Radical behaviorist interpretation of complex behavior that which is not
amenable directly to an experimental analysis has taken two forms. The first,
which we may call "top-down," is perhaps the more frequently encountered, and is
the mainstay of Skinners interpretations of economic, political and religious
life among other areas of application. It consists in suggesting surrogates of
the elements of the three- or four-term contingency that might comprise
responses of the kind controlled in the laboratory and the stimuli that would
control them in such a closed setting. The behavior under interpretation, which
typically occurs in a much more open setting, is then described as though it