Behavioral Domains: Three Perspectives

Abstract

Overview: This chapter links three key constructs discussed in Chapter 1, namely broad goals of the organism, the main types of environments within which these goals operate, and the behavioral domains that they define. We suggest that these goals and types of environments can be categorized and then cross-tabulated to form a heuristic device that helps demonstrate the underlying similarity of different disciplinary approaches to behavioral domains. We illustrate this type of analysis with perspectives on behavioral domains from three different scientific disciplines.