Newsletter
Volume 28 | 2005 | Number 1
Ogden R. Lindsley
By Carl Binder, Ph.D.
Ogden R. Lindsley
On Sunday, October 10, 2004, Ogden R. Lindsley, a giant in the fields of behavior research, measurement, and performance technology, died of bile duct cancer at the Kansas University Medical Center with his wife, Nancy, at his side. Four days before, Og sent a gracious and inspiring farewell message to his students and colleagues. In response, he received a stream of e-mail from around the world with love and appreciation from old friends, as well as from parents, students, and professionals whom he had never met yet whose lives he had profoundly improved with Precision Teaching and Standard Celeration Charting.
Lindsley’s life was extraordinarily full and productive. At 20, he left Brown University to enlist in the Army Air Corps, serving as an engineer-gunner on B-24 bombers. Shot down over Yugoslavia, he spent nine months as a POW, and then escaped. He later told colorful tales of tricking the Nazi soldiers and making friends with the local populace on forced marches between prison camps. He also recounted his personal pledge that if he were allowed to escape, he would devote half of his life to helping the world and the other half to having fun—reasoning that his fallen comrades would have insisted on the latter. His career, in fact, was marked by enthusiasm, inexhaustible energy, continuous curiosity and discovery, plus lots of fun. Cartoons, songs, and funny stories occupied an important part of his professional repertoire, along with enormous amounts of charted data.
Ogden returned from the war in 1945 to complete Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in experimental psychology and histochemistry at Brown University, and a Doctorate with B. F. Skinner at Harvard. With Skinner, he founded and directed the Behavior Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where from 1953 to 1965 he conducted extensive behavior research with human subjects, coined the term “behavior therapy,” and demonstrated that principles of learning discovered in Skinner’s animal operant conditioning labs applied with equal power and precision to humans. During that period, he published dozens of scientific articles reporting groundbreaking research in psychiatry, advertising, behavioral pharmacology, geriatrics, social psychology, and education. Most of his early publications are as relevant today as when they were published, and well worth the effort to request via interlibrary loan. He received the Hofheimer Research Prize from the American Psychiatric Association in 1962 for his study of psychotic behavior.
Measurement was at the core of his contributions. At an early stage, Lindsley committed his scientific career to Skinner’s supremely sensitive measure of behavior (or accomplishments), count/time (rate or frequency). He learned from Skinner’s cumulative recording methodology the power of standard graphic display for communicating and analyzing measures over time, applying that principle to develop his own standard charting tools.
In 1965, he decided to “parachute behind enemy lines” by moving from Harvard Medical School to special education at the University of Kansas Medical Center. He hoped to effect radical change in classroom education by replacing percent correct with count per minute measures and graphic displays of data for decision-making by teachers and students. He began a new career in teacher training and field-based educational research that ultimately had an enormous impact on thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students.
When he first worked with educators, teaching them principles of behavior and requiring them to measure behavior frequencies in their classrooms, Lindsley discovered that the idiosyncratic stretch-to-fill graphs they used to share data slowed down communication. To remedy this problem, he prototyped a “standard” chart initially using semi-logarithmic engineering graph paper covering a range of behavior frequencies from one per day (.000695 per minute) to 1,000 per minute up the left axis; and spanning 20 calendar weeks (140 days) across the bottom. This tool enabled teachers to share and receive feedback about classroom measurement and teaching projects in about one tenth the time it took with traditional graphs.
While using the chart for classroom practice and research, Lindsley and his students discovered that behavior multiplies, it does not add. That is, when graphed on the standard chart, which allows accurate projection of straight-line trends instead of curves, frequencies of behavior and accomplishments (along with many other natural phenomena) exhibit patterns of proportional rather than additive change. (For example, some behavior doubles rather than adding a fixed amount every week.) The power and sensitivity of Lindsley’s charting methodology is so great that if there were a Nobel Prize for behavior measurement, some colleagues believe he should have received it.
From the chart he discovered and quantified celeration (ACceleration or DEceleration), a direct measure of learning for individuals, organizations, or systems quantified as a multiplying or dividing change in frequency over time (e.g., x 1.5 per week), and graphically displayed as a standard angle on the celeration chart. From the late 1960s on, his students and colleagues demonstrated enormous improvements in learning effectiveness with Precision Teaching and Precise Behavior Management, using the standard celeration chart to make educational and management decisions. Emboldened by these discoveries and frustrated by the inability of teachers to change systems in which they served, Lindsley switched in 1971 to educational administration at Kansas University. He supervised 34 doctoral theses over the course of his tenure, training those who would become educational leaders to use behavior science principles and standard celeration charting in day-to-day educational and organizational management and decision-making. Extending use of the chart to count-per-week, count-per-month, and count-per-year applications, his students monitored such macro phenomena as organizational change, stock market activity, world health and economic trends, improving analysis and decision-making in every application they tried.
The Standard Celeration Society emerged during the early 1990s to support this work, and charting practitioners have become more and more visible in organizations such as ISPI and the International Association for Behavior Analysis. Many of Lindsley’s protégés became impatient with resistance to radical improvement and, with Lindsley’s encouragement, formed private-sector schools, learning centers, and consulting firms to make their methods available directly to consumers.
Lindsley’s work has received recognition internationally, including being awarded ISPI’s highest honor, the Thomas F. Gilbert Award for Professional Achievement in 1998. His work continues through several generations of his students, and celebrations of his work are planned at upcoming conferences, including those of the Standard Celeration Society, the Association for Behavior Analysis, and the California Association for Behavior Analysis. Ogden asked that those who wish to honor his life and work contribute directly to the Standard Celeration Society, and he appointed a committee (of which I am a member) to oversee management of his archives and posthumous publication of his work.
Lindsley’s unique qualities were a combination of scientific rigor and unwavering commitment to effecting positive change in the world. We have lost a creative scientific genius, but his legacy is a powerful set of measurement and performance improvement tools that have just begun to have their multiplicative effect.