Public Service in Behavior Analysis Awardee
2002: Dr. Richard Malott
Dr. Richard Malott received his B.A. in Psychology at Indiana University in 1958 where he was privileged to study with James Dinsmoor. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1963 where he had the additional privilege of studying with William Cumming, W. N. Schoenfeld, and Fred S. Keller. And, like many before and after him, he frittered away a few years of his life doing research on schedules of reinforcement. He taught with the Kantorians at Denison University from 1963 to 1966. In 1966, he helped start the behavior-analysis program at Western Michigan University, where he continues to teach. At WMU, he also helped start an intro psych course that taught behavior analysis to 1,000 students per semester, with the aid of 500 lab rats and 100 Skinner boxes (1,000 lever-pressing rats per year). Now, his students only condition 230 rats per year, but they also do 130 self-management projects and provide 13,500 hours of training to autistic children each year.
Malott and his students have packaged their teaching/learning efforts in educational systems known as the Student-Centered Education Project (aka The First Fly-by-night Underground College of Kalamazoo), the Behavioral Social Action Program, and the Behavior Analysis Training System. Currently, every summer, he teaches the Behavioral Boot Camp, an intense 18-hour-per-week, 7.5 week, graduate-level, behavior-analysis seminar. He has been actively involved in teaching African-American students and international students behavior analysis and behavior systems analysis at the graduate level. He and his students developed and run the Behavioral Research Supervisory System, a performance-management system to help 30 B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. students per year complete their projects, theses, and dissertations with high quality and in a timely manner. In addition, he and his students developed and run the Behavioral Academic and Career Counseling service, a behavioral-systems approach to helping 100 students per year get into behavior-analytic graduate programs and get behavior-analytic jobs.
Malott helped start Behaviordelia (a publisher of behavioral comic books, etc,), the Association for Behavior Analysis (ABA), ABA’s Teaching Behavior Analysis Special Interest Group, ABA’s Education Board, ABA’s Behavioral Follies (previously known as the Behavioral Performing Arts), the ABA Social (previously known as the Behavioral Boogie), the Behavioral Bulletin Board on CompuServe, and the Notes from a Radical Behaviorist bulletin board in the Cambridge Center’s Behavioral Virtual Community (http://www.behavior.org). He wrote the newsletter and column Notes from a Radical Behaviorist and coauthored Principles of Behavior (the book previously known as Elementary Principles of Behavior.) He is now (and has been for many years) working on I’ll Stop Procrastinating when I Get around to It and Applied Behavioral Cognitive Analysis. He has presented in 13 countries and has received two Fulbright Senior Scholar Awards. Over the years, he has also worked extensively with multi-media presentations, from seven-projector slide shows to contemporary PowerPoint presentations, but always with jazz and rock and roll lurking in the background and art and behavior analysis sharing the foreground.
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