What's the Function? // Presidential Election 2020

I love Criminal Minds. The serial killers, the drama, the satisfying endings... But the thing I love most about Criminal Minds is how cool it makes my job seem! Who watches that show and doesn't want to be a Behavior Analyst afterward? Granted, my current job is a whole lot more about adorable kiddos with developmental disabilities and a whole lot less about serial killers... but still.

My favorite part about being a behavior analyst is talking with parents, teaching them about their child’s behaviors, and giving them suggestions of better ways to respond to those behaviors. If a parent doesn’t respond appropriately to a child’s behaviors, there isn’t much my team and I can do that will change that child’s behaviors in the long term. One of the first things I always teach parents is about the functions of behavior, which is basically the reason someone acts a certain way. 

Understanding the function of someone’s behavior is great, because once you understand WHY they’re behaving in a certain way, you can pretty easily figure out how to respond to get them to either stop doing that thing or continue doing it.

All eyes and ears are on Washington DC these days, so I thought it would be fun to explain the functions of behavior through a political lens.

Attention: 

Behaviors that are attention-maintained are behaviors that occur because time and time again that behavior has received attention- whether positive or negative attention. My favorite current example of an attention-seeking behavior is President Trump’s Twitter account. Since Donald Trump created his Twitter account in 2009, he has tweeted over 45,000 times. On June 5th, 2020 alone, he sent out 200 tweets and retweets, breaking his record for the most amount of tweets he has sent out in a single day. 

So that’s the behavior — tweeting, tweeting, and more tweeting. How are we responding? Currently, Donald Trump is mentioned on twitter 10,000 times in 20 minutes. Even if only half of those mentions are responses to his tweets, that’s 5,000 responses in 20 minutes. In other words, we are reinforcing the heck out of the President’s attention-seeking tweeting behavior. He wants attention and he is getting it. 

If we want him to tweet less or even stop tweeting all together, the appropriate response is to ignore it all. Stop responding to his tweets, stop re-tweeting him, stop taking screenshots and posting them on our instagram stories.

Takeaway: If a presidential candidate is engaging in an inappropriate attention-seeking behavior, the correct response from us is to withhold attention completely in hopes that he decreases his behavior.

Escape/Avoidance:

Behaviors that are maintained by escape or avoidance are engaged in because that behavior has continuously resulted in the individual successfully escaping or avoiding something that is perceived to be negative. And what better example of an escape/avoidance behavior than wearing masks to avoid getting COVID-19? During this election cycle, which has unfortunately coincided with the pandemic, we’ve seen one candidate repeatedly engage in the mask-wearing escape behavior and the other candidate oftentimes decline to engage in the mask-wearing.

Wearing a mask to avoid COVID-19 is very much an escape behavior, but according to the CDC, it is an escape behavior we should all be engaging in. The CDC has told us that if we wear a mask, our chances of getting COVID-19 decrease. We’ve recently seen an excellent example of this with our two presidential candidates:

-> Joe Biden wears a mask (behavior) = No COVID-19 (consequence)

-> Donald Trump doesn’t wear a mask (behavior) = COVID-19 (consequence)

Obviously, COVID-19 is something that can’t be controlled by us. We can only do our best to avoid it by practicing the necessary safety precautions. Another example of a COVID-19 related escape-maintained happened in New York in late September. Donald Lewinski was in a bar and decided he didn’t need to wear a mask. Rocco Sapienza saw this and approached Lewinski, asking him to put his mask on. Lewinski’s response was to shove Sapienza. Unfortunately, Sapienza died several days later due to injuries he obtained when he was shoved. In this case, Lewinski attempted to escape the demand to put his mask on, so the escape-maintained behavior he engaged in was to push Sapienza. From the looks of it, he successfully avoided having to put his mask on. I’m sure I’m not the only one who hopes he doesn’t also escape jail time!

Takeaway: If an individual is engaging in an escape-maintained behavior, the correct response from us is to not let him escape based on his maladaptive behavior, but to instead either require him to follow through (wear the mask) or require him to ask appropriately to escape (“I’m sorry, I don’t want to put my mask on, but I will leave this bar.”)

Access:

Access-maintained behaviors are behaviors that individuals engage in because those behaviors have repeatedly resulted in them getting what they want. Attack ads are an excellent example of a behavior that is maintained by access. Every election cycle, it gets to a point where the presidential candidates attempt to gain access to our votes by attacking each other. As American people, the way we respond may not have much of an effect this year, but it could impact the way presidential candidates campaign in the future. Are we okay with the way candidates continuously attack each other? Or would we prefer they play nice and focus on their own vision? 

If we do not find attack ads to be effective and beneficial, and therefore an inappropriate way to win the election, we should vote for the candidate who does not use attack ads. The goal being, if candidate after candidate loses the presidency after going negative, they will stop using attack ads because the ads are no longer effective.

Takeaway: If a presidential candidate is engaging in an inappropriate access-maintained behavior, the correct response from us is to not give him access to what he wants (he loses the election) or make him ask appropriately for what he wants (no more attack ads = he wins the election).

Automatically Reinforcing:

Automatically reinforcing behaviors are the most difficult to respond to because these behaviors don’t rely on anyone else. Have you ever been in a long, boring meeting and found yourself picking your fingernails or playing with your hair? Maybe you tap your pen, shake your foot up and down, or scroll on your phone? Those are all examples of automatically reinforcing behaviors. The act of doing those things is soothing. It feels good to do it and it probably feels really weird to stop. 

Everyone engages in automatically reinforcing behaviors, even if they don’t all look the same. Because I don’t know what this looks like for Donald Trump or Joe Biden, let’s make up a pretend scenario to better explain:

• Donald Trump and Joe Biden are out to lunch at their favorite restaurant - Chick-Fil-A. Joe and Donald are having a pleasant conversation about climate change, but Joe keeps picking his phone up, opening Instagram, and scrolling while talking to Donald. It's making Donald feel like Instagram is more important than their conversation, which he doesn't like. So while Joe goes up to ask for some more Chick-Fil-A sauce, Donald quickly reaches over and moves Joe's Instagram app to another folder. When Joe comes back, he nonchalantly grabs his phone to get on Instagram, but, not being able to quickly find the app, he puts his phone down. He grabs his phone two more times during lunch, but eventually stops and they continue their conversation without interruption.

In this situation, Donald knew that saying “Stop” or reprimanding Joe wouldn’t do much, because Joe would likely pick up his phone again in a minute or two without even realizing it. Donald's intervention worked because by hiding the Instagrm app, he blocked the reinforcing effects of scrolling Instagram, so this was no longer automatically reinforcing to Joe.

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There is a lot more that goes into determining the functions of behavior, and oftentimes behaviors are maintained by more than one behavior (ie: Donald Trump tweets for attention but also so he will gain access to our votes). But I thought this would be a fun and simplified way to introduce the functions of behavior. What other behaviors in current events would you add under each function?

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Disclaimer: All of the above examples are simply hypotheses. There is no way to truly know the function of behaviors without conducting a functional analysis, which I have not done.