Envisioning cultural practices

Graphic visualization has demonstrated its value for organizing transactional data and modeling complex phenomena in a wide variety of fields, from theoretical physics to medicine. Behavior analysts have historically used a variety of graphic tools not only for presentation but also for analysis and teaching. As they turn increasingly to the analysis and design of cultural practices, the phenomena behavior analysts study are becoming increasingly complicated. Many cultural practices of interest are embedded in extensive webs of interlocking practices and contingencies that can be difficult to grasp comprehensively. Building on contingency diagrams, which have proven to be useful for the analysis of operant behavior, and graphic tools developed for object-oriented systems analysis, this paper suggests graphic tools for capturing the interlocking contingencies that constitute cultures. These diagrams offer a broad-bandwidth technology for analyzing and designing cultural practices.