This article represents an attempt to reach consensus on terms frequently used by its authors, who share an interest in extending a behaviorist worldview to cultural phenomena. Definitions of metacontingency, macrobehavior, macrocontingency, culturo-behavioral lineage, and cultural cusp were 1 A meeting ultimately resulting in this paper was held as part of a regional conference of the Brazilian Society of Psychology, partially supported by FAPESP (grant# 2015/00662-9) and CAPES (grant# 23038

In this article, I discuss the concepts of private stimuli, covert responses, and private events, emphasizing three aspects: the conditions under which private stimuli may acquire discriminative functions to verbal responses, the conditions of unobservability of covert responses, and the complexity of events or phenomena described as private. I argue that the role of private stimuli in the control of self-descriptive verbal responses is dependent on a relation (correlation or equivalence relation) with public stimuli, and that responses vary along a continuum of observability. These remarks on private stimuli and covert responses are introductory to an examination of the varying complexity of phenomena described as private. I argue that private events is a verbal response emitted under the control of phenomena of different degrees of complexity, and I interpret these phenomena, based on the principle of selection by consequences. I introduce the notion of inclusiveness to suggest that some phenomena related to privacy are less or more complex as they include relations of a phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and cultural origin.

Ethical self-control is conceived of as self-controlled responding under concurrent contingencies involving (conflicts of) consequences for the individual, and consequences for the group. The study assessed the production of ethical self-control repertoires in laboratory microcultures under four different macrocontingency arrangements. The experiment was held with eleven groups of four college students each. They were exposed to a task that required a choice of odd or even rows in an 8x8 matrix. Odd rows produced higher individual reinforcements and delayed aversive consequences for the group, thus being labeled impulsive selfish choices; even rows produced lower reinforcements for the individual participant, but positive delayed consequences for the group, thus labeled ethical selfcontrolled choices. Each group was exposed to only one condition. In the first condition, each participant was exposed alone to the task, producing high rates of impulsive selfish choices. In the second condition, the four participants were exposed to the task together, with access to one another's choices and being allowed to talk. The result was a high rate of ethical self-controlled choices. In the third condition, participants were exposed to the task together, could talk, but had no direct access to each other´s choices, which also resulted in a high rate of ethical self-controlled choices. In the fourth condition, participants were exposed to the task together, but could not talk, and had no access to each other´s choices. Results from this experiment show a higher rate of impulsive selfish choices. The data on the four conditions suggest that the possibility of verbal interaction has more effect on the emergence of ethical selfcontrolled responses than access to each other´s responses.

O artigo discute a proposta behaviorista radical de constituição da Psicologia como ciência do comportamento, destacando três conjuntos de questões: a) a noção de conhecimento com a qual opera, especialmente do ponto de vista da rejeição de princípios do positivismo lógico e adoção de uma concepção instrumental e relacional; b) uma interpretação da Psicologia como campo de saber que articula conteúdos filosóficos, científicos e aplicados e c) o programa de investigação dos fenômenos psicológicos orientado por um recorte externalista e por uma concepção selecionista de causalidade. A elaboração behaviorista radical é contrastada com concepções modernas acerca do homem, salientando-se seu alcance e seu caráter crítico e inovador na Psicologia e na cultura em geral.