Where Did the Time Go?
I started posting on the Something Interesting blog roughly a year ago — although, in a development that will not surprise my wife, I overlooked the anniversary a few weeks back.
I started blogging to embrace one of my dearest professional principles: When you have something to say, you should say it, even if it doesn’t make you popular. So I’ve tried to prompt you, in various ways, to take a critical look at behavior analysis as a discipline, because I think that doing behavior analysis, as it currently exists, is not enough. Every one of us bears responsibility for making what we do bigger and better. And so my posts raised a number of issues that I think we should confront as we build the Behavior Analysis of the Future.
Eye of the Beholder
I like to tell myself that most Something Interesting posts are of general interest, however…. Skinner (1956) wrote of an early foray into behavioral research that, “The major result of this experiment is that some of my rats had babies.” Analogously for me, the result of many of my posts has mainly been to annoy ABAI’s beleaguered technical staff with too many boneheaded questions about how our blog-hosting platform works. Some posts didn’t attract a lot of readers (and just like with journal articles, what will and won’t find an audience is always a bit mysterious to me).
So the best I can do I apologize for efforts that didn’t rise to the standard conveyed by the title of this column. The reader is always right, and what’s “interesting” is in the eye the the beholder. Though I still maintain that there are general issues that should concern all behavior analysts, where I failed to grab your attention, that’s on me.
At least I had fun trying. For what it’s worth, here were my Top 5+1 favorite themes to write about (in no particular order):
- Structural challenges in our discipline, including overcommitment, practitioner burnout, and racial, geographic, and economic inequities in access to ABA services. Good people, bad circumstances!
- Profanity (Why the hell not??!) and other nontraditional issues in verbal behavior (e.g., see here and here). There are a lot of high-prevalence, non-disordered everyday behaviors that we must understand and explain in order to create a truly all-encompassing science of behavior.
- Subtle but powerful behavioral phenomena, like the mysterious repertoires of natural born clinicians (They have “it.” But what is “it?”) and the benefits of “trivial” social interactions (a crucial form of social behavior that behavior analysis has largely ignored).
- Reflections on how our science interfaces with society, including how we communicate about behavior analysis to non-behavior-analysts and how derived stimulus classes explain outsiders’ hostile views about behavior analysis. Can’t change the world without the world’s buy-in!
- Interesting non-behavior-analysis books (on topics like parenting and the sociocultural consequences of the Black Death and the cultural fetishizing of a body part). Because I believe we should all routinely read outside of our chosen discipline. There’s behavior everywhere.
- Behavioral repertoires worth emulating (e.g., here and here). Self-explanatory.
There’s Always a Countdown
Fun it has been, but having fun isn’t enough. There is a second principle that I hold dear: When you run out of useful things to say, you should stop talking. And sooner or later that reality will catch up to me, like it does everyone. Which is where you, I hope, come in. Give me a bit of space to explain.
One of the first things I noticed upon entering behavior analysis is that old behavior analysts don’t go away. It’s wonderful that people enjoy our discipline so much that they retain their enthusiasm for it long after the typical age of retirement. And there definitely are times when a voice of experience is just what a discipline needs. But an unfortunate side effect is that old coots [coot: see semantic note in the Postscript] with impressive track records and shiny reputations tend to cast a big shadow, such that talented younger behavior analysts get fewer opportunities to shine.
I noticed this phenomenon at my very first conference back in 1981. The roster of speakers and the association officers looked to me a bit like the U.S. Congress, and I recall wondering if this meant that, following a rather spectacular 1960s generation, behavior analysis was stalling out. But it took only a few bar conversations with people not in the spotlight to persuade me that talent is not generation-specific, even if moments in the spotlight can be.
Shadow-casting may be even more of a concern now than in my youth. Due to prodigious growth in our discipline, the average behavior analyst is now well under 40 years of age. Which means that old coots are becoming less and less representative of the discipline as a whole, even as more and more people wait patiently in their umbra. There are some spectacular early- to middle-career behavior analysts out there who are pushing the outside of various envelopes. As far as I’m concerned, these folks can’t become the face of the discipline fast enough.
Just to be clear, though, I’m interested in behavior, not calendars. Age doesn’t matter as long as you have useful ideas. Consider two of my favorite old coots: Peter Killeen has been around forever but keeps cranking out cutting-edge theoretical work, and Andy Lattal has been more productive in the lab since turning 70 than most people are in the “prime” of their careers. And there are those rare individuals who never become coots at all. Janet Twyman, who’s been around for as long as I can remember, still looks 26, still bounds around with the energy of a 16-year-old, and gets more done than any 36- or 46-year-old I know. Let’s keep people like this around as long as they’ll have us.
Your Job
But let’s also not dance around the future by focusing too much on exceptional cases. I have two challenges for you. The first and more general one is that, if you have something to say, if you think there’s something other behavior analysts ought to be talking about, find a way to SAY SOMETHING, even if you don’t think yours is a majority perspective. Even if it feels risky. And, especially, even if old coots who are invested in the status quo push back. Use whatever medium suits you and has the potential to reach an audience, whether that be journal articles or conference presentations or workshops or podcasts or whatever. I’m happy to help by supporting guest posts in the Something Interesting blog. In short, I’m saying that behavior analysis is what behavior analysts make it, and there’s no reason to let old coots have the only say. The more people who rattle our collective cages, the better I will sleep at night.
The second challenge is specific and personal. Sooner or later an oldish coot like me is going to run out of useful things to say. But that never stopped an old coot from bloviating, so I’m asking you to help me out. Here’s one more brief tale from my first conference. At that meeting I remember noticing an elderly behavior analyst who seemed to be always lurking on the periphery of various goings-on, a hopeful ghost, desperate for the living to notice him. When someone did notice him, he would talk… and talk… and talk… forcing others to eventually engineer an uncomfortable exit. I realized that this person, who once was a force in the discipline, must have outlived no only his contemporaries but also his grasp on what professional peers were interested in. He might’ve been only person who didn’t understand that. And even as a relative youngster, even with my poorly developed frontal cortex and hazy grasp of career trajectories, I knew I did NOT want to ever become that ghost.
When we reach the point where the Something Interesting column outlives its usefulness, I sure would rather know than to continue haunting the shadowy recesses of the internet, desperate to be noticed by a verbal community that has moved on from what concerns me. But like The Ghost, I probably won’t recognize what I’ve become. So, Dear Reader, I will kick off Year 2 with this request: When my time comes, clue me in. Do me a favor and tell me when it’s time to walk off into the light (“When you have something to say, you should say it”). you might picturre that as an awkward exchange, but I will thank you. I mean it.
Postscript: Coots
The dictionary says a coot is a harmless, but odd or foolish, old man (the word might derive from an ungainly water bird of the same name). But here I employ the term merely as an affectionate way to refer to any youth-challenged individual, regardless of gender. No offense intended to anyone.