Dear blog reader,
This month’s contributor is Kian Assemi, a doctoral candidate currently wrapping up his PhD at University of Nevado, Reno. Given the stage Kian is at in his academic and research journey, we wanted to ask him to reflect on his experiences to this point and what may stick out as being particularly important. In that vein, we asked Kian, as we have with all of our contributors, to reflect on his journey thus far within the context of encouraging cooperation and collaboration within the field as a whole. As you will see, Kian does so quite beautifully, and discusses an incredibly important issue in our science (and indeed others) — the need for humility. This seems particularly critical if we consider the general theme of these blogs and the reason for that theme; that is, escaping our isolated research silos, acknowledging none of us know everything, and being open to learning from one another for the benefit of our science (this is science and not religion after all!). So read on and enjoy this wonderfully reflective and important contribution.
Colin and Dermot
About the author:
Kian received his master’s degree in applied Behavior Analysis from Fresno State. He then worked as a BCBA for a year before becoming a doctoral student in Ramona Houmanfar’s lab at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2019. His primary research interest is verbal behavior. He has published and presented research pertaining to various topics, including relational frame theory, cultural humility, applied behavior analysis in animal shelters, and acceptance and commitment therapy. He has worked in various organizational settings, such as the medical school at the University of Nevada, Reno. Currently he serves on the editoral board for Behavior and Social Issues. Kian plans to graduate in the Spring of 2025 and become an academic.
From Dogma to Skepticism: The Essential Role of Humility in Scientific Discovery and Learning
While I am approaching the end of my doctoral education in behavior analysis, I am still a student. As such, rather than outlining my own research I feel the best contribution I can make is to share the perspective I have on the utility of humility in science. Certainly, I am not the first to highlight the topic of humility, and I believe it is a growing topic in behavior analysis. However, I’d like to share my own experience with respect to it, and some thoughts I have on the subject.
I became interested in psychology because there was a point in my life that I began to examine my own habits and struggled to explain them. I couldn’t understand my own behavior, or the behavior of others. I started finding that examining my own behavior resulted in benefits beyond understanding; I was also able to improve my life by doing so. This led me to change my major in college to psychology. During my undergraduate education I took a course on the history of psychology taught by a behavior analyst named Criss Wilhite. I learned about radical behaviorism and found that it really resonated with me. Embracing determinism gave me a strange comfort. Not only was it conducive to explaining behavior in orderly terms, but it also relinquished blame to some extent, allowing me to become more accepting of my own mistakes, as my behavior was the product of my history. After all, the mistakes I made were part of what brought me here. Similarly, the behavior of others that I saw as cruel or obnoxious was no longer the work of a sinister free-willed agent, but the result of historical conditioning. Furthermore, attributing behavior to history rather than personality also meshed well for me, because I always felt that people labeled my personality incorrectly and in a way that felt constricting. I wasn’t introverted or extroverted. I was both, it simply depended on the context.
While I loved the philosophy of radical behaviorism, I was originally very interested in subjective features of perception. Unfortunately, I was told by some professors that behavior analysis could not possibly explain such a topic. It wasn’t until I had more conversations with behavior analysts at Fresno State that I encountered Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior (Skinner, 1957) and relational frame theory (Hayes, et al., 2001) that I was fully committed to behavior analysis.
I earned my M.A. in behavior analysis at Fresno State University before coming to the University of Nevada, Reno to pursue my Ph.D. From my experience as a student, I’ve noticed one particularly important thing that I feel isn’t frequently talked about: humility in science. I have gotten the sense that people tend to fear asking certain questions, seemingly because they don’t want to appear to not already know the answer. I make this generalization not simply based on my observations of the behavior of others, but my own as well. I have often felt a sense of fear at certain moments during classes when I feel I don’t completely understand something, especially if it is something fundamental to what is being talked about (e.g., what is behavior?). I didn’t want to appear to not know. There have been too many occasions in which I refrained from asking questions in such circumstances. I look back on this with regret, and I encourage students to do the opposite. I am by no means perfect at following this recommendation, but I have certainly improved in these situations over time, and I can confidently say that I can recall no instance during which I regretted asking a question I feared asking. In most circumstances, I felt a sense of liberation and relief. It would often be followed by others asking questions and generating a conversation that benefited me and seemingly others.
I don’t think the fear of appearing to not know something is exclusive to students. I think it is relatively common. I have encountered several circumstances in which a person who doesn’t know the answer to a question somehow changes the subject. I view this issue as ironic because when I think about the times that I’ve heard a professor admit to not knowing the answer to a question, or not being knowledgeable on a certain topic, my opinion of them has never diminished. In fact, most of these experiences resulted in my respect for the professor to grow. It demonstrates that the professor is not trying to manufacture an impression, they are genuine, trying to understand things, and acknowledge that there is always more to learn.
Related to the fear of being wrong or not knowing is the fear of receiving criticism. It is an ironic fear for a scientist, given that the progress of science is facilitated by criticizing explanations and experiments. Early in my time at UNR, in my Applied Research Methods class, Steve Hayes said to the class that one day relational frame theory and acceptance and commitment therapy will be replaced with more useful theories and technologies. I hold a lot of appreciation for such a statement. I imagine it is common for people who have made their career on their theories and technologies to be resistant to replacements for them due to a desire to have one’s name behind a popular contribution. Kantor has warned about the dangers of “autistic self-expression” (Kantor, 1953, p. 106). This was, of course, before autism was in the DSM, and what he was warning readers about was the tendency to conduct science for political reasons pertaining to one’s own image. An important feature of science is its corrigibility (Kantor, 1953). If we are unwilling to accept criticism, or ideas alternative to our own, we are stifling genuine progress. Indeed, when someone criticizes a person’s work, they are doing the person a favor and allowing them to address potential shortcomings. Whether the person criticizing the work is motivated by petty reasons or a genuine hope to help is irrelevant. All criticism should be taken seriously. I acknowledge that it can be difficult to receive, and it can be emotional, but it is nevertheless important. I think it is vital for all scientists to attempt to become comfortable with such situations, even though this may be a never-ending effort.
As I alluded to previously, I recall my first experience learning about radical behaviorism being incredibly satisfying. I felt almost like I was becoming enlightened. It was as though I could finally articulate and see “the truth.” I recall describing it as if I had been “unplugged from the matrix” (as in the movie). It seemed that I was seeing the universal “base coding” of behavior. It was only later that I saw this as an actual disadvantage. This outlook was conducive to dogmatism – that there is an objective reality called “truth” of which I had perceptual contact and understanding. I believed reinforcement was the truth of why organisms behaved. As if there was a mechanism built into organisms that resulted in them seeking out and consuming reinforcement as a reason to behave. Amy Odum wrote an excellent article that touched on different ways of speaking that imply hypothetical constructs (Odum, 2011). Saying “organism behave because behavior produces a reinforcer” treats reinforcement as a hypothetical mechanism while saying “reinforcers increase the likelihood of future behavior” treats reinforcement as an empirical relation that can be observed. I would like to emphasize at this point that I am not accusing all radical behaviorists of thinking of reinforcement in a way appealing to a hypothetical construct, I am just highlighting that I fell into that trap without knowing it.
What finally inhibited this dogmatic orientation to the world was when I came to the University of Nevada, Reno, and took a philosophy class taught by Linda Hayes. It was there that I learned about interbehaviorism. I recall having a similar experience learning about interbehaviorism as I had with radical behaviorism. Yet again, I felt I was being “unplugged from the matrix.” This presented a conspicuous issue. If I could feel “unplugged from the matrix” more than once, then I am simply in another matrix, waiting to be unplugged yet again ad infinitum. This experience provided me with a healthy sense of humility and skepticism. I learned that I know the absolute truth of nothing, and my best hope was to make a small step toward a better orientation to behavior rather than the “base code of the universe.” For me, the product of science became increasingly useful descriptions of events, not objective truths of the world. As a result, I began to use variations of an important phrase more often: “I don’t know” (e.g., “I’m not positive, but my view is…” “Take my thoughts with a grain of salt…” “I don’t know enough to talk about that topic intellectually.” etc.).
There is a relevant term from the healthcare field called cultural humility (Tervalon and Murray-Garcia, 1998) that involves several components important to delivering care to patients. One component relevant to the current topic is developing an attitude of “not knowing.” I believe this to be an imperative characteristic for scientists. Skepticism and refraining from dogmatism are critical in science. Scientists develop constructs to better understand events, but there is an important distinction between their constructs and the events being described (Hayes et al., 1997). The two will never be the same. Any description of an event will never truly do justice to the event itself. This doesn’t mean we should refrain from describing events, but that we should maintain a recognition that what we are doing will never be perfect, and science will always be corrigible, without an endpoint.
The topic of building this sort of humility reminds me of some work conducted at UNR that speaks to the prevalence of a reluctance to identify a situation in which one does not know an answer. In my early days as a student at UNR, I met Patrick Smith, a senior student who helped train me to teach a PSY101 course. He conducted an interesting dissertation (Smith, 2023) relevant to the topic at hand. It pertained to participants emitting responses indicating that they did not know the answer to a question. Patrick found that participants were generally bad at indicating when they did not know the answer to a question when they could not possibly know the answer. However, he also found that training has the potential to improve identifying such circumstances.
Related to acknowledging what we don’t know, I think in behavior analysis, we sometimes act as though we can see the future, and this leads individuals within the field to criticize the area of work of their colleagues. I believe humility should extend across philosophy, theory, experimentation, and applications of science. It seems like people sometimes criticize those who do not have the same goals as their own. For example, those with applied interests may criticize experiments with seemingly no applied utility (and vice versa). After all, the primary benefit science offers society seems to be the technology it affords us. While at a personal level, I am particularly interested in basic experimental work that I feel will lead to applied utility, I find criticism of basic experiments that are motivated by curiosity rather than applied utility, to be disheartening for several reasons. Firstly, in the same way that music and other sorts of art are consumed as a leisure activity, why would it not be okay for scientists to produce something similar? One may argue that funding is being wasted to satisfy curiosity rather than to solve the critical societal issues of today. However, it should be appreciated that psychology is a relatively young science, and we should consider how technologies developed in sciences with longer histories, such as physics. Doing so would provide several examples of circumstances of discoveries which were initially motivated by curiosity and subsequently led to significant applications. Similarly, in physics, much of the time research that was motivated by curiosity was often criticized.
In 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was conducting studies involving a Crookes tube to explore electrical discharges in gases. At the time these experiments had no obvious applied value. While conducting these experiments, he noticed a fluorescent screen glowing despite it not being in the direct path of the rays. Out of curiosity, he covered the Crookes tube to block the visible light, but the glow persisted. This suggested to Roentgen that there was some other sort of invisible ray being emitted. From there, he conducted a series of experiments, from which he discovered that these invisible rays could pass through material that wasn’t particularly dense. Therefore, it would pass through flesh, but not bone. He called them “X-rays” due to their unknown nature. Shortly after this, John Hall-Edwards used the X-ray to diagnose a broken bone.
Similarly, in the early 1600s Galileo’s studies on inertia did not immediately hold applied utility. Subsequently in the late 1600s, with the development of Newtonian mechanics, the utility of his work became more apparent. In the 1800s it had wide scale practical application in engineering for things like bridge building, and eventually for railroads.
While there are many other examples of scientific work in physics with seemingly no applied utility until later, and curiosity setting the eventual foundation for important technology, my point is that we don’t necessarily have the foresight to know what will be useful in the future. Ultimately, my position is that scientists should follow what is important to them, whether it be to satisfy their own curiosity or to attend to practical issues. I will give a personal caveat to this in that if a scientist is inflicting harm to an organism in pursuit of satisfying curiosity, my stance is different.
To conclude, my advice for a student aspiring to become a behavior analyst is to embrace what they don’t know. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Be as respectful as possible, but do not inhibit questions out of fear of offending someone or appearing ignorant. We are all ignorant about a vastly larger portion of topics than the ones we have mastered. Recognize that there will eventually be a better way of understanding everything we think we understand and be open to alternatives accordingly. There is no shame in not knowing, and what we know will always be corrected and improved upon. Embrace this circumstance.
References
Hayes, L. J., Adams, M. A., & Dixon, M. R. (1997). Causal constructs and conceptual confusions. The Psychological Record, 47, 97-112.
Hayes, S. C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (2001). Relational frame theory: A post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Kantor, J. R. (1953). The logic of modern science. Principia Press.
Odum A. L. (2011) Delay discounting: I’m a K, you’re a K. Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior. 96, 427–439.
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Smith, P. (2023). Improvements in the frequency and accuracy of “I cannot know” type answers to three term series word problems by multiple exemplar training of relational skills and Instructional content (Doctoral dissertation, University of Nevada, Reno).
Tervalon, M., & Murray-Garcia, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of health care for the poor and underserved, 9, 117-125.