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This article describes major differences in research focus and methods between behavior analysis and social psychology, and it outlines some of the ways in which fruitful cooperation between the two fields can be established. Attribution, optimism, and time horizons are considered to be measures of past behavior-consequence linkages, which provide information about otherwise unknown aspects of people's learning histories. Experiments in these research areas of social psychology contribute to the improvement of the three-term contingency by (a) introducing past experiences and (b) providing explanations of behavior variability in the laboratory and in daily life.