Description
Mentalistic Versus Environmental Explanations- comment with 4 sentences
Engaging with each other is essential in an online course. Conversations strengthen your understanding of the new knowledge gained and increase your curiosity and awareness of those who share in this learning platform. You have learned the terms mentalistic explanation and environmental explanation. Given your understanding of these terms, share in a conversation with the community of learners by engaging in ONE of the following:
Provide a personal or professional example of a mentalistic explanation and an environmental explanation.
Compare and contrast the two explanations. How are they different?
Explain why behavior analysts avoid mentalistic explanations.
Describe a time that you have used an environmental explanation to analyze your own behavior.
Response Guidelines 1 AND 2 with 2-3 sentences each learner
Your Writing: Each post should be courteous, succinct, professional, well written and organized, using proper writing mechanics, grammar, and punctuation.
Your Post: Please post something to the discussion board related to the content covered this week. Do not create your post as a reply to the pinned post. Instead, use Yellowdig’s Create option to create a new post.
Responding to Peers: As you respond to your classmates, share your professional experiences and feedback regarding their posts. Try to comment on those that have had few or no responses thus far, and consider the following:
How have your experiences resonated with their ideas?
Learner 1——-Mentalistic explanations don’t tend to benefit behavior analysts because they are an argument that goes in circles, also known as circular reasoning. Behavior analysts avoid mentalistic explanations because the idea they are studying has no support other than the original claim, which does not help figure out cause and effect. Mentalistic explanations prove nothing of value to the behavior analyst.
I see this a lot at my current job with newer behavior technicians. When asking them and trying to figure out a behavior’s ABCs (antecedent, behavior, consequence), they sometimes use circular reasoning as their support.
Learner 2——-This week I decided to talk about why a BCBA would avoid using a mentalistic explanation of a behavior. The biggest reason a mentalistic explanation is not used is because it does not explain the reason for the behavior but instead uses assumptions to explain a behavior. This topic is talked about often in the field. As a RBT i often assist my BCBA super visors in finding out the function of behaviors while actively staying away from using a mentalistic explanation.
