Propositional control is Don Dulany’s theory that human behavior is guided by conscious propositions: beliefs about what a situation means, expectations about what will happen, and intentions about how to act. Rather than treating behavior as a direct product of reward and punishment, Dulany argued that people interpret reinforcement. We ask, often quite quickly, What does this signal mean? What response is expected? Do I want to comply?

This theory was a quiet but important turning point in psychology. In the mid-twentieth century, behaviorism dominated much of academic psychology. Many researchers focused on observable stimulus-response patterns and avoided talk of inner thought, awareness, or choice. Dulany’s work on verbal conditioning challenged this narrow view. His experiments suggested that people changed their verbal behavior when they became aware of the relation between their responses and reinforcement, and when they intended to follow that relation (Dulany, 1961).

In accessible terms, propositional control says that reinforcement does not simply press a behavioral button. It becomes effective only after the mind gives it meaning. We form a behavioral hypothesis, weigh our motivation to comply, and then act in line with an intention. This idea helped move psychology toward the cognitive models that now shape research on attitudes, social influence, judgment, and deliberate behavior (Dulany, 1968; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1970).

Propositional Control and the Cognitive Revolution

Verbal Conditioning, Awareness, and Propositional Control

Don Dulany’s early research entered psychology during an unsettled debate over whether human behavior could be conditioned without conscious awareness. Verbal-conditioning experiments seemed to offer compelling evidence for the behaviorist position. Participants were asked to produce words, construct sentences, or tell brief stories while an experimenter selectively responded to particular categories of speech. A quiet “Mm-hmm,” a flash of light, or another apparently reinforcing signal might follow plural nouns, emotional expressions, or certain grammatical forms. When the targeted responses increased, researchers could describe the change as operant conditioning: reinforcement had strengthened a class of verbal behavior.

Dulany questioned whether this explanation captured what participants were actually doing. The verbal task was often vague, artificial, and puzzling. Participants knew they were taking part in an experiment, but they were not told exactly what the researcher was studying. Under these conditions, a nod, light, buzzer, or murmur could become more than a reinforcing event. It could function as information—a clue that helped the participant infer the hidden rule of the situation. Dulany observed that people naturally tried to make sense of these otherwise ambiguous tasks, sometimes treating even a seemingly arbitrary signal as evidence about what the experimenter wanted (Dulany, 1961).

This distinction was crucial. A stimulus may follow a response, but temporal sequence alone does not establish that the stimulus mechanically strengthened the response. A participant might instead form a behavioral hypothesis: “The experimenter responds when I use plural nouns,” or “They appear to approve of emotionally expressive words.” That hypothesis may then produce a corresponding self-instructional set—what Dulany also called an intention—to select more responses from the inferred category. The resulting increase in behavior can resemble operant conditioning from the outside while being organized internally through interpretation and intention.

Dulany’s Experiments on Hypotheses and Intentions

Dulany tested this possibility in his 1961 experiments by reinforcing plural nouns with an approving vocal response and then questioning participants about what they believed they were expected to do. Those who reported hypotheses related to the reinforced response class were also the ones most likely to increase their use of plural nouns. Dulany did not stop with retrospective reports. In a second experiment, he instructed participants to use the response categories identified in the first study. These instructions produced the predicted patterns of behavior, supporting the proposed sequence from hypothesis to intention to response selection (Dulany, 1961).

This was not merely a dispute over whether participants could correctly describe the experiment afterward. Dulany was proposing a different mechanism of control. In his account, the person detects or constructs a relation between behavior and consequence, represents that relation as a hypothesis, and intentionally acts upon it. He used the term verbal control to describe this system of behavioral hypotheses and self- or socially generated instructions. Importantly, he did not insist that every mediating process must take the form of a complete inner sentence. He allowed that hypotheses and intentions might be verbal, partly verbal, or cognitively represented in a form that remained capable of being expressed when the task invited reflection.

Dulany’s later formulation broadened this argument into the theory of propositional control. Reinforcing events could convey both affective value and information. Praise may feel pleasant, but it also communicates that a response has been noticed, evaluated, and perhaps desired. A buzzer may have little intrinsic reward value, yet still influence behavior if the participant interprets it as confirmation that a hidden rule has been discovered. The psychologically active element is therefore not merely the external stimulus. It is the proposition the person forms about what the stimulus signifies and the intention that follows from that interpretation (Dulany, 1968).

The Problem of Measuring Conscious Awareness

Dulany’s findings strengthened the case for conscious mediation, but they also raised a difficult methodological question: how reliably can researchers determine what participants knew while their behavior was changing? Frederick Kanfer’s broader review of verbal-conditioning research highlighted this problem. Awareness was usually measured through questions asked during or after the experiment, and verbal reports are imperfect windows into mental activity. The questions themselves may alert participants to the hidden contingency, encourage further problem solving, or change their later responses. Reports may also follow rather than precede the behavioral change. Some participants may possess relevant knowledge but lack the language, confidence, or opportunity to express it clearly. Others may offer a plausible explanation only after their behavior has already changed (Kanfer, 1968).

Kanfer therefore warned against treating a participant’s verbal account as if it were identical to the process it described. Reports are themselves behaviors shaped by the social setting, the wording of questions, the participant’s willingness to cooperate, and the demand to provide an intelligible answer. Yet Kanfer did not dismiss the cognitive evidence. He acknowledged that information about the response-reinforcement relation could facilitate learning. The unresolved issue was whether later reports proved that conscious knowledge had mediated the behavior at the moment it occurred (Kanfer, 1968).

This methodological difficulty sharpened rather than erased Dulany’s contribution. His point was not that every verbal report should be accepted as a transparent record of consciousness. It was that psychologists could not infer unconscious conditioning simply because they had failed to measure participants’ hypotheses adequately. The relevant comparison was no longer merely between reinforced and nonreinforced responses. Researchers also had to examine what participants believed, when that belief emerged, whether it predicted behavior, and whether experimentally supplied instructions produced the same response pattern.

Seen in this light, verbal conditioning became a problem of meaning as much as reinforcement. The participant was not an empty surface upon which an experimenter strengthened isolated words. The participant was an observer of the experiment, an interpreter of social feedback, and a problem solver attempting to discover what counted as a successful response. Dulany’s work helped reveal that much apparently conditioned human behavior may be better understood as behavior guided by consciously accessible rules, hypotheses, and intentions.

What Dulany Meant by Propositional Control

The word proposition has a more precise meaning than simply “a thought.” A proposition represents a meaningful relationship that can be accepted, rejected, evaluated, or acted upon. It may connect a behavior with an expected consequence, identify what another person appears to want, or express an intention about what to do next. Dulany used propositional control to describe behavior governed by these consciously accessible representations rather than by reinforcement operating as a purely mechanical force.

This marked an important departure from traditional stimulus-response explanations. In a strict associative account, a consequence follows a response and gradually strengthens it. Dulany argued that human beings frequently do more than register this sequence. They interpret it. The individual forms a rule about what occurred, decides whether the outcome has value, and develops an intention to act accordingly (Dulany, 1968).

The Building Blocks of Propositional Control

Dulany distinguished several kinds of propositions within this process. A hypothesis about the distribution of reinforcement represents which responses appear to produce a consequence: When I use this kind of word, the experimenter responds. A hypothesis about the significance of reinforcement interprets what that consequence means: That response signals that I did what I was expected to do. A behavioral hypothesis identifies the relevant demand or rule: This is what I am supposed to do. Finally, a behavioral intention represents the action the individual is trying to perform.

Dulany captured these differences through the characteristic language of the propositions themselves. A behavioral hypothesis predicates what one is “supposed to” do, whereas an intention takes the form of “try to” (Dulany, 1968). This distinction matters because recognizing an expectation is not the same as deciding to follow it. A person may understand perfectly well what behavior is being encouraged and still remain indifferent, resist, or act against it.

Motivation therefore occupies a central place in propositional control. The person does not ask only, What behavior produces this consequence? The person also evaluates the consequence: Is it pleasant or unpleasant? Does it matter to me? Do I want to satisfy this expectation? Dulany called this motivation to comply. When a behavioral hypothesis and motivation to comply come together, they contribute to a behavioral intention. If the person neither understands the expectation nor cares about it, intention should remain weak or neutral (Dulany, 1968).

Consider a participant who hears an approving murmur after producing emotional words. Several psychological relations may be represented:

• The murmur follows emotional words.
• The murmur means the experimenter approves of those words.
• I am supposed to use more emotional words.
• I want to perform the task correctly.
• I will try to use more emotional words.

The final response is not caused by any one proposition in isolation. It emerges from a network of represented relationships involving contingency, meaning, value, expectation, and intention. Reinforcement supplies information, but that information gains control only through the way the individual understands and evaluates it.

Propositions Guide Behavior—but Do Not Fully Determine It

This also clarifies why Dulany did not equate propositional control with passive awareness. Merely noticing a contingency does not guarantee that behavior will change. Awareness becomes behaviorally important when it enters an operative rule—especially an intention capable of directing response selection. Dulany summarized this relationship plainly: “The response tried is the response used” (Dulany, 1968). Under ordinary conditions, people tend to perform the action they intentionally attempt, although prior habits may also contribute independently to what they ultimately do.

That qualification is important. Dulany did not argue that all behavior is consciously intended. His model explicitly retained a role for habit. A response initially performed voluntarily may become increasingly automatic through repeated execution and later occur with less direct dependence on present intention. Ajzen and Fishbein preserved this feature when explaining that Dulany’s model allowed overt behavior to be influenced by both behavioral intention and habit (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1970). Propositional control was therefore not a denial of automatic behavior. It was an account of how conscious rules and intentions initiate, organize, and sometimes gradually establish patterns that may later become habitual.

Nor did Dulany define propositions as little sentences permanently running through the mind. His theory treated constructs such as behavioral hypotheses and intentions as parts of a larger theoretical network. Their meaning came from their relationships to verbal reports, experimental instructions, reinforcement patterns, intentions, and observable response selection. Dulany stressed that confidence in a conscious, volitional process depends on converging evidence across these relationships rather than on any single introspective report (Dulany, 1968).

Propositional control is therefore best understood as a theory of consciously mediated rule-governed action. People represent what outcomes follow from behavior, interpret what those outcomes signify, evaluate whether they matter, infer what they are expected to do, and form intentions that guide action. These propositions need not be perfectly accurate, rational, or fully articulated. They must only be sufficiently accessible and organized to exert control over behavior.

This makes Dulany’s theory more subtle than the claim that “people think before they act.” His deeper argument was that much complex human behavior is governed by structured meanings. We act not merely because something followed our behavior, but because we form a proposition about what followed, why it mattered, what was expected, and what we intend to do next.

How Propositional Control Works

Propositional control is not a single moment of conscious choice. It is a sequence through which environmental events become interpreted, evaluated, and translated into intention. A consequence may draw attention to a pattern, but it does not determine behavior by itself. The person must recognize a relationship, form a rule about what that relationship means, care about the expected consequence, and develop an intention to act.

Dulany’s theory is more intricate than a simple progression from reward to response. He distinguished between what people believe reinforcement follows, what they think the reinforcement signifies, what they believe they are expected to do, and what they actually intend to try. These processes are related, but they are not interchangeable. A person may detect a pattern without understanding its social meaning, understand an expectation without wanting to follow it, or form an intention that competes with an established habit.

Awareness of the Contingency

The process begins when a person notices a possible relationship between behavior and consequence. In Dulany’s terminology, this involves a hypothesis about the distribution of reinforcement: a belief about which response is followed by which event. The person may recognize, for example, that an experimenter says “Mm-hmm” after plural nouns or that a supervisor offers praise after a particular kind of workplace behavior.

This awareness is more than exposure to repeated pairings. It requires the person to detect or construct a pattern:

When I perform this response, that consequence tends to follow.

The perceived relationship may be accurate, incomplete, or mistaken. What matters initially is that the person has identified a contingency that can become psychologically meaningful. Dulany treated this distributional hypothesis as a particularly important form of awareness because other factors lose much of their capacity to guide intention when the person perceives no relationship between the response and the consequence (Dulany, 1968).

Awareness, however, does not yet tell the person what the consequence means. A light, murmur, smile, point, or financial reward may be noticed without being understood as approval, correction, instruction, or encouragement. Recognizing the pattern creates the possibility of propositional control; it does not complete the process.

Forming a Behavioral Hypothesis

Once a possible contingency has been noticed, the person interprets its significance. Dulany distinguished between knowing what reinforcement follows and deciding what one is supposed to do. The resulting behavioral hypothesis is a rule about the demand embedded in the situation:

This is the response the experimenter wants.

This is how I am expected to behave.

If I want to perform the task correctly, I should do more of this.

The behavioral hypothesis converts an observed pattern into an actionable interpretation. Environmental feedback is no longer merely an event following behavior. It has become evidence about the structure of the task and the expectations governing it.

This step also shows why reinforcement can influence different people in different ways. One person may interpret praise as useful confirmation. Another may see it as manipulation. A third may recognize the contingency but misunderstand which feature of the behavior is being rewarded. The same external event can therefore produce different behavioral hypotheses.

Dulany did not treat participants’ reports as unquestionable records of consciousness. Instead, he asked whether reported hypotheses behaved as theoretical constructs should: whether they were systematically related to instructions, intentions, and response selection. In his early verbal-conditioning research, the relevant reports predicted which response classes participants selected, and instructions designed to induce similar self-instructional sets produced comparable behavioral patterns (Dulany, 1961).

Motivation to Comply

Understanding an expectation is not the same as accepting it. A person may know precisely what another person wants and still choose not to cooperate. Dulany therefore included motivation to comply as a separate element of propositional control.

Motivation to comply reflects the value the person places on fulfilling the perceived expectation. The individual may ask:

Do I care whether I perform correctly?

Do I value this person’s approval?

Is the consequence desirable enough to influence me?

Would compliance threaten my autonomy or self-respect?

A behavioral hypothesis may be strong while motivation to comply is weak. An employee may understand that management rewards visible enthusiasm but view the expectation as artificial. A teenager may recognize that a parent wants obedience yet resist precisely because the demand feels controlling. Awareness may even produce deliberate opposition rather than compliance.

Dulany proposed that behavioral hypotheses and motivation to comply combine in shaping intention. When a person strongly believes that a behavior is expected and strongly wants to meet that expectation, intention should move in the corresponding direction. When the person does not know what is expected or does not care, intention tends toward neutrality. As Dulany put it, the person who “doesn’t know or doesn’t care” should not develop a strong intention merely because reinforcement is present (Dulany, 1968).

This is one of the theory’s most important departures from mechanical learning models. The same consequence can motivate compliance, indifference, avoidance, or resistance depending on the meaning and value assigned to it.

Behavioral Intention

The final mediating stage is behavioral intention: what the person is trying to do. The process moves from noticing that a consequence follows a response, to inferring what behavior is expected, to evaluating whether compliance matters, and finally to forming an operative intention:

I will try to perform this response.

For Dulany, intention was not merely another belief about behavior. It was the proposition most directly involved in response selection. A behavioral hypothesis states what one is “supposed to” do; an intention states what one will “try to” do. The distinction preserves the gap between social expectation and personal agency.

Dulany’s experiments supported the central role of intention. In one study, reported behavioral intentions accounted for much more variation in final performance than either the value of the reinforcement or the external reinforcement manipulation. When behavioral intention was statistically controlled, the associations between performance and other manipulations largely disappeared. Dulany summarized the result by arguing that, when habit and instinct were held constant or were irrelevant, the pathways to response selection passed through volition.

Ajzen and Fishbein later carried this principle into social psychology. In their adaptation of propositional control, attitudes toward an act and beliefs about social expectations predicted behavioral intention, which in turn mediated overt behavior. Their studies also showed that the relative influence of attitudes and social norms varied with the motivational context. Under cooperative conditions, perceived norms carried greater weight; under competition, personal attitudes toward the act became relatively more important (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1970).

Intention is therefore the point at which represented meanings become organized action. It does not guarantee behavior under every circumstance. Skills may be lacking, opportunities may disappear, emotions may overwhelm deliberation, and established habits may exert an independent influence. Dulany’s model allowed a voluntarily repeated response to become increasingly automatic and less dependent on present intention. Yet for novel, deliberate, and socially interpreted behavior, intention serves as the theory’s most immediate bridge between cognition and action.

The distinctions among these stages become clearer when the complete process is viewed side by side.

The table illustrates that propositional control is not simply cognition inserted between stimulus and response. Each stage performs a distinct function: awareness detects a possible pattern, the behavioral hypothesis interprets its meaning, motivation gives that interpretation personal weight, and intention organizes action. Reinforcement therefore influences behavior through the person’s represented understanding of the situation rather than through consequence alone.

The Prismatic Filter: How Conscious Interpretation Mediates Reinforcement

In a strict behaviorist account, human action can appear almost direct: an environmental reward meets a response, and the response becomes more likely. Dulany’s model adds the missing interior drama. The reward does not travel unchanged from the outside world into action. It passes through conscious awareness.

A useful metaphor is a prismatic optical filter. When a beam of reinforcement reaches the person, it does not simply determine behavior by contact. It enters the prism of awareness, where the mind refracts it into meaning: What does this reward mean? What pattern is being encouraged? What is the experimenter, teacher, partner, employer, or group asking of me?

The behavior that appears on the other side is therefore not a plain reflection of the original input. It is a redirected path, colored by interpretation, expectation, and intention. The same reward may encourage one person, embarrass another, irritate a third, and leave a fourth unmoved. The difference lies in the prism: the person’s beliefs, motives, social concerns, and conscious reading of the situation.

This metaphor also helps explain why rewards sometimes fail. Praise may not increase effort if the person interprets it as manipulation. A bonus may not strengthen commitment if the person experiences it as too small, unfair, or controlling. Social approval may be powerful when belonging is at stake, yet weak when the person rejects the group’s standards. Reinforcement is not empty, but it is not sovereign. It must be interpreted.

Propositional Control in Everyday Life

Dulany developed propositional control through laboratory studies, but the theory describes a familiar feature of everyday life: people rarely respond to feedback in a uniform way. A consequence matters only after it has been interpreted. Praise, criticism, approval, silence, money, status, and social acceptance can each guide behavior, but their influence depends on what the person believes they mean.

A student may study harder after a teacher’s praise because the praise is understood as evidence of competence. Another student may hear the same praise as pressure to maintain an impossible standard. An employee may repeat a behavior after receiving recognition, while a coworker dismisses the same recognition as superficial or manipulative. A child may respond strongly to parental approval because it signals closeness and security, whereas another may resist because approval feels conditional or controlling.

These differences are not random. Each person is acting from propositions about the situation:

• This feedback means I am doing well.
• This person’s approval matters to me.
• If I continue, I will gain something I value.
• If I comply, I may lose autonomy.
• If I fail, I may disappoint someone important.

The external event may be identical, yet the behavior changes because the represented meaning changes.

Propositional control is especially useful for understanding why apparently attractive incentives sometimes fail. A bonus may not increase commitment if it is seen as unfair. Praise may reduce motivation if it feels patronizing. Public recognition may encourage one person and embarrass another. A rule may produce compliance when it is viewed as legitimate, but resistance when it is experienced as coercive.

The theory also helps explain why stronger rewards or punishments do not always produce lasting change. When people continue an unwanted behavior, the problem may not be a lack of consequences. The behavior may still serve an expected purpose. Avoidance may promise relief. Perfectionism may promise protection from criticism. Anger may promise control. Silence may promise safety. Unless these underlying propositions are understood, changing the external incentive may leave the internal logic of the behavior intact.

Case Example: Praise, Achievement, and Fear of Failure

Consider a student who receives enthusiastic praise whenever an assignment is exceptional. At first, the feedback appears beneficial. The student works harder, earns higher marks, and becomes known as a strong performer.

Over time, however, the student may form a more rigid proposition:

I receive approval when my work is flawless.

That proposition may gradually acquire a deeper meaning:

If my work is not exceptional, I may lose respect or disappoint people.

The student’s motivation is no longer limited to learning or completing the assignment. Achievement becomes tied to acceptance, security, and self-worth. The resulting intention may be:

I must avoid submitting anything that might reveal weakness.

The resulting pattern resembles fear of failure, in which avoiding possible inadequacy becomes more important than pursuing growth

This intention can still produce excellent work, but it may also lead to procrastination, excessive checking, anxiety, or avoidance of difficult tasks. The original praise did not directly cause these outcomes. Its influence depended on the proposition the student formed about what the praise signified.

Now imagine that a teacher offers the same student a different kind of feedback:

“This is thoughtful work. The unfinished parts show where your understanding can grow.”

The external event remains praise, but the meaning changes. The student may begin to form a more flexible proposition:

My effort and learning are valued even when the result is imperfect.

That new interpretation can support a different intention:

I can attempt difficult work without needing to guarantee success.

The case illustrates both the usefulness and the risk of propositional control. Meaning can organize persistence, but it can also create rigid patterns when approval, safety, or identity become attached to narrow conditions.

Dulany’s framework therefore invites a different question when behavior seems puzzling. Instead of asking only, What reward is maintaining this? or What punishment would stop it? we can ask:

What does the person believe this behavior accomplishes?

That question shifts attention from external pressure to the person’s internal model of the situation. It helps explain why people may knowingly resist incentives, repeat costly habits, or pursue goals that appear irrational from the outside. Their actions may still make sense within the propositions they are using.

This does not mean that every daily choice is slow or consciously deliberated. Many propositions become familiar enough to guide behavior quickly. A person may not pause to formulate, If I remain quiet, I will avoid rejection, yet that relationship may still be accessible when examined. Propositional control is most visible when people reflect on the rules they have learned to live by—and discover that some remain useful while others no longer fit the present.

How Propositional Control Shaped Modern Psychology

Dulany developed propositional control to explain how people interpret reinforcement and form intentions in experimental settings. His primary concern was not psychotherapy, personality, or emotion. Even so, his work expressed a principle that became increasingly important across cognitive psychology: environmental events do not influence everyone in the same way. Their effects depend partly on what the person believes they signify (Dulany, 1968).

The comparison with Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, and Richard Lazarus should not be mistaken for a direct historical lineage. They developed their theories from different traditions and addressed different psychological problems. Their work nevertheless shares a broad cognitive premise with Dulany: between an event and a person’s response lies an interpretation (Dulany, 1968; Ellis & Dryden, 1987; Lazarus, 1991; Wenzel et al., 2016).

From Behavioral Rules to Beliefs and Appraisals

In Dulany’s model, a person forms propositions about contingencies and expectations: If I respond this way, this outcome follows; this is what I am expected to do; this consequence matters to me. Later cognitive theories carried the study of interpreted meaning beyond laboratory reinforcement into emotion, psychotherapy, coping, and enduring beliefs about the self and world (Dulany, 1968).

Albert Ellis organized this general principle through the ABC framework of rational-emotive therapy. An activating event at A contributes to an emotional or behavioral consequence at C, but the person’s beliefs at B help determine what that event becomes psychologically. Ellis and Windy Dryden grounded this position in the Stoic observation that people are disturbed not simply by events but by their view of events. They also described human beings as forming hypotheses about the world that should be examined rather than accepted as inherently true (Ellis & Dryden, 1987).

Ellis was especially concerned with rigid and absolutistic beliefs. A setback may produce disappointment when interpreted as undesirable, but it can generate more severe distress when joined to a demand such as I must succeed, others must treat me fairly, or conditions must be easier than they are. In this respect, Ellis’s model resembles propositional control: the external event becomes psychologically powerful through an evaluative proposition. Ellis, however, applied this principle to emotional disturbance and therapeutic change rather than to verbal conditioning (Ellis & Dryden, 1987).

Aaron Beck’s cognitive model developed a more layered account of represented meaning. Immediate responses may be shaped by situation-specific automatic thoughts, while those thoughts can reflect broader assumptions and underlying beliefs. A passing interpretation such as I have failed may therefore express a deeper rule such as My worth depends on performing well. Contemporary CBT preserves this distinction by treating automatic thoughts and enduring beliefs as connected but different levels of cognition (Wenzel et al., 2016).

Dulany’s behavioral hypotheses and Beck’s automatic thoughts are therefore not interchangeable. Dulany emphasized consciously accessible rules about reinforcement, perceived expectations, and intended action. Beck’s model extends further into enduring cognitive schemas that shape interpretation repeatedly across situations. Modern CBT consequently attends both to immediate misappraisals and to the underlying beliefs that help generate them (Craske, 2010; Wenzel et al., 2016).

Richard Lazarus extended the role of interpretation into emotion and coping through cognitive appraisal theory. He described appraisal as the process through which people construe what an encounter implies for their well-being. An event does not possess a fixed emotional meaning independent of the person. Its significance emerges in relation to goals, commitments, vulnerabilities, and the person’s understanding of what is at stake (Lazarus, 1991).

Lazarus and Susan Folkman further distinguished an initial appraisal of whether an encounter is harmful, threatening, challenging, beneficial, or irrelevant from an assessment of what resources and coping options are available. This helps explain why two people may encounter the same demand yet respond differently: they may assign it different meanings or judge their capacities to manage it differently (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).

Across these approaches, the vocabulary changes. Dulany described behavioral hypotheses, reinforcement significance, motivation, and intention. Ellis emphasized evaluative beliefs and rigid demands. Beck examined automatic thoughts, assumptions, and deeper beliefs. Lazarus focused on appraisal and relational meaning. These theories should not be collapsed into a single model, nor should they be treated as a direct historical lineage. They nevertheless share a broad cognitive principle: people respond not only to events, but also to what those events appear to imply about safety, competence, belonging, control, identity, and the future.

Cognitive psychology therefore broadened the study of represented meaning beyond consciously stated rules. If I do this, approval will follow may operate as a deliberate expectation, while If I disagree, I will be rejected may arise as a rapid appraisal or the expression of an enduring belief. Dulany showed how interpreted contingencies and intentions could mediate learned behavior; Ellis, Beck, and Lazarus extended the study of meaning into emotion, coping, and persistent patterns of action (Dulany, 1968; Ellis & Dryden, 1987; Lazarus, 1991; Wenzel et al., 2016).

The relationship is therefore conceptual rather than genealogical. Dulany demonstrated how interpreted contingencies and intentions could mediate learned behavior. Ellis, Beck, and Lazarus showed how beliefs and appraisals could also organize emotional experience, coping, and persistent patterns of action. Together, these traditions helped establish one of cognitive psychology’s central premises: understanding behavior requires examining the meanings through which a person encounters the world (Dulany, 1968; Ellis & Dryden, 1987; Lazarus, 1991; Wenzel et al., 2016).

While Ellis, Beck, and Lazarus expanded represented meaning into emotion and psychotherapy, Ajzen and Fishbein carried Dulany’s emphasis on intention more directly into the prediction of social behavior.

From Propositions to the Theory of Reasoned Action

Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen recognized that many everyday behaviors depend not merely on past reinforcement but on what people believe about an action and the consequences they expect it to produce. Their early research proposed that overt behavior is most immediately predicted by behavioral intention. Intention, in turn, is shaped by attitudes toward the behavior, perceived expectations of important others, and the individual’s motivation to comply with those expectations (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1969; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1970).

Fishbein and Ajzen eventually organized these relationships into the Theory of Reasoned Action. The model proposed that deliberate behavior follows a relatively orderly cognitive sequence: people consider likely outcomes, evaluate whether those outcomes are desirable, consider what significant others expect, and form an intention that guides behavior.

The resemblance to Dulany’s model is meaningful without implying that the theories are identical. Dulany described behavioral hypotheses, motivation to comply, and intention within learning situations. Fishbein and Ajzen applied related principles to voting, health behavior, consumer decisions, and interpersonal conduct. In both accounts, behavior is organized through represented beliefs and intentions rather than being treated as a direct reaction to environmental consequences (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980).

The Theory of Planned Behavior

Ajzen later recognized that people may intend to act yet remain unable to carry out their intentions because of limited opportunity, resources, skill, or perceived ability. He addressed this limitation by adding perceived behavioral control, creating the Theory of Planned Behavior.

This extension complements rather than replaces Dulany’s emphasis on conscious intention. People may value an action and intend to perform it while still doubting that they possess the capacity or opportunity to succeed. The Theory of Planned Behavior therefore placed intention within a wider account of attitudes, social expectations, and perceived control (Ajzen, 1991).

From cognitive therapy to appraisal theory and models of social behavior, later psychologists expanded the study of represented meaning in different directions. These theories did not simply reproduce Dulany’s account, nor should they be presented as direct descendants of it. They nevertheless reinforced a principle that propositional control helped bring into focus: explaining behavior requires asking not only what happened, but what the person believed it meant.

Can Learning Occur Without Conscious Awareness?

One of the most influential debates in cognitive psychology concerns a deceptively simple question: Can people learn complex patterns without knowing what they have learned? During the 1960s and 1970s, Arthur Reber argued that the answer was yes. His research on implicit learning suggested that people could acquire knowledge of complex grammatical structures without consciously discovering or verbalizing the rules that governed them (Reber, 1967).

Reber’s experiments typically exposed participants to letter strings generated by a finite-state grammar. Rather than asking participants to discover the rules explicitly, the studies encouraged passive observation or memorization. Later, participants were asked to judge whether entirely new letter strings were grammatical or ungrammatical. Remarkably, they performed significantly better than chance, even though many claimed they could not explain why they made their judgments. Reber interpreted these findings as evidence for implicit learning—the unconscious abstraction of structural regularities that could guide later decisions without conscious access to the underlying rules (Reber, 1967)

Dulany’s Response to Implicit Learning

Dulany did not dispute Reber’s central empirical finding. Participants really could classify novel grammatical strings more accurately than chance. The disagreement concerned how they accomplished this performance.

Rather than proposing that people had acquired an unconscious representation of the formal grammar, Dulany, Richard Carlson, and Gerald Dewey suggested that participants developed what they called informal grammars: personally constructed sets of conscious rules that captured parts of the regularities present in the letter strings. These rules were often incomplete, imperfect, and different from one participant to another, yet they were sufficient to guide surprisingly accurate judgments (Dulany et al., 1984).

This distinction was subtle but important. Reber’s explanation required an abstract grammatical representation operating outside conscious awareness. Dulany argued that the same behavior could be explained more parsimoniously by consciously accessible rules of limited scope. Participants did not need to recover the entire finite-state grammar. They only needed to discover enough useful regularities to distinguish many grammatical strings from ungrammatical ones (Dulany et al., 1984).

Conscious Rules, Partial Awareness, and Reportability

The debate was therefore not simply conscious versus unconscious. Dulany proposed a more nuanced possibility: knowledge may be partially conscious.

Participants often could not describe an entire grammar, yet many could report fragments of knowledge that reliably predicted their judgments. They might notice that certain letter combinations frequently occurred together or that particular sequences “looked wrong.” These consciously reportable rules were rarely complete, but they nevertheless accounted for much of the participants’ successful performance. Rather than possessing a perfect formal grammar, each participant appeared to construct a personal working grammar based on consciously represented regularities (Dulany et al., 1984).

This distinction also clarified an important methodological issue. Failure to produce a complete verbal explanation does not necessarily demonstrate unconscious learning. This distinction also touches on metacognition—what people know about their own knowledge and how accurately they can report it. People may possess knowledge that is incomplete, difficult to articulate, or only gradually accessible during questioning. Dulany cautioned against treating limited reportability as evidence that the knowledge itself was entirely unconscious. Instead, researchers should examine how much conscious knowledge participants possess, how accurate that knowledge is, and whether it predicts their judgments  (Dulany et al., 1984).

The debate remains relevant today because it illustrates a recurring theme throughout Dulany’s work. Whether studying verbal conditioning or artificial grammars, he consistently argued that psychologists should not underestimate the role of consciously accessible meaning. Human learning may not always be fully explicit, but neither should unconscious processes be assumed simply because conscious knowledge is incomplete. Between complete awareness and complete unconsciousness lies a broad territory of partial understanding, tentative rules, and progressively refined interpretations—a position that fits naturally with Dulany’s broader theory of propositional control (Dulany, 1968; Dulany et al., 1984).

Limits of Propositional Control

Don Dulany’s theory represented an important advance over purely behaviorist explanations by showing that consciously represented meanings help organize intentional behavior. Yet no single theory captures the full complexity of human action. Since Dulany first proposed propositional control, research in cognitive science, affective neuroscience, and embodied cognition has shown that many influences on behavior operate alongside consciously accessible beliefs and intentions rather than through them alone (Dulany, 1968).

Emotion Sometimes Precedes Deliberation

Propositional control assumes that consciously represented meanings guide much voluntary behavior. Emotional reactions, however, are often initiated before deliberate reflection is complete. A sudden threat may trigger fear, physiological arousal, and defensive preparation before a person has consciously formulated a behavioral hypothesis. Subsequent thought may reinterpret or regulate the emotion, but the initial response frequently emerges rapidly and automatically (LeDoux, 1996).

Richard Lazarus acknowledged this interaction by arguing that emotion depends on appraisal rather than on objective events alone. Yet many appraisals occur extremely quickly and outside deliberate reasoning. Emotion and cognition therefore cooperate rather than operate in strict sequence (Lazarus, 1991).

Habits Can Bypass Deliberate Intention

Dulany himself never claimed that all behavior remains under continuous conscious control. Repeated actions often become increasingly habitual. Once established, habits require less active deliberation and may be initiated by familiar situations rather than by newly formed intentions (Dulany, 1968).

Modern research on automaticity has expanded this idea. Well-practiced behaviors such as driving familiar routes, typing, or everyday social routines frequently unfold with minimal conscious monitoring. Deliberate propositions remain capable of modifying these behaviors, but they do not necessarily generate each action from the beginning (Dulany, 1968; LeDoux, 2002).

Trauma and Learned Survival Strategies

Traumatic experiences illustrate another important limitation. People who have repeatedly encountered danger may respond to certain cues long before consciously evaluating the present situation. Defensive reactions such as freezing, avoidance, hypervigilance, or emotional numbing often reflect learned survival strategies rather than deliberate decisions. From a polyvagal perspective, some of these reactions can also be understood as shifts in autonomic state organized around safety and threat.

These reactions are not necessarily irrational. They may have developed because they once protected the individual. However, their persistence shows that behavior can remain strongly influenced by emotional learning even when conscious beliefs have changed. Therapy frequently involves bringing these previously unexamined patterns into awareness so they can gradually be revised rather than assuming that insight alone immediately changes behavior (Herman, 1992; Porges, 2009).

Embodied Cognition and Somatic Signals

Research on embodied cognition has also broadened the picture of human decision making. Thinking is not confined to abstract propositions alone. Bodily states—including posture, physiological arousal, facial expression, and interoceptive sensations—can influence perception, judgment, and choice.

Antonio Damasio argued that reasoning is guided partly by somatic markers: bodily signals associated with previous emotional experience. Rather than competing with cognition, these bodily responses help narrow choices and guide adaptive decision making. Decisions therefore emerge from ongoing interactions among conscious reasoning, emotion, memory, and bodily experience rather than from propositions alone (Damasio, 1998).

Fast and Slow Thinking: Automatic and Deliberate Processing

Daniel Kahneman offered another perspective by distinguishing two broad modes of cognition. System 1 operates rapidly, automatically, and with little conscious effort, while System 2 is slower, more reflective, and capable of deliberate reasoning.

Although Kahneman’s framework differs substantially from Dulany’s theory, the comparison is illuminating. Propositional control most closely resembles the reflective operations associated with System 2. Many everyday behaviors, however, depend on rapid intuitions, heuristics, and automatic pattern recognition that occur with limited conscious deliberation. Effective behavior often emerges from cooperation between these two modes of processing rather than from either alone (Kahneman, 2011).

Propositions Explain Much—but Not Everything

Propositional control remains an important contribution because it restored conscious meaning to the scientific study of human behavior. Dulany demonstrated that people actively interpret reinforcement, construct hypotheses about situations, and form intentions that organize voluntary action. Modern psychology has largely embraced this insight.

At the same time, contemporary research suggests that conscious propositions operate within a much larger psychological system. Emotion, habit, bodily states, implicit memory, trauma, and automatic pattern recognition all contribute to behavior, sometimes before conscious reflection has fully developed. Rather than replacing Dulany’s theory, these perspectives extend it by showing that intentional reasoning represents one part of a broader architecture of mind.

Seen in this broader context, propositional control is best understood not as a complete theory of human behavior but as one of the foundational explanations of how consciously represented meaning guides deliberate action. It explains a great deal—but it does not explain everything (Damasio, 1998; Dulany, 1968; Kahneman, 2011; Lazarus, 1991).

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

We began by noticing that one compliment can inspire one person, embarrass another, and leave a third unchanged. That simple observation turns out to reveal something profound about human nature. We are not simply shaped by what happens to us. We are shaped by what those events come to mean.

Dulany spent his career demonstrating this principle in carefully controlled experiments. Later psychologists extended it into beliefs, appraisals, schemas, emotions, and decision making. Together they remind us that human behavior is rarely mechanical. Between the world and our actions lies interpretation.

Perhaps that is why psychology remains endlessly fascinating. The same event can produce courage or fear, persistence or surrender, hope or resentment—not because reality changes, but because the mind is always asking, What does this mean? Learning to examine those meanings may be one of the most powerful forms of psychological growth.

If this article sparked your curiosity, the concepts below explore many of the ideas that grew from—or connect with—Dulany’s work.

Associated Concepts

• Cognitive Revolution: The broad movement in psychology that restored scientific attention to mental processes, including memory, language, judgment, expectation, and meaning.
• Behaviorism: A school of psychology that emphasizes observable behavior and learning through environmental consequences. Dulany’s theory challenged behaviorist accounts that minimized awareness.
• Theory of Reasoned Action: Fishbein and Ajzen’s model proposing that behavior is primarily predicted by behavioral intention, which develops from attitudes toward the behavior and perceived social expectations. The theory extends several ideas first articulated in Dulany’s propositional account.
• Theory of Planned Behavior: Ajzen’s extension of the Theory of Reasoned Action that incorporates perceived behavioral control alongside attitudes and subjective norms. It remains one of the most influential models for understanding intentional human behavior.
• Cognitive Appraisal Theory: Richard Lazarus’s theory that emotions arise from a person’s evaluation, or appraisal, of the relationship between events and personal goals. Like propositional control, appraisal theory emphasizes that psychological responses depend on interpreted meaning rather than objective events alone.
• Cognitive Schemas: Organized knowledge structures that influence how people interpret experiences, remember information, and anticipate future events. Beck’s concept of schemas broadened the study of represented meaning from immediate behavioral hypotheses to enduring patterns of belief.
• Automatic Thoughts: Aaron Beck’s term for the rapid interpretations that arise in response to situations. Although distinct from Dulany’s behavioral hypotheses, automatic thoughts illustrate how consciously accessible cognitions continue to influence emotion and behavior throughout cognitive psychology.
• Implicit Learning: The acquisition of knowledge without complete conscious awareness of what has been learned. Dulany’s later research challenged strong versions of implicit learning by arguing that consciously reportable rules often explain more behavior than previously recognized.

References:

Ajzen, Icek (1991). The Theory of Planned Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. DOI: 10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
(Return to Main Text)

Ajzen, Icek; Fishbein, Martin (1969). The Prediction of Behavioral Intentions in a Choice Situation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 5(4), 400–416. DOI: 10.1016/0022-1031(69)90033-X
(Return to Main Text)

Ajzen, Icek; Fishbein, Martin (1970). The Prediction of Behavior from Attitudinal and Normative Variables. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 6(4), 466–487. DOI: 10.1016/0022-1031(70)90057-0
(Return to Main Text)

Ajzen, Icek; Fishbein, Martin (1980). Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior. Prentice-Hall. ISBN: 9780139364433
(Return to Main Text)

Craske, Michelle G. (2010). Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. American Psychological Association. ISBN: 9781433805486
(Return to Main Text)

Damasio, Antonio (1998). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Avon. ISBN: ‎9780380726479
(Return to Main Text)

Dulany, Donelson E. (1961). Hypotheses and Habits in Verbal “Conditioning.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(2), 251–263. DOI: 10.1037/h0040641
(Return to Main Text)

Dulany, Donelson E. (1968). Awareness, Rules, and Propositional Control: A Confrontation with S-R Behavior Theory. In Theodore R. Dixon and David L. Horton (Eds.), Verbal Behavior and General Behavior Theory (pp. 340–387). Prentice-Hall. ISBN: 9780139416415
(Return to Main Text)

Dulany, Donelson E.; Carlson, Richard A.; Dewey, Gerald I. (1984). A Case of Syntactical Learning and Judgment: How Conscious and How Abstract? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113(4), 541–555. DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.113.4.541
(Return to Main Text)

Ellis, Albert; Dryden, Windy (1987). The Practice of Rational-Emotive Therapy. Springer Publishing Company. ISBN: 9780826154705
(Return to Main Text)

Herman, Judith Lewis (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books. ISBN: 9780465087655
(Return to Main Text)

Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 9780374275631
(Return to Main Text)

Kanfer, Frederick H. (1968). Verbal Conditioning: A Review of Its Current Status. In Theodore R. Dixon and David L. Horton (Eds.), Verbal Behavior and General Behavior Theory (pp. 254–290). Prentice-Hall. ISBN: 9780139416415
(Return to Main Text)

Lazarus, Richard (1991). Emotions and adaptation. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780195069945
(Return to Main Text)

Lazarus, Richard S.; Folkman, Susan (1984). ‎Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer Publishing Company. ISBN: 9780826141903
(Return to Main Text)

LeDoux, Joseph (2002). Synaptic self: How our brains become who we are. Viking. ISBN: 9780670030286
(Return to Main Text)

LeDoux, Joseph (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster. ISBN: 9780684803821
(Return to Main Text)

Porges, Steven W. (2009). Reciprocal Influences Between Body and Brain in the Perception and Expression of Affect A Polyvagal Perspective. In Daniel J. Siegel, Marion Solomon, and Diana Fosha (eds.), The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice. ‎W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition. ISBN: 9780393705485
(Return to Main Text)

Reber, Arthur S. (1967). “Implicit Learning of Artificial Grammars.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6(6), 855–863. DOI: 10.1016/S0022-5371(67)80149-X.
(Return to Main Text)

Wenzel, Amy; Dobson, Keith S.; Hays, Pamela A. (2016). Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Techniques and Strategies. American Psychological Association. ISBN: 9781433822377
(Return to Main Text)