This is the best account of social behavior from a functional behavioral point of view. Well reasoned yet daring in scope, this text is used around the world. Analyzing Social Behavior provides the first full coverage of the social sciences from the perspective of modern behavior theory. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to behavior analysis and an analysis of a broad range of human social behaviors, using research from psychology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, and sociology. The book demonstrates why most individualistic concepts of psychology- such as the self, thinking, and grammar-are inherently social events. While the special properties of verbal communities that maintain such behaviors are unique and delineate the social sciences, this book shows that these properties can be understood from a natural sciences perspective.

Individuals have opportunities to behave pro-socially at different points in time. This study investigates the interdependence between temporarily separated good deeds and their effect on individual pro-social behavior. In a multi-session laboratory experiment, subjects play a donation dictator game. The first group of subjects runs through two sessions on the same day. For the second group, there is a time-lag of one week between sessions. In both treatments, subjects decrease their donation decision in the second session. Spillover effects of pro-social behavior, however, decrease over time as the reduction in donations is smaller for subjects with larger time-lag between decisions.