Eventos Privados: Perguntas Teóricas e Respostas Empíricas

Abstract

Privacy, since the therm was first used by B. F. Skinner it has been subject of theoretical content, but it received little empirical attention. Considering recent theoretical advances on the problem of privacy, namely: (1) privacy as momentary; (2) relative to an observer; (3) different from intern; and (4) measurable in a public-private continuum. We propose the empirical investigation of privacy as a function of two variables, separately analyzed in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively: the access to the controlling variables of momentary private responses, and a common history of reinforcement. In both experiments 20 participants were divided in two groups: Base Group and Referential Group, being that the dependent variable analyzed was the probability of occurrence of verbal responses of the participants of the Referential Group that corresponded to those emitted previously by the participants of the Base Group. In the Experiment 1 the participants were exposed to a set of 8 properties for each one of 6 stimuli, while the participants of the Referential Group accessed the same 6 sets of 8 properties but cumulatively in a series. The data of the Experiment 1 shows that for all participants of the Referential Group the probability of occurrence of correct answers increased as a function of the number o stimulus properties known. In the Experiment 2 the participants were exposed to three test conditions: Baseline (BL.), Post Verbs-Training Test (V.T.) and Post Noun-Training (N.T.), being that between the first and second tests (BL. - V.T.) participants were exposed to a matching-tosample task and relations between shapes and verbs were stablished, and between the second and the third testes (V.T. - N.T.) participants were exposed to similar matching-tosample task, but the relation stablished were between shapes and nouns. All participants were requested to tact the shape stimuli during the test conditions. We observed that the transfer function procedure controlled the emission of correct answers during the tests for all participants of the Group Base. For the participants of the Referential Group the procedure was partially effective. Yet, for 13 out of 16 participants, the probability of occurrence of correct answers was a function of a common history of reinforcement, being that correct answers didn’t occurred for any participant during the Baseline. We concluded that privacy, if described accordingly with some recent theoretical contributions, may be a subject of empirical investigations that could provide conditions for: (1) a better description of the controlling relations during the verbal episode; (2) the development of an empirical agenda that allow a more straightforward analysis of privacy; and (3) an objective description of the role of inference in the analysis of events that are momentarily private considering the commitment of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior with the assumptions of natural sciences.