Association for Behavior Analysis International

Volume 29 | 2006 | Number 3

On the Future of Behavior Analysis: Introduction to the Special Issue

Dr. Thomas Critchfield

Prognostication is tricky business. Think of music critic Philip Hale (1937), who asserted that, "If Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse." Or Astronomer Simon Newcomb (1888), who concluded that, "We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy."(1) And then there are the legions of doomsday cultists who, despite their enthusiasm for the task, have failed to deliver even one correct end-of-the-world prediction.

A Time of Great Change

About two years ago, in a statement prepared for an ABA election ballot, I wrote that, "Tomorrow’s ABA will not look like the one your parents might have enjoyed." This was not prophesy, but merely a description of dynamic times that already are upon us. The typical ABA member of ten years ago, for instance, might not have anticipated any of these recent developments in
the Association:

ABA membership has increased to almost 5,000.
The ABA convention has nearly outgrown all existing hotel venues and may need to shift to a convention center by as early as 2009 or 2010.
In addition to its annual convention, ABA also hosts extremely popular biennial international conferences and occasional topical meetings (for information on 2007 offerings, please go to http://www.abainternational.org/events.asp).
ABA is financially stable and owns its own building, making the Association no longer dependent on the charity of Western Michigan University.
Consistent with an industry trend, ABA's journals soon will be available in electronic form.
SABA, ABA's sister society devoted to charitable giving, provides annual fellowships for students in behavioral development and the experimental analysis of behavior and annual grants for international development projects.
Behavior analytic service delivery is in great demand, and a significant portion of the membership is interested primarily in service-delivery issues.

Remarkable things have happened outside of ABA as well. Division 25 (Behavior Analysis) of the American Psychological Association is growing for the first time in decades. Translational research, something that behavior analysts have always understood, has become a priority for U.S. government research funding agencies (e.g., Perone, 2002). A national certification effort for applied behavior analysts (see http://www.bacb.com) has achieved considerable success both in the United States and, increasingly, internationally.

Perhaps strangest of all, there are signs that, after decades of derision during the "cognitive revolution" (e.g., Baars, 1986), behavioral psychology is inching toward the mainstream of scientific psychology – or, at least, receiving a little respect from it. This stems in part from society’s recent embrace of empirically-validated therapies (behavior analysts always have data at the ready!), but there are signs of a more general shift of attitudes. For example, Roediger (2004), a prominent cognitive psychologist, has suggested, with tongue only partly in cheek, that, "behaviorism won," in the sense of exerting enduring positive effects on all of empirical psychology. Roediger’s complete argument, reproduced elsewhere in this issue, provides a surprisingly positive external assessment of the current status of behavior analysis.

This view coincides with a shift in emphasis in the dominant (cognitive) paradigm psychology, away from the most florid forms of mentalism that predominated in the past and toward analyses that are more parsimonious and more focused on behavior-environment relations (e.g., Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999; Gray, 2006). In such an intellectual landscape, behavioral psychology can participate in scholarly discussions that cut across theoretical perspectives (e.g., Chase & Watson, 2004). It is possible for cognitive psychologists to publish in Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) (e.g., Gagne, 2002), or for an article published in JEAB (White & Wixted, 1999) to receive the 2000 George A. Miller Award from Division 3 of APA for "best article in general psychology."

Special Issue: What Does the Future Hold?

If behavioral psychology were dead, as many have asserted, there would be no point in speculating about its future, but all signs are to the contrary. I have described mostly good news, but in the changing world inhabited by our field, challenges exist as well. Either way, ABA members will be wise to consider the implications for their field and the organizations that represent it. With this in mind, the present special issue of the ABA Newsletter was conceived to allow several distinguished behavior analysts to comment briefly on developments and trends that will affect the behavior analysis of the immediate future. Although prediction is risky, so is a failure to plan strategically, and the authors represented in this issue all are in a position to understand the forces that will shape tomorrow's behavior analysis.

Each of the essays is informative individually, but I believe that the most important lesson to be derived from them is collective. For reasons described below, there is special incentive currently for behavior analysts to have a broad perspective on their field and its many expressions.

A Molar-Level Challenge

The "problem" is that these are relatively good times for behavior analysis. The field is growing and, in the process, ABA is incorporating more members, with more varied interests, than ever before. Rapid growth also means that a large percentage of ABA members entered the field, or the Association, only recently. According to some writers, such "youth bulges" have two predictable effects on a culture (Hart, Atkins, Markey, & Youniss, 2004). First, newcomers are (by definition) not part of the culture’s history and the traditions derived from it. As newcomers become more common they constitute an ever-larger share of the social networks into which other newcomers enter. Second, the preceding is a recipe for unrest. Individuals who have not been shaped by a culture tend to agitate for change – sometimes for good (e.g., the American civil rights movement of the 1960s), sometimes otherwise (e.g., the Hitler youth movement). Some analyses suggest a lag of several years between the emergence of a "youth bulge" and its full impact on a culture. If so, then, with ABA now several years into its growth spurt, we can expect to see the full impact on the Association relatively soon.

What the future will bring, I believe, depends on the extent to which ABA’s constituent groups engage in mutual socialization during the coming years. In a perfectly integrated field, method, theory, and application heuristics would be identical for autism professionals, school psychologists, behavioral pharmacologists, organizational behavior analysts, clinical psychologists, animal behavior researchers, and the like. Yet perfect integration is impossible given that different kinds of behavior analysts confront different scholarly and practical problems. To illustrate, consider the contingencies of survival faced by an autism service provider (seeking to develop easy-to-implement treatments and secure insurance payment for services) versus a behavioral pharmacologist (working to understand basic drug-behavior interactions and get research funded by federal agencies). Where survival contingencies are concerned, the two have little in common, and may find common ground instead with, respectively, other kinds of practitioners or other psychopharmacologists.

Possible Bad Outcomes

Here I am reminded of anthropological research that found the longevity of religious communes to be positively correlated with the number of rituals shared uniquely among their members (Sosis, 2004). I am not suggesting, as have some critics, that behavior analysis is mostly quasi-religious dogma, or that it is most healthy when totally divorced from other scholarly communities. I merely acknowledge that it is logical for individuals to separate when they experience more reinforcement apart than together. How will growth and diversification affect the sub-communities of ABA?

Fragmentation within ABA

One possible outcome is for sub-communities to remain affiliated with ABA but to function quasi-independently. Consider the case of Precision Teaching (Potts, Eshleman, & Cooper, 1993), which by many measures is a highly successful movement. The Standard Celeration Society (www.celeration.org) has been an active ABA Special Interest Group for years, hosts its own conference, and publishes the Journal of Precision Teaching (JPT). Yet two factors may have limited the impact of Precision Teaching within behavior analysis. First, to make their work understandable to lay persons, Precision Teachers developed a vocabulary different from that of most behavior analysts (Lindsley, 1991). Second, Precision Teachers publish mainly in JPT. For example, a recent electronic search revealed about one empirical report on precision teaching per year outside of JPT, and most of these were case studies rather than the formal experiments that behavior analysts tend to favor as evidence of effectiveness. As a result, my impression is that most behavior analysts know little about this powerful technology and, not surprisingly, have done little to help promote it.

Fragmentation of ABA

Another possible outcome is for a sub-community to shed its formal connections to traditional behavior analytic institutions. Consider the case of behavioral pharmacology. Although behavior analysts conducted some of the first studies merging behavior science and psychopharmacology (Skinner & Heron, 1937), as behavioral pharmacology matured it became essentially self-sufficient. One can now become well trained in the area and have a productive scholarly career without ever attending an ABA convention or publishing in JEAB, because a vibrant (mutually-reinforcing) community inhabits other associations and journals, both specialized (e.g., Behavioral Pharmacology Society; www.behavioralpharmacologysociety.org) and mainstream (e.g., Psychopharmacology). This is a success story, to be sure, but with the side effect that behavioral pharmacology research is encountered less often than one might hope at the ABA convention. I think that ABA is a shade paler for this.

A Better Outcome

A third, and more hopeful, possibility is that ABA members will find ways to link their diverse needs and remain interdependent. I don’t have an exact prescription for how this might develop, but I can envision four strategies that may help.

1. Admit there’s a problem.

Behavior analysis is said to be unusual among social sciences in the degree to which its diverse participants share a conceptual framework. Certainly this counts for something, but as the examples just mentioned illustrate, a common world view probably is not enough to assure that we’ll all play nicely together in the future.

2. Emulate existing "socializers."

A few behavior analysts cannot be placed into any single sub-community. Some avoid traditional dichotomies within the field, such as basic versus applied (e.g., Murray Sidman and stimulus equivalence or, more recently, Tim Vollmer and response-independent consequence schedules). Some bridge areas of specialization that might appear to be unrelated (e.g., Jack Marr has worked in the lab on behavioral toxicology, in zoos on captive-animal enrichment, and in the classroom on instructional design for college physics courses). Still others manage to remain integrated into the core of behavior analysis while simultaneously helping a specialty area achieve independent successes. In my opinion, for example, we can credit the remaining links between a general behavior analytic community and areas like Precision Teaching or behavioral pharmacology to a relatively few individuals who wear the hat of behavior analyst (with specialization in a subject area) rather than that of subject area expert (who happens to employ behavioral analyses).

Collectively, such individuals serve as a conduit through which ideas are exchanged across verbal communities,(2) and they illustrate one key to a healthy future for ABA – if only we knew how to reliably engineer this outcome. For now, I suggest taking a close look at the training, habits, and career decisions that have made these people remarkable; these are needed on a larger scale if behavior analysis is to remain reasonably unified.

3. Seek collaboration.

Social psychology teaches that nothing generates interdependence like shared contingencies. It makes sense to look for opportunities to build collaborations that place behavior analysts with different day-to-day survival contingencies on the same team. In the United States, research funding priorities have recently promoted this outcome by favoring proposals with translational (i.e., both basic and applied) emphases (Perone, 2002), but much else may be possible. Here's some quick free-associating: Could there be shared initiatives for ABA's Verbal Behavior and Speech Pathology Special Interest Groups (SIGs)? What about the Behavioral Medicine and Health, Sport, and Fitness SIGs? Are there ways to better integrate the proven practices of Direct Instruction and Precision Teaching into applied behavior analytic treatment regimens? In a translational world, could the Behavior Analysis Certification Board® draw more heavily on the expertise of basic scientists in deciding what is good training in behavior principles? Can organizational behavior managers do more to help service delivery agencies develop their staff management and training systems? And so on.

4. Modify graduate training.

Acts like collaborating, or talking across verbal communities, require special repertoires that cannot be counted on to emerge spontaneously (e.g., Critchfield & Reed, 2005). We should look closely at whether the models of graduate training on which the field has relied for decades are designed to build the needed skills for such collaboration. While there is no question that individual careers start with immersion in autism service delivery, or reinforcement schedule research with nonhumans, such specialized training may contribute to, or at least permit, the fracturing of the field.

Starting Right Now

Here’s a prediction: In the future, ABA will thrive as an organization, and behavior analysis will prosper as a discipline, to the extent that behavior analysts view their colleagues' accomplishments and challenges, not as area-idiosyncratic, but rather as successes and hurdles for the field as a whole. Considerable work is needed to achieve this goal. For now, I am betting that the solution begins with energetic exchanges of information regarding the various niches that behavior analysis now fills, something that is approximated in the essays of this special issue. Readers who share my concern regarding the unity of the field are challenged to think strategically, but to simultaneously develop their own, low-cost initial strategies – for example, consider submitting a paper session for ABA 2008 that brings together behavior analysts who don't normally find themselves in the same room.

References

Baars, B. J. (1986). The cognitive revolution in psychology. New York: Guilford.

Chase, P. N., & Watson, A. C. (2004). Unconscious cognition and behaviorism. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 25, 145-159.

Critchfield, T. S., & Reed, D. D. (2005). Conduits of translation in behavior-science bridge research. In J. E. Burgos & E. Ribes (Eds.), Theory, basic and applied research, and technological applications on behavior science: Conceptual and methodological issues (pp. 45-84). Guadalajara: University of Guadalajara.

Doughty, S. S., Chase, P. N., & O'Shields, E. M. (2004). Effects of rate building on fluent performance: A review and commentary. The Behavior Analyst, 27, 7-23.

Gagné, C. L. (2002). The competition-among-relations-in-nominals theory of conceptual combination. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 78, 551-565.

Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gray, W. D. (2006). The emerging rapprochement between cognitive and ecological analyses. In A. Kirlik (Ed). Adaptive perspectives on human-technology interaction: Methods and models for cognitive engineering and human-computer interaction (pp. 230-246). New York: Oxford University Press.

Hart, D., Atkins, R., Markey, P., & Youniss, J. (2004) Youth bulges in communities: The effects of age structure on adolescent civic knowledge and civic participation. Psychological Science, 15, 591-597.

Lindsley, O. R. (1991). From technical jargon to plain English for application. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 24, 449-458.

Perone, M. (2002). Behavior analysis and translational research. ABA Newsletter, 25(3), 1, 3-4.

Potts, L., Eshleman, J. W., & Cooper, J. O., (1993). Ogden Lindsley and the historical development of precision teaching. The Behavior Analyst, 16,
177-189.

Roediger, R. (2004, March). What happened to behaviorism? Observer, 17 (3), Presidential Column. Retrieved 9/30/06 from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1540

Skinner, B. F., & Heron, W. T. (1937). Effects of caffeine and benzedrine upon conditioning and extinction. The Psychological Record, 1, 340-346.

Sosis, R. (2004). The adaptive value of religious ritual. American Scientist, 92(2), 1660172.

White, K. G., & Wixted, J. T. (1999). Psychophysics of remembering. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 71, 91-113.

(1) Quotations retrieved 9/30/06 from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions

(2) For example, Doughty, Chase, and O’Shields (2004) both explained and cast a critical eye on some of the assumptions underlying Precision Teaching, and thereby generated spirited discussion in subsequent commentaries. In my opinion, the article succeeded because it placed problems that might be seen as peculiar to precision teaching into a context that any behavior analyst can understand.