World History for Behavior Analysts: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel

Abstract

Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, contains two important messages for behavior analysts, one a statement of theoretical (and perhaps social-political) kinship and the other a suggestion about scientific methodology and subject matter. First, Guns, Germs, and Steel presents an environmentalist explanation of the dramatically different fates of the world’s cultures that is compatible with the views of many behavior analysts, past and present. Second, Diamond’s discussion of the book’s methodology suggests useful new ways for behavior analysts to investigate important but currently neglected forms of individual behavior.