Question: What is the role of rule governed behavior?
Answer: Briefly, a better term is rule-established behavior. Technically it is “supplementary verbal stimulation that makes one pattern of optimizing consequences more likely than another.” The resulting behavior enters into a contingency and is maintained by it. There are a range of variables that account for whether or not one will see a change when contingencies change. Often one has to ask, what has been the history of not doing what has been instructed? In essence not complying is often punished, or has a history of punishment. That makes it appear that the pattern has no consequence. An experimenter demonstrates a pattern, the participant imitates it, and it is maintained even though another pattern would be more profitable. Any such demonstration is a mand. Most mand compliance is maintained by what happens if one does not comply. Mom ask you to pass the salt. You do not, what is likely to happen? Is it really the thank you that maintains passing the salt?
Another factor is response effort. If the patten takes little to perform, the fact that another patten might have a better payoff may make less of a difference. Another is how much variability occurs in the pattern such that it contacts other consequences. Oftentimes recent experiments use pressing a space bar as the manipulandum. In a 1958 experiment Azrin had subjects press a button under a range of conditions on an FI reinforcement schedule. The subjects did not show the FI scallops obtained with rats. Instead of concluding that human verbal behavior interfered with the schedule, that is a self-rule, Azrin tightened the button, making it harder to depress. Sure enough, beautiful FI patterns emerged. The tightening brought the participants into contact with the schedule.
Yet another consideration, what precisely is the actual Ocn-behavior relation. Skinner used an example of an apprentice blacksmith learning to use a bellows to make sure lighted coals are hot enough to do the job. The apprentice is given a little poem, “Up fast, down slow. That’s the way to make the coals glow.” Now change the type of coals used, which requires a different pattern and we may see the apprentice persist with the old pattern. That is because the coals are not the SD, the poem is, the coals are the potentiating variable for reciting the poem. If on the other hand the apprentice had been told to carefully observe the coals and to adjust the up and down pattern of the bellows until the coals are white hot, changes in coals would lead to changes in bellows pattern. In the first case the rule makes the apprentice insensitive to the coal changes, in the second case the rule makes the apprentice more sensitive to coal changes.
As you can see, a range of variables must be considered when talking about so called rule governed behavior. Sadly, this seldom is the case.