Research Statement
At the center of my research is a single, deceptively simple behavior: choosing between consequences that arrive at different moments, sometimes affecting different people. When the smaller, sooner consequence and the larger, later one accrue to the same person, we call it self-control; when the later consequence benefits a group while the immediate one favors the individual, I have called it ethical self-control. My work treats these as two descriptions of the same learned pattern of behavior rather than as two separate phenomena, and a guiding aim of my program is to map the relationship between them, especially how the selection of cultural practices facilitates and hinders their learning, maintenance, and transmission.
This framing organizes work that might otherwise look scattered. Conceptually, I have used cultural selection, metacontingency, and macrocontingency to analyze social phenomena, from the production of Açaí berries in the Amazon and its consequences for food security to systemic inequity. Experimentally, my students and I have studied ethical self-control in arrangements of conflicting contingencies, such as common-pool and prisoners’ dilemma games, examining how rules, the depletion of shared resources, and others' choices affect cooperative patterns. The same concepts have guided community-engaged work on restorative justice, community gardens, and the effects of cultural practices on clinical issues.
The individual side of this continuum is where the pattern connects to pressing mental health problems. Steep discounting of delayed consequences is a feature of the choices described in patterns like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and substance use. The cultural side explores the development of group-level interventions, including public policies, to increase the frequency of self-controlled choices. My near-term aim is to study experimentally how the individual and group versions of this choice relate, bringing the cultural-selection tradition into contact with the behavioral-economic study of choice.
My output since joining UNT in 2024 supports this direction: eight peer-reviewed pieces already in print, two accepted or under review, and per-publication quality indicators documented in my CV, including Brazil’s Qualis CAPES rating, with A1 as the top tier. I serve as associate editor for three journals and on the editorial board of a fourth. I contribute to the Think Tank in Culturo-Behavior Science and the Brazilian SIG of Behavior research on theory and philosophy. My longer aim is to show that a behavioral science can address problems of mental health, social conflict, and social justice with conceptual and ethical seriousness.
This is where my external funding search is targeted, expanding the basic and applied programs to further our understanding of the interplay of individual and social behavior. I am preparing an NIH proposal that addresses choice in ADHD, as the individual expression of the pattern my program already studies, and an NSF proposal on the basic processes of cooperation and resource use in common-pool dilemmas. The applied foundation laid the path to growing a program where I strive to find ways behavior scientists may use to improve the life of their clients, peers, and communities.
