The Shape of Relations to Come: Multidimensional Analyses of Complex Human Behavior

Abstract

Science, understood to be the behavior of scientists, falls within the purview of behavior analysis. All scientists use scientific instruments to study a natural phenomenon, and for the behavior analyst, perhaps no tool is more important than the graph used to show changes in level, trend, and variability, and upon which behavior analysts make data-based decisions. Modern behaviorism as we know it dates back to the development of the cumulative recorder first developed in the 1930s. Though revolutionary to the science of behavior, two-dimensional graphs may be limited in application for analyzing complex human behavior. In the current article, we conceptualize verbal behavior as a multidimensional field of environmental relations, and introduce the use of multi-axial radar charts for its visual and quantitative analysis. From there, we survey the use of radar charts toward advancing a behavior-analytic understanding of human language and cognition. We demonstrate the use of radar charts for calculating simple shape descriptors as a quantitative measure of dynamic interactants, and show how they can be used to measure change over time.