From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>

To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>

Date: Mon 08/25/08 09:57 PM

Subject: Re: [s-acc] seven views of time

 

Ccc:

Obviously you do not mean by "behavior management" quite what I'm speaking to. This is probably because you defied the prevailing behavioral control system and .. through persistence and hard work, got away with it. Now you practice behavior management, but with the ethics of somebody who knows what effect it has on others. If I were to develop a statement on behavioral ethics, I'd seek your assistance.

I can't see how these questions relate to behavior management.

The problem is to get control of a person's timing so that their lives aren't theirs any more but that they will behave as desired. Zimbardo is a social psychologist not a clinician so he's not talking about "therapy methods" directly. He's talking "influencing attitudes and changing behavior" – how it's done. His co-author, who got his Ph.D. from Stanford under Zimbardo, tries to write ads for Yahoo! Which will change people's buying behavior. And where the old tradition inadvertising was argumentation, the new tradition involves producing "compelling involvement."

What these questions relate to, is attitudes that people live by.

When this perspective is/would be employed in a "behavioral health" setting, it would amount to the logic of how to keep a person under control.

Your talk below is insufficient because you don't seek to be a "social death sentence manager" by putting people under your control. That's what I mean about "ethics."

To me there is only one kind of behavior management and that is self management. If anyone thinks they are going to manage my behavior, they are in for a rude awakening.

Of course each of us has worked hard to overcome this system of objectification. My point is how is the objectification INTENDED to work.

Behavioral science should be seeking the best ways to help people to help themselves and that is not by managing them with manipulation and drugs.

Now Zimbardo is on the Advisory Committee for PsySR and he considers himself an advocate against torture. But he does not know when he violates people by the above, and he causes people damage.

Same with these questions; I cannot see how my answers to any of them would relate to whether my behavior is normal or abnormal nor what it has to do with time.

Nnn is not (yet) on this list, but I copied my post to him and he tried to post his answer back to S-ACC. He spoke to the Buddhist attitude which is that "past, present, and future are one."

You don't hear what I'm saying. I'm not saying these attitudes relate to whether your "behavior is normal or abnormal." Zimbardo is saying that these attitudes can be used to classify your "habit structure," which is where your timing comes from. For folks in "treatment" it provides the behavior managers with objectifications which presumably they can use to "get 'clients' to behave."

And Ccc, for the "client/survivor" folks, we need to develop a general perspective on how to fight the kind of learned helplessness that results from social enforcement of behavioral management. That's a crucial critical skill for us.

 

Andrew