Cultural Survival in B. F. Skinner: Possibilities for Conceptual Refinement

The concept of cultural survival is fundamental when describing the selection processes involved in cultural evolution. However, its application by Skinner was inconsistent. As a result, distinct and sometimes contradictory interpretations regarding what it means for a culture to survive occasionally emerge in the behavior-analytic literature. In this article, we aim to identify the stimuli that prompted Skinner to emit the verbal response “cultural survival.” Our analysis suggests two problems: (a) the concept of cultural survival is used by Skinner to identify both the effects of cultural practices on the physical survival ofmembers of the culture and their effects on the survival of specific sets of social reinforcement contingencies via operant reinforcement, and (b) the concept is applied to two different phenomena—namely, first, the relation between the complete range of social reinforcement contingencies maintained by the human species and the physical survival of humankind, and, second, the relation between specific sets of these contingencies and the physical survival of particular groups. Finally, we argue for the importance of the precise identification of the groups and social contingencies that compose any “culture” submitted to a behavioral analysis. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42822-020-00044-w.