PREVIOUSLY IN THIS SERIES
QUEST #1 – We need to be more behavioral about this
QUEST #2 – A *WIDER REACH* is within our reach
QUEST #3 – No-Paragraphs Naomi and the tyranny of text
QUEST #4 – The power of the good story
A key theme of this series of posts has been that our discipline’s dissemination efforts may have placed too much emphasis on the wrong types of messages. Collectively, we have often hoped that what’s in our journal articles and books will somehow filter out to affect the public consciousness. But given the length and high-level language of those products — not to mention the fact that everyday people are not likely to stumble across them — they’re probably not going to win many hearts and minds.
Scholarly treatises clearly have their place, but when we reach out to People Who Are Not Behavior Analysts (PWANBAs), we ought to be careful to communicate in a style to which they easily resonate, particularly in the form of story-telling.
With those points on the record, let’s briefly examine some ways, beyond journals and books, that one can tell the story of a science like behavior analysis.
Reinventing the Book
One way to communicate better is to re-think books to make them more accessible. The “graphic novel” (GN; actually a bit of a misnomer because GNs can be either fiction or nonfiction) is a hybrid longform vehicle that, like the briefer comic book, librally supplements text with expository artwork. Some of my favorite examples come from Australian artist Stuart McMillen, who specializes in nonfiction works. Of particular interest to behavior analysts is Rat Park (which you can read in its entirety online for free), McMillen’s take on the development of the drug-self-administration procedure in which drugs are treated as reinforcers. The book doesn’t use operant terminology but it does a decent job of representing what self-administration is about and why it’s important in the history of addictions research. It also accurately describes an effect that’s often omitted in casual descriptions of addiction: that even the most potent drug-reinforcement effects can be attenuated by alternative reinforcement. I’ve assigned Rat Park in classes and it goes over well with undergraduates.
To give you some of the flavor of Rat Park without giving too much away, here are a few of the book’s early panels.
By the way, although the GN format gained wide popularity starting around the mid-1980s, it was being exploited long before that in behavior analysis by Behaviordelia, the company founded by Don Whaley and Dick Malott. As Malott has written in describing the goals for Behaviordelia, when it comes to teaching people about behavior analysis, “it’s gotta be fun or else it won’t be fun.” Several Behaviordelia books tried to make behavior analysis fun by combining the GN format with a very 1970s irreverent counterculture vibe. Here’s a sample page from 1972’s Contingency management in education & other equally exciting places.
Specifics aside, I suspect that casual readers — and by that I mean people without a ton of pre-existing motivation to slog through technical information on behavior analysis — will find presentations like those of Rat Park and Contingency Management an easier go than big blocks of dense traditional explanatory text. And if the content is legit, where’s the harm?
[By the way, I couldn’t find much empirical research on objective outcomes from adults reading in the GN format, but there are a few promising findings. For instance, one study found that reading GNs improved reading comprehension in adults in an English as a Second Language course. That’s interesting given that, for a lot of American adults, any introduction to science is sort of like learning a second language. But I suspect the effects of interest depend partly on what’s done with the art work, and I couldn’t find any research evaluating that specifically.]
Audio
People don’t gather around a campfire for silent book reading, but they do to hear ghost stories. This makes sense, for humans have been consuming verbal behavior with their ears for far longer than they have with their eyes. Yet listening can work very differently depending on what you’re listening to. We know that the typical academic-style lecture doesn’t tend to hold attention for very long or engender much remembering later. The telling of a good story, however, can be spellbinding and create lasting memories. This may help to account for the contemporary popularity of the podcast, a conversational, often story-driven audio-format presentation. Roughly 40% of Americans listen to a podcast in a given month, and in 2019 an estimated 58 million U.S. households listened to a science podcast (a number that has surely increased since then). Clearly a lot of people think that podcasts make science fun (check out one of my own favorites, Ologies with Allie Ward).
There are now many behavior analysis podcasts, showing that what we do is easily adapted to this medium. Two of my favorites are Behavioral Observations and ABA Inside Track because they’re pretty rigorous without being overbearing, and they minimize something that really grates on my nerves about some podcasts: a cult of personality surrounding the hosts, who seem more intent on highlighting themselves than on talking about behavior analysis. But I understand where this comes from, because podcasts are education in entertainment’s clothing. They are part performance, part information, and those two things will be allocated differently across different podcasts.
There are, of course, other audio formats which combine performance and information.
Around fourth grade, a student I knew, who did not much enjoy reading and had trouble decoding unfamiliar words in text form, was introduced to the song “Cell City” which, in verse and music, names and describes the function of the structures in a cell.
That student memorized “Cell City” in one or two quick listens and today, many years later, can still deliver a killer rendition. Sometimes on random occasions I hear her singing it to herself while busy with other things. If you’ve ever encountered a behavior analysis article or book with this kind of robust and lasting effect, please let me know.
As I mentioned in my last post, music is close to universal in human experience, and yet we don’t typically think of it as a way to communicate about science (see Postscript 1). That’s too bad. I would pay a lot for a song that would teach my undergraduates about positive/negative reinforcement/punishment as efficiently as “Cell City” teaches its content! My child rearing days showed me what lots of public school teachers know: For cementing basic concepts and vocabulary, songs can work quicker than close to anything else. Of course, since music composition isn’t part of the typical behavior analysis toolbox, this is an opportunity that, to my knowledge hasn’t been much explored in our discipline — though, ACT fans, check out “The Acceptance and Commitment Song.” To be sure, this is no “Cell City” (not even close), but what have YOU got that’s better?
Video
Anyone who has taught knows how useful it can be to use video to supplement other modes of instruction . Many of us spend a lot of time searching for clips of famous experiments, like this one of the famous Little Albert demonstration:
Or this one from Pavlov’s lab. Also helpful are documentaries that put science content into a useful context, like the public television production “In Search of Ourselves,” which reviews the Nature-Nurture debate in Psychology and links it to broader societal forces.
Probably no one in behavior analysis has invested more effort in exploring the possibilities of video communication than University of Ulster’s Mickey Keenan. As Mickey wrote to me recently:
The printed word is 15th century technology, and it has its place in communication, but a little reflection might remove any cataracts from the eyes of behaviour analysts when they contemplate the design of illustrations needed to replace scientific short-hand when producing a behavioural article for a popular science magazine; illustrate the operant, or changes in time without resorting to a graph, or mentalism, or dualism, or the 3-term contingency….., in a way that inspires.
As a counterpoint to the printed word, Mickey has been producing video explorations of behavior analytic concepts for a long time now. Some of Mickey’s products can be viewed on YouTube. Most can be viewed on his web site.
An important thing to keep in mind when you examine Mickey’s stuff is that a lot of it is video-native content. Sure, you can find lots and lots (and lots!) of behavior analysis videos online, but, with apologies to those who produced them, most are pretty terrible — by which I mean that they are talking-heads exercises, that is, basically a film record of a lecture, with all of the stiffness and rigidity that implies.
If you want an informative contrast, check out some of those “recorded lectures,” then watch 10 minutes of any title by master documentarian Ken Burns, who specializes in weighty and complex topics like war, politics, and baseball. Or, to save time, check out this trailer for Burns’ installment on country music.
Burns’ stuff reminds us that what makes video special is its potential to use entertainment and emotion to make palatable, even pleasurable, the slog through challenging content.
For me, country music is definitely “challenging content.” Gotta be 100% honest here: I haven’t watched the film. Rather, I picked the trailer mainly because in two short minutes it gives you a sense of Burns’ story-telling style. I haven’t watched the film because, full disclosure, I’ve had a blistering-hot hate for country music ever since my dad embarrassed Teenaged Me by blasting it from his tragically uncool 1960 Nash Rambler station wagon every morning when dropping me off at school. And yet somehow, despite my behavioral history, the trailer worked like reinforcer sampling, such that now I kind of want to watch the documentary. Given how much bad press behavior analysis gets these days, imagine if we had freely-available content that could accomplish something similar!
To my knowledge, we currently aren’t doing a lot in behavior analysis to harness the incredible power of video (but if you know of noteworthy counterexamples not mentioned here, let me know).
Side notes:
(1) Once in a while the creators of popular visual media do a credible job of incorporating “our” content. For instance, as a dad in the 1990s (the Golden Age of children’s cartoons!), I became well acquainted with the Rugrats episode “Chuckie the Brave,” which illustrates fear acquisition and systematic desensitization; and the SpongeBob Squarepants episode, “Culture Shock,” which illustrates adventitious reinforcement and the slow progression of extinction. We should borrow content like this whenever it suits our purposes. And learn from it. Note that these episodes are not about conditioning phenomena per se. Rather, those phenomena are plot devices in stories about characters that interest an audience. There’s something to learn in these episodes about behavior, but only if you’re sufficiently interested in the story to follow along.
(2) Behavior analysis has also found its way to the short-form video platform Tik Tok, but here, too, I’ve seen a lot of talking-heads productions that mostly seem to undershoot what’s possible to do with video (though I confess that, as an aging Boomer, I may not fully understand Tik Tok!). Here’s the point to drive home: The potential reach of social media platforms like Tik Tok far exceeds what traditional scholarly behavior analysis normally can hope for. For instance the.behavior.influencer (Kenny Ryndak Samuel) has close to 82,000 followers. What she’s doing resonates with a lot of people who probably wouldn’t normally bump into a behavior analyst.
Will the Academic Journal Evolve Too?
My primary concern here is with dissemination to PWANBAs, but once you start musing about alternative communication formats it’s hard not to wonder whether communication about science, within a professional discipline, could be improved.
In 2016 in The Behavior Analyst, Mickey Keenan played around with the concept of journal publication via an article that consists entirely of a QR code (when scanned on a smart phone, it takes you to a video). This serves as a reminder that we remain very old-school in how we communicate about science within our professional communities. The first fully peer reviewed print journal began in 1731, and by 2018 we were up to an estimated 30,000 of them — all communicating in pretty much the same way as in the 18th Century.
Now, I’m not criticizing the journal article exactly, because the format clearly works: Those who are well trained in consuming journal articles can get a lot from them. But even here there are limitations. One thrust of the open science movement has been that traditional journal articles may not say enough about Methods and Results, hence the development of the online Supplemental Information mechanism for recording far more detail.
The premise of the interesting Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE; see Postscript 2) is that some of the limitations of the print article might be overcome by tapping other media. According to the journal’s web page, it was born after JoVE’s founder, Moshe Pritzker, was unable to replicate an experiment due to incomplete information in a print article. He imagined that a detailed video record would be more informative. Here’s JoVE’s description of its mission:
JoVE is a scientific methods journal providing rapid and efficient publication of methodology in biological, medical, chemical and physical research. JoVE articles are video based (we call them video methods articles) which ensures a more effective transfer of information and experimental detail than with traditional text-based articles. JoVE publishes novel methods, innovative application of existing techniques, and gold standard protocols that enable a greater level of experimental transparency. A detailed text protocol and representative results accompany every video to further expand the impact of our video articles.
It’s easiest to imagine the result by checking out a few of JoVE’s published reports that are of possible interest to the present audience:
- Operant procedures for assessing behavioral flexibility in rats
- Operant learning of drosophila at the torque meter
- Quantifying social motivation in mice using operant conditioning
Authors submit a print manuscript that is then peer reviewed. If accepted, the manuscript becomes the basis for a video record that is either author-created or produced by the journal’s team of videographers. I agree with the journal’s mission statement that video records tend to be easier to digest than print descriptions, and this raises the question of who the intended audience may be. According to the journal, it’s equal parts scientists and students. In the latter case:
JoVE educational videos empower effective teaching of science concepts and laboratory methods in undergraduate and graduate courses at universities and colleges. These videos enable quick in-depth comprehension of complex STEM subjects to increase student engagement and learning outcomes, and support innovative teaching initiatives such as blended learning and flipped classroom.
I’m taking a wait-and-see attitude about whether JoVE is a curiosity or a harbinger of things to come in science. It’s telling, I think, that JoVE’s self-descriptions quickly pivot from scholarly reporting (first quote) to engaging students (second quote), which are two pretty different missions. That is, I’m not sure JoVE is 100% sure what it’s for. Still, it’s getting some traction in terms of scholarly citations, particularly for methodological purposes. But so far I don’t see other publications feeling threatened enough by JoVE to change their modus operandi. For the time being, let’s say that what’s interesting here is the potential for blurring the boundaries between audiences: Just maybe, enhancing how science is conveyed to scientists could also make it more accessible to nonscientists.
Concluding Comment
I’ve surveyed a few different ways to disseminate behavior science to PWANBAs, and I’m taking no position on better or worse approaches among these options. One thing they have in common, I suspect, is the capacity to draw ire from traditionalists. After all, doesn’t it demean a serious science to examine it through media that often are employed for not-so-serious purposes? I’ll say only that behavior analysts purport to believe that the organism is always right and that you need to meet learners where you find them. If you do that poorly while disseminating, doesn’t THAT demean your science? And, if alternative media teach well, can that be bad?
As a discipline we’ve had, at best, uneven success with dissemination, which suggests that whatever we’ve been doing doesn’t work reliably. This argues for taking a variation-and-selection approach going forward — that is, harnessing a variety of different strategies to find out what does work reliably.
And by the way, if you know of cool (and nontraditional) dissemination efforts I haven’t mentioned, please tell me about them (tscritc@ilstu.edu).
Postscript 1: I Sing a Song of Behavior Analysis
Derek Reed recently asked ChapGPT to generate a song about behavior analysis, in the style of Bob Dylan. Result is below (not saying it’s great art, but it really does help to imagine a Dylanesque delivery).
Now waiting on one of you to set this to music and create a video, which I’ll happily reproduce in a post!
In the winds of change, A-B-C data lays,
A tale of actions and their maze,
Where antecedents whisper before the play,
And behaviors dance in the light of day.
Reinforcement’s song, softly sings
Of trials and teachings, and the hope it brings.
Echoic words, a mirror’s gaze,
In the heart of the maze, where the mind sways.
Extinction bursts, a fleeting cry.
In the silence, our dreams do lie,
Generalization’s wide, open road,
Where we carry our ever-changing load.
Through discrete trials, we find our way,
In the dance of life, where we all sway,
With each step, a lesson learned,
In the fires of passion, brightly burned.
So let’s sing of shaping, of mands so clear,
In a world of echoes, we hold dear,
Where the least restrictive environment’s call
Guides us home, one and all.
Postscript 2: About JovE
I don’t know a lot about the economics of running a journal, but one reason why JoVE might be a one-of-a-kind operation is that, apparently, it’s pricey to host online access to a bunch of video articles. Like an increasing number of print journals, JoVE has simply offloaded the the economic burden onto authors via a $1400 publication fee and another $2500 fee to make each video report open access. If that’s what it takes to support the operation, I’m not predicting a video journal will be coming to behavior analysis any time soon. But it would be interesting to see what one would look like if that happened.