Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice

2015, Vol. 15, No. 1, 28 35

2015 American Psychological Association

2372-9414/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0101067

Creativity, Brazilian Jeitinho, and Cultural Practices:

A Behavioral Analysis
Diego Mansano Fernandes
and Claudya Gusikuda Perallis

Fernanda Augustini Pezzato

Instituto de Anlise do Comportamento,
Bauru, Brazil

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So Paulo State University

This theoretical interpretive essay aims to provide a radical behaviorist analysis of

operational and ethical aspects of the Brazilian jeitinho. It can be defined as a
behavioral variability shown and maintained by the Brazilians in a context of historical
material deprivation as well as governmental and social control. The same behavioral
pattern was observed during the first efforts of starting behavior analysis in Brazil. In
the 1960s, Professor Keller and his Brazilian colleagues from the University of So
Paulo made operant conditioning chambers by hand using improvised items (i.e.,
birdcages and lunchboxes). We have located some of those first Brazilian conditioning
chambers and photo-documented them to use as an illustration of the cultural practice
in analysis combining a double interest that integrates a cultural analysis and a
description of the history of the science of behavior in the country.
Keywords: cultural practices, radical behaviorism, jeitinho, behavior analysis

The present paper is a proposal of radical

behaviorist analysis of a phenomenon typical of
Brazilian culture known as jeitinho. We assume that this analysis is important considering
the lack of detailed research of jeitinho within
psychology, despite the national and international belief that this cultural practice identifies
Brazil as a nation (Ferreira et al., 2012). We
also assume that such investigation is possible
and can be considerably enriched by the theoretical and methodological apparatus of behavior analysis, once it emphasizes the description
of the functional aspects of the contingencies of

reinforcement that took place in cultural practices. Finally, our efforts seek to illustrate the
path of a behavioral analysis of culture and
contribute to the improvement of the area.
The Definition of the Terms in Use
The literal translation of the Brazilian jeitinho would be something such as little
waymeaning a specific way of doing
thingsand its pronunciation in Brazilian Portuguese is jay-tcheen-yoo (Ferreira et al., 2012).
It has already been studied by sociologists and
anthropologists, who contributed to the systematization of its definition. In the words of Barbosa (2006),

This article was accepted under the editorial term of

Darlene Crone-Todd.
Diego Mansano Fernandes and Claudya Gusikuda Perallis, So Paulo State University; Fernanda Augustini Pezzato, Instituto de Anlise do Comportamento, Bauru, Brazil.
The authors thank Professor Katsumasa Hoshino for preserving the historic equipment, for allowing the realization
of the photos (see Figure 2), and for having described some
of their history.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Diego Mansano Fernandes, UNESP/FC/
Laboratrio de Aprendizagem, Desenvolvimento e Sade
(LADS), Av. Luiz Edmundo Carrijo Coube, 14-01, Vargem
Limpa. Bauru- So Paulo Brasil CEP 17033-360. E-mail:
mansanofernandes@gmail.com

. . . the jeitinho is always a special way to solve

some problem, difficult or prohibited situation, or a
creative solution for some emergency, whether in the
form of a cheat to some rule or predetermined standard,
whether in the form of conciliation, cleverness, or
ability. Therefore, to be considered a jeitinho, the
situation must involve an unforeseen and adverse event
to the individual goal. The solution must be a special
way efficient and fastto deal with the problem.
It cannot be any strategy. It must produce short-term
goals. . . . It does not matter if the solution is or is not
final, provisional, ideal, legal, or illegal. (p. 41, translated by authors)
28

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A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS OF BRAZILIAN JEITINHO

The reports of wide and historical occurrence

of the jeitinho (Barbosa, 2006; DaMatta, 1973,
1979, 1984) allow for considering it a cultural
practice. A cultural practice is defined as behaviors of individuals that are part of a group that
are transmitted through generationsthese being selected by the environment mainly for their
surviving value for the group inserted in this
culture (Skinner, 1971, 1987). It means that we
can propose a behavioral analysis of the jeitinho
by the description of a behavioral pattern that is
shaped, maintained, and transmitted to members of the same or future generations of the
Brazilian culture. Such analysis is an examination of the third level of selection by consequences; therefore, the present work is understood as a behavioral analysis of culture (Glenn,
2004; Skinner, 1987).
The occurrence of this kind of behavioral
pattern is certainly not a Brazilian exclusivity,
but sociologists and anthropologists consider
the jeitinho closely related to the Brazilian national identity defining Brazil as the land of
the jeitinho (Amado & Brasil, 1991; Barbosa,
2006; DaMatta, 1979, 1984). The high frequency of its occurrence also resulted in the
insertion of the jeitinho into popular vocabulary
(as the Brazilian way of solving problems) and
in international studies about the phenomenon
(Ferreira et al., 2012; Rodrigues et al., 2011).
On an ontogenetic level, we can define the
jeitinho in operational terms as a creative behavioral pattern to solve problems. Thus, to
understand the jeitinho in a behavioral analytic
approach, we must define creativity and describe in which situations this behavioral pattern is selected. Behavior analysts highlight that
creativity would not be considered a noun, but a
verb or adjective, because it is not a specific
kind of behavior but the attribution of a set of
relations that are part of a context in which
behavior occurs (de Souza Barba, 2012; Epstein, Schmidt, & Warfel, 2008; Hunziker,
2006; Hunziker & Moreno, 2000; Neuringer,
2003). In this way, creativity may be defined as
the emission of new and variable behaviors
when environmental conditions abruptly change
and/or a low probability of reinforcement happens (Barbosa, 2003). More specifically, the
novelty and variability may involve behaviors
that have never been emitted by the person and
are being emitted for a different function than
previously associated or when the behavioral

29

distribution in a specific contingency is different than when initially installed (Barbosa,

2003).
The set of relations that are part of a context
in which behavior occurs is the references that
allow for the classification of the behavior as
variable or novel. As described by Hunziker
(2006),
. . . the characteristic of being novel/original/creative is
not a property of the behavior but it is a property
offered by the references within it is being compared
toinside a particular universe. (Hunziker, 2006, p.
157, translated by authors)

On this basis, there are relative and mutant

aspects that allow different conceptions of creativity by different social environments and/or
cultures. It also results in different strategies
adopted by educational agencies to teach the
creative behavioras pointed out by Skinner
(1968) and reported more recently by Alencar
(2007).
Description of Contingencies That May
Have Installed, Maintained, and
Transmitted by the Brazilian Jeitinho
Once we have described the creative behavior
as part of the jeitinho, we can complete its
definition by describing which problems are
historically common in Brazil and how behavioral variability became advantageous or the
only option available to solve them. The analysis of socioeconomic indices and Brazilian human development (Programa das Naes Unidas para o Desenvolvimento, 2004) make
evident the historical trajectory of poverty and
social inequality. The income distribution
makes evident the existence of a social elite.
Data from 2012 describe that 87.40% of the
Brazilian wealth is concentrated in 8.13% of
people (middle and upper classes), and 40.81%
of the countrys wealth is owned by a small
group of only 0.21% of the population (upper
class, which retains most of the political control
and media regulation; Brasil, 2014) despite the
recent efforts of the government to reduce this
problem with some income transfer programs
such as Bolsa Famlia.
This condition of social organization entails
several structural problems in various sectors
(i.e., education, health system, public safety)a
reality that makes necessary the development of

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30

FERNANDES, PERALLIS, AND PEZZATO

alternative strategies and varied and persistent

behavioral repertoires of problem-solving. The
universe of behavioral variation and contextual
references of creativity for solving problems
was also enriched by the different cultures that
constitute the Brazilian melting pot (Native
Americans, Portuguese, African Americans,
Japanese, and most of the European citizens that
came to the country in the beginning of the last
century). The adverse circumstances faced by
all of these people also made worth the mixture
(interchanges of knowledge, miscegenation,
and mutual help) and transmission of the functional strategies through persons and generations by imitation (modeling) and especially by
the description of the behavioral pattern useful
for each unforeseen situation highlighting the
role of verbal behavior in transmission and
maintenance of cultural practices in a specific
social environment. In this sense, verbal behavior is essential because it is precisely in the
relation between persons that emerge alternative ways to manipulate the environment, thus
as the specific forms of descriptions of these
relations and their transmission through the
generations of speakers and listeners, the socalled sayings, proverbs, and idioms (Glenn,
1989; Skinner, 1957). As examples, I am a
Brazilian and Brazilians never give up, There
is always a jeitinho for everything, and The
need is the mother of the inventions.
The power of verbal behavior on the control
and transmission of behavioral cultural patterns
was also useful to controlling agencies by the
definition of social rules and laws that made the
jeitinho the only way to solve vital problems for
the main population in Brazil. The anthropologist Holanda (1995) points out that the Brazilian
institutions were built in a coercive and unilateral way, without any conversation between
governments and the governed, but only by the
imposition of laws to attend to the interests of
the political elite. Thus, until now, the social
inequality also reflects the domain of the elite,
using government and laws to control institutional coercive forces (e.g., using the army
against a countrys own population, unlawful
police killing, and the use of torture) over the
poor communities (Human Rights Watch,
2014), making necessary any strategy (jeitinho)
to eliminate abusive taxes and rights violations.
This scenario can be seen as an expression of

the perpetuation of the power of the controllers,

as already alerted by Skinner (1953, 1978).
Other important variables able to maintain
the cultural practice of the jeitinho are the lower
cost of response and immediacy of the reinforcement. This sensibility for immediate reinforcement even when greater amounts of reinforcement can be produced with some waiting
or more efforts can be explained by experiments of delay discounting (Critchfield & Kollins, 2001; Rung & Young, 2015). As an example, there is the case of the entrepreneur who
wants to open a business. Public institutions are
extremely bureaucratic and require a timeconsuming and laborious route for the release of
the documentation authorizing the operation of
the company (high cost of response). As a way
of countercontrol, entrepreneurs usually opt for
informality or pay bribes to public officials to
accelerate the process (lower wait for reinforcement and lower cost of response associated with
social acceptance/absence of social punishment
because everybody does it, which seems to
compensate for the risk of governmental punishment; G1 RS, 2013).
In summary, the socioeconomic and political
contingencies that contribute to the maintenance of varied behavioral patterns of Brazilians are (a) the satisfaction of basic survival
needs (intrinsic reinforcement) associated with
the social transmission of a varied and persistent
pattern of problem-solving (by modeling and
verbal behavior), (b) avoidance of threats or
rights violations arising from aversive conditions (negative reinforcement), and (c) the high
cost of response and the delay of reinforcement
of contingencies arranged by public institutions
or bureaucratic legal requirements.
The Jeitinho and the History of Behavior
Analysis in Brazil
An example of the Brazilian jeitinho of dealing with adversity was the construction of improvised operant conditioning chambers in the
first teaching laboratory of behavior analysis in
Brazil. Professor Fred Keller came to Brazil in
1961 to administer the disciplines of comparative and animal psychology and history of psychology in the newly created course of psychology, invited by Professor Paulo Sawaya (Dean
of the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and
Letters, University of So Paulo; Matos, 1998).

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A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS OF BRAZILIAN JEITINHO

31

Professor Keller had set up a research laboratory with the equipment that Grason-Stadler
brought from the United States, but he and his
Brazilian colleagues and students (Professor
Rodolpho Azzi, Professor Carolina Bori, and
Professor Maria Amlia Matos; the students
Maria Ins Rocha e Silva Selma and Dora Ribeboim Fix; and later Professor Mario A.A. Guidi)
encountered financial inability to import the
equipment from the United States to build a
teaching laboratory (Keller, 1975; Matos,
1998). In this context, they built the equipment
with improvised materials such as birdcages,
brass railings, and lunchboxes. In the words of
Matos (1998),
Rodolpho Azzi had improvised a small teaching laboratory with four or five Skinner boxes, which actually worked very well. He adapted metal plates with a
round hole in the middle to one of the walls of a
birdcage. A metal rod about 30 cm long was passed
through this hole, folded at one end as an umbrella
handle. About 10 cm of the straight end of the rod was
entered by the piercing of the metal plate while the
bent end was outside the cage. When the straight part
of the shaft (the bar) was shifted down, the curved
part was used to move up and struck the metal plate
producing the sound of the drinker. We always used
to work in pairs: the experimenter used to control the
contingencies, record the time and the answers, and
give orders to the drinker. The drinker was the
other member of the pair: with a small tub with water
and a glass pipette, the drinker used to reinforce the
displacements of the bar by inserting the pipette (properly wetted) in the cage, making it available to the rat.
(p. 2, translated by authors)

The equipment described above can be seen

in Figure 1, which was extracted from the publication of Matos (1998). Performing experiments with these first operant conditioning
chambers was only possible with one animal at
a time and with continuous monitoring by the
experimenter. There was no sound generator or
polarity mixer for electric shock or step markers
and so forth. These contingencies determined
that only temporal variables and some basic
schemes were studied in the early laboratory
practices of behavior analysis in Brazil (Matos,
1998).
In the following years, the team built more
operant conditioning chambers already automated, but still improvisedmanufactured with
brass railings, commercial electronic components, and lunchboxes. We located and photographed these conditioning chambers (see Figure 2), nowadays kept as a relic by a former

Figure 1. Carolina M. Bori, Rodolpho Azzi, and Maria

Amelia Matos (from right to left) in front of the first operant
conditioning chamber handmade in Brazil, March 1963.
From Contingncias para a Anlise Comportamental no
Brasil, by M. A. Matos, 1998, Psicologia USP, 9, 89 100.
Copyright 1998 Psicologia USP. Reprinted with permission.

student of psychology at the time, Professor

Katsumasa Hoshino. Professor Hoshino adopted the equipment when it was replaced and
used it for teaching psychopharmacology to students of medicine at So Paulo State University
in Botucatu until the 1990s.
These early prototypes of operant conditioning chambers were the basis for subsequent
projects, which enabled the production of domestic equipment for teaching psychology laboratories supported by funding government
agencies. Thus, from these prototypes, it was
possible to develop undergraduate courses of
psychology and disseminate behavior analysis
in Brazil (Matos, 1998).
An Analysis of the Implications of This
Behavioral Pattern for Individuals and for
the Culture
To discuss the ethical aspects of Brazilian
cultural practice that we are calling jeitinho, is
necessary to describe how radical behaviorism
deals with questions of valuewhat it defines
as good to an individual, group, or culture.
Skinners radical behaviorism proposes a naturalistic perspective, which means that any event
occurs from the interaction between organisms

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32

FERNANDES, PERALLIS, AND PEZZATO

Figure 2. Operant conditioning chambers handmade by the first behavior analysts of Brazil.
The equipment was made of brass grids, and the mechanics were improvised with commercial
electrical components and wires and controlled by buttons set in a lunchbox.

and their environments in terms of natural laws,

without which no plausible analysis can succeed (Skinner, 1987; Zuriff, 2005). In the specific case of behavioral phenomena, psychological, philosophical, and/or scientific issues
emerge from this interaction and must be analyzed as part of it.
Therefore, to speak about value judgments to
Skinner is to speak in terms of interacting organisms and their environments, more specifically in reinforcing consequences of behavior
(Skinner, 1971, 1972, 1987). To the radical
behaviorist point of view, they both refer to
behaviors that occur in relation to its contexts
and its consequencesfrom where we seek empirical evidence for its functional analysis.
Therefore, Skinner (1987) states that a value is
what reinforces our behavior, and a list of values is nothing more than a list of reinforcers;
before that, what is good for someone is what
reinforces their behavior (Leigland, 2005; Skinner, 1987). In addition, what is good for someone being a reinforceris only good in a
given context, and what is good for one culture
may not be good for another, or even for itself
in other circumstances. However, Skinner
(1987) stated that all cultures will eventually be
judged by the survival value of their own practices, no matter if they care for it or not.
Despite the importance of the philosophical
debate about the radical behaviorist point of
view about ethics, there are some problems with
Skinners prescription of survival of the cultures as the criterion for ethics evaluation, as
Dittrich (2011) and Fernandes (2015) point out,
and we are not particularly interested in or committed to it, but rather with the selection by
consequences as an explanation model and the
implications of some of these patterns of cultural
practices to the Brazilian people at large. Therefore,

we will focus on an ethical evaluation from the

second and third levels of selection by consequences from the point of view of the consequences that a cultural practice entails for the
individual and for the culture (Dittrich, 2011),
we emphasize at least two possible sides of the
consequences of the Brazilian jeitinho:
1. The jeitinho can be useful and advantageous in the short term, especially for
those who have their behavior of solving a
problem in the Brazilian way reinforced.
2. The jeitinho may be worth for the development and survival of the members of a
culture, but it may also be deleterious in
the long term for the group as a whole.
In point 1, the advantages are already described in Description of Contingencies That
May Have Installed, Maintained and Transmitted the Brazilian Jeitinho, such as the satisfaction of basic survival needs, escape/avoidance
of threats or rights violations, and a way for fast
solutions to bureaucratic legal requirements.
The recent water crisis in some areas of the
country (Romero, 2015) is an excellent example
of the environment that produces creative patterns of behavior, or jeitinho: Based not solely
on the immediate environmental factors, but
also in the cultural background, people are
building indoor rainwater collector systems, developing some ways to reuse water from showers and the laundry, and even developing some
creative ways to protest against the controlling
agencies, as noted by Bernas (2015). The immediate consequences are beneficial for the
population at large in terms of reducing the
financial costs and promoting alternative ways
to distribute the natural resources.

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A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS OF BRAZILIAN JEITINHO

In point 2, we have the creative solutions to

everyday problems as a form of behavioral variability that is fundamental to the process of
selection by consequences. It allows for the
emergence of repertoires and opportunities that
may never occur in other conditions and are
functional as a strategy of countercontrol in a
context of Brazilian social inequality and institutional violence. As an example, the jeitinho
allowed, among other achievements, the development of behavioral science in Brazilian universities with few institutional resources. This is
undoubtedly an undeniable achievement to the
people and culture of the country.
On the other hand, we also can say that in
some contexts the jeitinho may neglect the good
of others and the good of the group as a whole.
When we take personal advantage in any type of
situation, this advantage will end up being at the
expense of others, even if such loss is remote in
time and space.
Skinner (1986) pointed out the problems arising from the development of some technologies
that permit us to do much with less effort and
questioned the promotion of cultural practices
that do not emphasize the reinforcers contingent
on productive behavior. The jeitinho can be
interpreted, in some sense, as one creative way
of doing much with less effort, and the consequences appointed by Skinner can be seen in
some extent in Brazilian cultures. When the cost
of the response is higher than the delayed reinforcers that it is supposed to produce, it is
possible that people will develop alternative
ways to get those consequences without that
high cost and then transmit them to others.
It is possible that this vicious circle of reinforced standards of individualistic behaviors
makes citizens less concerned with the good of
the others even with members of their own
social environmentand more engaged in ensure their own personal goods, reinforcing individualism standards that certainly do not contribute to the good of the group, or even the
species in the long term. An example of how
interlocking contingencies involved in the jeitinho as a cultural practice can become deleterious is corruption. This practice can be considered a common jeitinho found by Brazilian
politicians, companies and citizens to get immediately benefits and/or avoid taxes. In this case,
instead of the jeitinho being an exercise in countercontrol (producing better living conditions

33

for members of the culture), the main result is

the reinforcement of individualistic behavioral
patterns aimed for ones own good. Thus, we
assume a big risk in not create a practical problem solving culture for the good of the greatest
number of people, but giving a jeitinho to get
individual benefits and get rid of problems with
short term solutions behaving creatively.
Conclusion
In strict sense, despite the conceptual differences between creative behavior in behavior
analysis and Brazilian jeitinho in social sciences, there is no operational difference between the jeitinho and creative behavior generated by novel contingencies of reinforcement in
terms of what people do. Nevertheless, what
makes jeitinho unique are characteristics linked
to the historical development and miscegenation of Brazilian culture that allowed such functional variability.
There are multiple ethical implications of this
cultural practicesome of them are good and
some are bad in terms of what is reinforcing and
what is punitive in each context. In the scenario
described, there are some interesting products,
including the development of strategies to fight
against the coercive control of the powerful
agencies, which include obtaining access to primary reinforcers and basic services and to avoid
basic human rights violations. The bad ones can
be seen as the great amount of corruption and
the reinforcement of individualistic patterns of
personal relations.
As an attempt to cover a deficit in the psychological literature regarding Brazilian jeitinho as a social and complex phenomenon, specifically in the emergent field of behavioral
analysis of culture, along with Carrara (2008),
we suggest the importance of empirical investigations of the subject matter, through experimental and quasi-experimental models of research, and field observations of its social
interlocking contingencies. Some interesting
examples can be seen in Balafoutas (2011), Barr
and Serra (2010), Borba et al. (2014), Carrara et
al. (2013), and Dobson (2012).
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Received August 15, 2014
Revision received April 3, 2015
Accepted April 20, 2015