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This article describes part of the common ground on which behavior analysts and social psychologists can meet for fruitful discussions to further their research: Both groups of investigators share an interest in rule-governed behavior. I describe four lively research areas of mainstream social psychology to illustrate that shared interest - time horizons, optimism and pessimism, attribution, and equity theory. Numerous experiments in each area are designed to (a) discover individuals' self-rules and (b) analyze their implications for various activities in daily life., For some time now, behavior analysts have been admonished to cooperate with researchers in other fields (e.g., Czubaroff, 1993; Glenn, 1993). If such efforts are to be successful, it is [...]

Recent pessimistic assessments of behaviorism's contributions and future role are examined and found wanting. Research in social psychology and large-scale applications, as well as recent books on social processes, are shown to make considerable use of operant principles. Although these principles are largely hidden by conventional phrasing and often are not specifically acknowledged, their general acceptance makes them appear to be almost a part of psychology's conventional wisdom. Implications for behaviorism, in terms of core principles and peripheral implications, as well as a 'school,' are briefly discussed., Recent assessments of behaviorism - narrowly defined as 'the lines of research and theory that follow from, and closely adhere to, the seminal views of Watson and Skinner' (Lamal, 1989, [...]