Metacontingencies relate to the contingent relationship between culturants (which includes
interlocking behavioral contingencies and their aggregate products) and cultural
consequences. Among the studies that have recently given empirical support to the concept of
metacontingencies, are those that investigate the concurrence between individual and cultural
contingencies under the notion of ethical self-control. Previous studies have evaluated the
effect of increasing the magnitude of cultural consequence or individual consequence
separately on cultural selection in concurrence contexts. However, no study has manipulated
the magnitude of individual and cultural consequences together. The objective of this study
was to evaluate the effect of the simultaneous manipulation of the magnitude of the individual
and cultural consequences on the selection of culturants and individual responses of the
participants in two microcultures. For this, a task involving a colored matrix of 10 rows
(numbered from 1 to 10) and 10 columns (tagged with letters from "A" to "J") was used. The
data collection was carried out with 2 groups (microcultures) of 3 college students. During the
data collection with each microculture, each participant at a time selected a row from the
matrix and received feedback from the experimenter about his or her choice. Choices on odd
(impulsive) rows produced greater consequences for the individual while choices on even
(self-controlled) rows produced lesser individual consequences, which, however, were
correlated with the possibility of producing cultural consequences, when all 3 participants
chose different color rows. During the experiment, the consequences varied so that as the
magnitude of the individual impulsive consequence increased, the magnitude of the cultural
consequence diminished and vice versa. The results indicated little influence of the variation
of the magnitude of the consequences programmed in the experiment on the acquisition and
maintenance of the culturantes and on the alteration of the pattern of the participants' choices
in favor of the cultural or operant selection. New studies, with changes in the procedure, could
better assess the influence of magnitude of consequences on the behavior of individuals in a
group.
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