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| The Varieties of Behavior Analytic Experience |
| Monday, May 26, 2025 |
| 11:00 AM–11:50 AM |
| Marriott Marquis, M2 Level, Marquis Salon 6 |
| Area: SCI/EDC; Domain: Theory |
| Chair: Jonathan W. Pinkston (University of Kansas) |
| CE Instructor: Jonathan W. Pinkston, Ph.D. |
| Presenting Author: A. CHARLES CATANIA (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) |
| Abstract: It has taken us decades to become a discipline in our own right. Once simply a part of experimental psychology we now can act as behavior analysts across many environments: university departments, treatment centers, government agencies, businesses, communities, and so on. Where once we were a happy few mainly at a handful of academic institutions, we now have created major niches for our work not just nationally but internationally. What we do within our discipline ranges from teaching and research to applications and dissemination; what we do outside it reaches beyond our discipline to potential allies in the larger culture, in biology and medicine, in philosophy and secular humanism, and sometimes even in disciplines that once seemed competitive with ours, such as linguistics and cognition. We must beware of boundaries that separate us from other disciplines and from varied approaches within our own discipline. This presentation will use case studies to illustrate the range of our current and potential contributions to the broader culture and in some cases will suggest possible directions for further enhancing them. |
| Instruction Level: Basic |
| Target Audience: I plan this presentation to be relevant to basic through advanced audiences. |
Learning Objectives: 1. Participants should be able to identify the contingencies that have gradually reduced both human and nonhuman research within universities and to suggest one or more actions that may help to reverse those trends.
2. Participants should be able to identify the differences between the selectionist approach that underlies behavior analysis and the associationist and cognitive approaches that underlie approaches to learning and conditioning in psychology and other disciplines.
3. Participants should be able to provide examples both of how basic research in our discipline has informed applications and of how applied behavior analysis has provided directions for basic research.
4. Participants should be able to provide examples of how the behavior analytic perspective bears on major cultural issues, such as discrimination and prejudice, sex and gender, gun violence, and politics.
5. Participants should be able to show how the verbal practice of naming necessarily breaks continua down into discrete categories and to describe at least two problems that may be created by such categorizations. |
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| A. CHARLES CATANIA (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) |
 I am a Behavior Analyst and Experimental Psychologist with special interests in learning, schedules of reinforcement, and the analysis of verbal behavior. Much of my research has been rooted in biology where, for example, experiments on inhibitory interactions among operant classes were inspired by analogous interactions in sensory systems. Parallels between Darwinian natural selection and operant shaping have been relevant to several lines of work, including accounts of language evolution in terms of the functions of verbal behavior. It has helped me throughout to regard behavior as primary. Organisms evolved based on what they could do; all of their physiological systems evolved in the service of behavior. Thus, any effective science of behavior will necessarily be part of the biological sciences. That science, behavior analysis, has generated a broad range of applications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Charles_Catania |
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