Some things you need to know to be a behavior analyst and other considerations: an informal recollection with examples

ABSTRACT

I offer an interpretative recounting of my comments at the 2nd International Summit and Conference on Behaviour Analysis and Autism in Higher Education (Stockholm University, January, 2018). It is partially inspired by topics arising during the Summit, so is less straightforwardthan if expressly written on the same topics. I suggest that behaviour analysis has benefited greatly from its devotion to objectivity, and in turn benefitted many others through applied behaviour analysis. However, the field risks narrowness and isolation by devoting itself so greatly to autism and avoiding topics that do not easily fit its application-focused, contingency-based paradigm. I recount our history, give examples of sophisticated behavioural applications by others, and describe objective investigations of aspects of behaviour we do not emphasise. I argue that behaviour analysis would benefit by contacting certain non-behavioural areas, including requiring our students to take and attend non-behavioural courses and events.

KEYWORDS:

• Behaviour analysis
• behaviourism
• ecological psychology
• industrial design
• history
• BCBA
• BACB

Statement of ethical compliance and conflict of interest

Production of this article was supported by a travel reimbursement from the organisers of the 2nd International Summit and Conference Behaviour Analysis and Autism in Higher Education. This article is a conceptual review, and thus is not based on either human or non-human subject data. It does not require ethical evaluation or submission approval by my institution or any other authority in the United States. I believe it to follow all applicable ethical standards in its place of publication. There are no financial or personal conflicts of interest to report.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Skinner’s assigned graduate advisor was actually Edwin Boring (1886-1968), known to us primarily by his historical and conceptual work rather than his psychology per se (see e.g., Boring, 1929).

2. A discipline that has counterintuitive terms like “positive punishment” and “negative reinforcement” may not be the master of terminological clarity that it thinks it is (cf. Neuman, 2018). Consider that “reinforce” is actually metaphorical, meaning “to strengthen.” When reinforcement occurs, the probability of the occurrence of responding with certain parameters is increased. We are not really making the response less susceptible to damage or alteration by an outside force. Radical behaviourists are certainly not talking about strengthening of hypothetical S-S or S-R bonds, or their putative neurological correlates, which is what “reinforce” means to others and meant before we borrowed it from reflex physiology. “Negative” also does not mean to behaviour analysts what it means to everyone else, namely to “negate” or “nullify.” Yet, we object when “negative reinforcement” is understood, perfectly reasonably, to be the opposite of reinforcement. I will go full radical here. I think that saying “reward” when we mean “reinforcement” and something like “relief” when we mean “negative reinforcement” would be better for us in terms of popular acceptance particularly in areas where those kinds of terms are already used effectively (see McLean & Christensen, 2017). We might need to keep “reinforcement” as a technical term until something more objective is found or devised.

3. It is a mistake to dismiss Titchener’s system as “subjective.” It was indeed subjective in a literal and technical sense. But Titchener’s perspective was actually more consistent with behaviour analysis than we usually give him credit for. He was trying to put the direct observation of what we would call “private events” (Skinner, 1945) on a strong empirical footing, making the self-observer of consciousness as accurate and reliable about the self-examination as possible given the practical limits of trained introspection. Even though Titchener’s attempt would ultimately fail, he was an ally of Watson’s in trying to move psychology into the sciences and away from speculative philosophy.

4. Just as it is an error to think that there is one kind of “behaviourism,” or that all of ABA is exemplified by Lovaas’s recommendations regarding autism remediation (e.g., Lovaas et al., 1981), it is a mistake to assume there is “riding instruction” when there are actually many different systems and schools going back hundreds of years. In this presentation, I am concentrating on just one tradition within what is now broadly called “English” riding, which, like any endeavour, including ABA, includes practitioners of varying quality and fidelity to the model.

5. It is uncertain how much such actions truly reinforce the desired behaviour in the horse, although it seems that the better riders I encounter are the ones gently petting and scratching the horse’s neck immediately after a new success then fading those things as the behaviour becomes reliable. This suggests a possible mutual and highly individualised reinforcement arrangement which might make for an interesting research project. Podhajsky’s (1967, p. 68) advice that stroking is better than patting has been supported by research (Hancock, Redgate, & Hall, 2014; Thordbergson, Nielsen, Beaulieu, & Doyle, 2016). A recent study suggests that verbal responses are ineffective reinforcement for horse’s actions, at least in the absence of food back-up (Lansade & Calandreau, 2o18). My experience is that horse trainers and riders praise their horses in a distinct vocal style, with a slight whinny, downward pitch, and lengthening of the utterance. If this observation is accurate generally, it suggests that horses may be differentially sensitive to certain kinds of vocalisations and teach their humans to make them.

6. I am told that DID does not exist. Yet, if a single individual can unconsciously author both sides of the same facilitated communication conversation by alternately manipulating two different people, a man and woman, how can we summarily reject the possibility of a kind of dissociative identity phenomenon (Todd, 2012)?