First, I would like to say that, from my reading of Part I. in the RFT book, it seems the overall program of research has a stable foothold within behavior analysis. This is further accentuated by the fact that applied research is beginning to appear in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (see Ninness et al.)in which RFT principles are built into a computer program which teaches trigonomic functions and their graphical representations in an efficient manner. Believe me, it works...I am a co-author on the latest of these RFT/math studies, and, coming into the project, I knew pretty much nothing about functions and their graphical representations but after approx. an hour in the program as a pilot subject I had a firm grasp on the concepts...as well as many novel formulae and graphs never before seen.
Because work like this is emerging along side a strong basic research program, I think RFT is here to stay. As for its future, I have been working on a way to study meta/macrocontingencies and cultural materialism in a basic laboratory setting. This area is the domain of "cultural analysis," or "behavioral anthropology," and even crosses over into OBM. When studied behavior-analytically the phrase "culture" is really synonymous with "social behavior."
If this basic research catches on, I predict the future could see a merging of both research programs in order to study how relational framing operates in relation to social behavior. The beauty about this particular social-behavioral research program is that it begins (presumably) in a laboratory setting analogous to the most basic contexts which give rise to interlocking contingencies as they occur in nature, and as they (presumably) occurred in the evolution of cultures. So, this program would (presumably) be the most thourough, inductive, investigation of social behavior to-date. This is similar to the beginnings of the behavior-analytic research program in general: Skinner started with the most basic contexts and slowly built upon them until now, where we can study language and cognition, and do so in an inductive, non-hypothetical, manner.
Perhaps combining RFT with such research could reveal principles relevant to symbolic behavior, myths, taboos, and "norms" etc... but would do so with the precision of a basic behavioral laboratory. Other basic researchers are already hard at work developing an equation of choice behavior, perhaps a few decades will reveal equations of norms, taboos, and even a "terrorism equation." It seems pretty far-fetched, but what an exciting way to earn a living!
Shawn Boles added on 4/25/2006:
Tony Biglan has written on this as well.
Hardcover: 464 pages
Publisher: Context Press (January 1, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN: 1878978225