Exercise

The Psychological Record , 1997, 47, 181-200

BEHAVIOR-ANALYTIC APPROACHES TO SELF-AWARENESS

SIMON DYMOND

University of Wales, Bangor

DERMOT BARNES

University College Cork

The current paper provides an overview of behavior-analytic approaches to self-awareness. Skinner (1974) argued that the phenomenon of self-awareness is produced , in large part, by those social contingencies that reinforce discrimination of the organism 's own behavior. This view of self-awareness is supported by a range of empirical studies that successfully established self-discrimination performances in both nonhuman and human subjects. Recent developments in basic, applied, and conceptual analyses are currently extending Skinner's behavioranalytic definition of self-awareness. The current paper focuses on a relational frame interpretation of human self-discrimination.

The experimental analysis of behavior, as one of the many subdisciplines within psychology, is often seen as being largely unconcerned with the issue of self or self-awareness (see Skinner, 1974, p. 4). Strangely enough, however, radical behaviorism , the philosophical foundation of behavior analysis, includes many references to, and conceptual analyses of, "self-awareness" (e.g. , Chiesa, 1994; Hineline, 1983, 1992; Skinner, 1953, 1974). The aim of the current paper is to provide an overview of the behavior-analytic approach to selfawareness. We will outline both early and more recent behavior-analytic definitions of self-awareness, and we will also consider a range of studies that have experimentally analyzed the phenomenon of selfawareness from a behavior-analytic perspective. We will begin a behavioral analysis of "self-awareness" by examining the socially agreed or conventional definitions of the terms "self" and "self-awareness" found in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1991). This dictionary defines "self" as "a person's or thing 's individuality or essence" and as the "object of...