Private Events

Description of the Strategy

Stated simply, private events are those events occurring “within the skin” of a person or other organism. That is, private events involve stimuli and/or behaviors to which only the behaving organism has direct access. Although many private events have overt behaviors or stimuli that they typically accompany (e.g., the swelling of a sprained ankle is observable to others), the private event (e.g., the pain) is not perceivable by external observers. Thinking, imagining, remembering, feeling, understanding, knowing, and perceiving bodily states are all events that only the organism experiencing them may contact directly.

Behavior analysis has been widely misrepresented as excluding or ignoring private events. Although there are exceptions, many early behaviorists, including J. R. Kantor and B. F. Skinner, along with most contemporary behaviorists, make no such restriction. The faulty belief in the behaviorist rejection of private events has several origins. For example, position of behavior analysis is often confused with other behavioral positions emerging during the same historical period. Inclusion of private events as open to direct scientific analyses distinguishes the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner from the methodological behaviorism of individuals such as Clark Hull. The latter behaviorists insisted exclusively on inclusion of data that were subject to interobserver agreement. Although interobserver agreement is seen as important in contemporary behavior analysis, it does not define the limits of behavioral science.

The belief that behavior analysts deny the existence of private events may also stem from the refusal of behavior analysts to consider private events as the causes of overt behavior (e.g., thoughts causing action). However, exclusion of private events as explanatory causes of behavior does not exclude such events from being the subject of study. For the behavior analyst, private events are always the dependent variables that one explains, rather than the independent variables that explain behavior. When private events, such as thoughts of self-efficacy, are seen to be highly correlated with performance, the behavior analyst seeks to understand the environmental conditions that lead to (a) the thoughts of self-efficacy, (b) the overt performance, and (c) the relation between the thought and performance.

Research on Private Events

The belief that behaviorism is ill equipped to analyze private events may also result from the relative lack of empirical research concerning private events from a [Page 440]behavior-analytic perspective. In dealing with the analysis of the behavior of simple organisms in simple environments, variability in overt behavior could be analyzed without analyses of private events. This is also essentially the case in experimental analysis of the behavior of individuals when extreme control of the environment is possible, such as among institutionalized individuals. Thus, because the empirical analysis of private events was both unnecessary and methodologically troublesome, private events were largely ignored. However, as behavior analysis expands into adult clinical populations and problems, the need for analysis of private events has become more acute. These analyses have begun to appear in greater numbers in the behavioral literature. This is particularly the case with basic research concerning rule-governed behavior, stimulus equivalence, and issues of self. For example, recent literatures have emerged examining phenomenon such as self-discrimination, self-control, the participation of private events in equivalence relations, and rule following. Likewise, in the clinical behavior analysis literature, private events have emerged as a topic of central empirical and theoretical concern.

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