attempting to understand the usage of a term such as goals, one needs to look closer at verbal behavior. And to deepen that analysis, one needs to understand multiple controls of verbal behavior. As Moore stated, one can assume that this behavior is controlled (a) partly by sociocultural traditions and (b) partly by operations and contact with other aspects of the environment. People will talk about goals because a verbal community has reinforced this behavior, but also because this verbal behavior has been functional with regard to actions the person has taken in a particular context. Terms such as goals may be perfectly reasonable as descriptive terms relating to the probability of a response. Or as put by Foxall (2004): “The testimony that people give us about their intentions, plans, hopes, worries, thoughts and feelings is by far the most important source of information we have about them” (p. 112).

The research cited earlier indicates that the verbal behavior referred to as goal statements may be useful for the purpose of both predicting and influencing behavior. And as already indicated, behavior analysts use the term goals in a way that hints that they themselves also seem to have goals and find use in formulating them. The analytic approach of behavior analysis is fundamentally practical. In this vein, when Fellner and Sulzer-Azaroff (1984) pointed to the behavior-analytic objective in avoiding mentalist conceptions, this practical ambition corresponds in an OBM context to the search for concepts that has a value in guiding managers and administrators toward the environmental conditions that may be influenced. Rather that, than attempting to influence inaccessible mental processes in employees.

Goal-Directed Behavior as Rule Governed

A reasonable way to study goals would be to ask people about them in one way or another. Essentially, that is how the empirical data on goals, cited previously, have been collected. The fact that goal-setting procedures tend to be stressed in the OBM literature and in clinical literature should be considered from the perspective that both areas primarily deal with verbally competent individuals. In these areas, both the behavior under scrutiny and the influence it is exposed to are often verbal. So, in order to provide further precision in the analysis, the events under study are considered to be verbal responses—that is, goal statements—rather than goals per se (O’Hora and Maglieri 2006).

To follow Skinner in an analysis, goal statements are a form of human behavior that may in turn influence other behavior. Talking about goals is one functional class of behavior, and behavior under the influence of such talking is another functional class. When focusing on what effects goals have on human behavior overall, what should be analyzed is not a goal as an object but the relationship between these two functional classes of human behavior. It is thus a behavior–behavior relationship (Hayes and Brownstein 1986; Leigland 2014). If a person states a goal and then acts to achieve it, he or she is interacting with his or her own behavior in the moment, not with a future object.

Describing future goals in the present as related to events that are hitherto not directly experienced touches on Skinner’s (1966) analysis of rule-governed behavior. Skinner did not use this term with regard to goals, but it is easy to see its relevance for our subject area. A rule that influences subsequent behavior is, according to Skinner, an antecedent specifying behavior and consequence. The idea of treating goals as rules or statements specifying contingencies, along with treating them as motivating operations rather than as discriminative stimuli, has by and large been adopted by the OBM literature (Agnew and Redmon 1993; Malott 1993).

An example would be a man looking for his glasses in an entirely new way and place upon hearing “Dig into the pot of mashed potatoes and you will find your glasses!” Or, to use an example of more complex behavior, “Join us in the demonstration next Saturday, and you will make a contribution to world peace!” If someone then takes part in the demonstration to achieve this end, it would be a case of rule-governed behavior. It is also quite reasonable to expect that within a cognitive framework, this behavior would be called “goal driven,” where the goal that drives the behavior would be conceptualized as a mental image of future possibilities. But in Skinner’s analysis, this goal is neither mental nor future. It is behavior under the control of the past and present context of the listener to the rule.

We argue that it is quite possible to make a sensible and parsimonious statement regarding goal-directed behavior from a behavior-analytic position. Goal-directed behavior is behavior under the influence of other behavior—that is, verbal behavior or, more specifically, goal statements. In the simple case, the establishing of a rule or instruction is overt verbal behavior. But it may equally well be covert. The problem with this position, when it comes to the concept of goal-directed behavior, is not at the basic conceptual level. The problem is what Skinner left unanswered: the question of how this verbal behavior can influence other behavior.

A Relational Frame Theory Account of Goal-Directed Behavior

In order to further the understanding of the behavioral processes underlying goal-directed behavior, O’Hora and Maglieri (2006) extended the analysis by incorporating principles from relational frame theory (RFT; Hayes et al. 2001; Törneke 2010). The rationale for this extension is twofold: It should enable increased precision, and it should rest upon basic behavioral principles amenable to empirical investigation. But O’Hora and Maglieri also noted that while behavioral conceptualizations of goal setting have attempted to account for putative behavioral histories, they have ignored much of the empirical research on the effects of goals and goal setting that is described in the cognitive literature. These effects must be accounted for in a comprehensive behavioral conceptualization of goal-directed behavior.

From an RFT perspective, it is suggested that verbal behavior is a special way of responding to relations between stimuli (Törneke 2010). By means of operant learning, humans acquire this ability to respond to socially established contingencies early on (Healy et al. 1998; O’Hora et al. 2004). Technically, this ability is called “arbitrary applicable relational responding” or, more metaphorically, “relational framing.” It is arbitrary in the sense that humans learn to relate events based on arbitrary contextual cues rather than just on their physical characteristics (Hayes et al. 2001). In RFT, the analysis of thinking follows that of Skinner in treating thinking as private verbal behavior under contextual control. Thus, private behavior can acquire functions as a result of the individual’s way of relating events to each other rather than purely on that individual’s direct experience of these events.

Different ways of relating under contextual control have been theoretically identified and experimentally verified. This research has covered relations of coordination—that is, relating one event as the same as or equivalent to another relations of opposition (Barnes-Holmes et al. 2004a; Carpentier et al. 2003; Dymond et al. 2008; Roche and Barnes 1997)—as well as comparative relations—that is, relating events as more-than or less-than (Barnes-Holmes et al. 2004c; Berens and Hayes 2007; Dymond and Barnes 1995; Munnelly et al. 2010). Other types of relations are temporal relations (O’Hora et al. 2008), causal relations (Dack et al. 2009), and hierarchical relations—that is, responding to one event as belonging to another, or being part of or being included in another category of events (Gil et al. 2012). Yet another type of framing is the ability to take a certain perspective, or deictic relations (McHugh et al. 2004; Weil et al. 2011).

These relations, established by arbitrary contextual cues, alter the way events or stimuli acquire functions for further behavior. Among the functions that have been studied experimentally are respondent conditioning (Dougher et al. 1994, 2007), mood (Barnes-Holmes et al. 2004b; Cahill et al. 2010), and evaluative conditioning effect (Valdivia-Salas et al. 2013). These functions imply that if one is capable of interacting with arbitrary contextual cues in a way that transforms stimulus function, words or gestures may provide cues that can alter the functions of stimuli. These stimuli thereby acquire new “meaning.” The statement that “X is better than Y” contains the word “better” (cuing comparative framing), which may transform the valence of a not-yet-experienced event. Simple examples of comparative framing would be the statements “Japanese whisky is better than Scottish,” “German cars are better than French ones,” and “Corn-fed chickens are better than ordinary ones.” Given that the listener has experienced drinking Scottish whisky, driving French cars, and eating ordinary chicken, he or she may now relate to Japanese whisky, German cars, and corn-fed chicken as more appetitive, without any direct contact with these stimuli. These processes may be accomplished as a result of the listener having the repertoire of interacting with arbitrary contextual cues in a way that transforms the stimulus functions of present events. These repertoires can be shaped, under contextual control, to increasing complexity (Barnes-Holmes et al. 2004a; Lipkens and Hayes 2009). Once the basic repertoire is available, quite complex actions can take place.

Goals as Relationally Framed Events

For the present discussion on goal-directed behavior, temporal framing is of special importance. All organisms have the ability to interact with changes in the environment. But once the stimulus functions of the environment transform as a result of arbitrary contextual cues, a new route to behavioral change is established. Just as stimuli can be acted upon as “better” without any direct experience, they can be acted upon as “coming later” without any prior experience of the stimuli or the events occurring in this specific order. So, through the processes described, a person will be able to interact with verbal stimuli so that he or she will constitute a rule in the form “If you do Z, you may acquire X, which is better than Y.” If the rule influences the following behavior, the result is what is typically called “rule-governed behavior.” In this way, RFT offers an analysis of how a rule can specify behavior and consequence, to use Skinner’s (1966) words.

O’Hora and Maglieri (2006) have incorporated the conceptual framework of RFT in the analysis of goal statements as a means of understanding the process of influencing behavior in an organizational context. They pointed out a limitation in the behavioral literature, when it often neglects empirical findings from other areas in the field and may fail to offer an account of these findings. Specifically, they pointed out that research unanimously shows that when goal difficulty increases, performance improves, regardless of whether the goal is attained or not. These results run counter to the idea of goal statements as discriminative stimuli. Increased difficulty would reasonably be associated with less likelihood of reinforcers to occur (i.e., goal attainment), and performance should be expected to decrease.

But O’Hora and Maglieri argued that effective goal statements function by specifying a level of performance that will relate feedback statements over ongoing performance, in a “more/less-than” frame, to the behavior defined by the goal. If the goal is to complete 10 activities, stating that one has completed three activities rather than none relates the ongoing performance to the goal statement. The approaching of the defined goal level is only achieved indirectly, by verbal means, but will allow for the reinforcement of “being on the right way.” Thus, reinforcement is quite possible, even though the goal in itself is not attained. In this way, the behavior in question acquires derived reinforcing functions through a verbal statement signaling closer proximity toward an event or state not yet reached. But in order for this function to persist over time, the relation between the goal level of performance and the reinforcement inherent in attaining the goal needs to be maintained, to retain the reinforcing effects of verbal feedback. Behaviors that are task-relevant will be more likely to occur and those that are task-irrelevant will be less likely, when goal and feedback statements are provided. O’Hora and Maglieri (2006) also touched upon a more process-related feature of goal setting in production facilities when relations are derived “based on the deictic (I-You) relations between each employee’s view of him or herself and his or her view of other employees (e.g., ‘We’re all in the same boat’)” (p. 154). In this way, RFT can be used in an analysis of goal-directed behavior as behavior under the influence of other behavior and to analyze how antecedent and consequential functions of events change owing to derived relational responding.