Systemic Racism and Cultural Selection: A Preliminary Analysis of Metacontingencies

Racism is a pervasive social justice issue that has been addressed by a variety of fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and sociology. Behavior-analytic accounts of racism have primarily focused on individual and interpersonal acts of prejudice or bias and have used operant contingencies of r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavior and social issues 2020-11, Vol.29 (1), p.52-63
Main Authors: Saini, Valdeep, Vance, Hanna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Clinical Psychology
Original Paper
Personality and Social Psychology
Prejudice
Psychology
Racism
Reinforcement
Social justice
Systemic racism
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Summary:Racism is a pervasive social justice issue that has been addressed by a variety of fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and sociology. Behavior-analytic accounts of racism have primarily focused on individual and interpersonal acts of prejudice or bias and have used operant contingencies of reinforcement as a unit of analysis for conceptualizing the development of racism. However, the absence of behavior-analytic theories of systemic racism, which includes cultural practices that are discriminatory in nature, is apparent. In the present discussion, we provide a preliminary analysis of systemic racism through the lens of cultural selection and metacontingencies as units of analysis. We provide a learning-theory perspective on systems of racism, offer solutions to systemic racism based on metacontingencies as a conceptual tool, and describe barriers to those solutions by evaluating correlations between metacontingencies and individual operant contingencies.
ISSN:1064-9506
2376-6786
DOI:10.1007/s42822-020-00040-0