Just as I was finishing up this post, it happened again.
IT is when some culturally-sensitive issue crops up on a listserv to which I subscribe, and a predictable cycle of events follows. First a few people stake out contrasting positions. Others then chime in to affirm or refute those positions. Nothing substantive is added after the first day or two, but comments snowball emotionally until all sides are disgusted with one another and the thread dies out, usually with nobody persuading anyone of anything.
Since nothing gets resolved, the function of these conversations seems to be, not to inform or even debate, but rather to parcel participants into silos. Enough is said for people to declare their tribal allegiances and to make “with me or against me” evaluations of others, and once that requirement is satisfied the participants drift away. A cynic would say that what they cared about was less the topic under discussion and more discovering with whom it is safe to share a silo. That’s unfortunate.
Silos
To understand why I care about silos, you have to consider that, even with the vast expansion of applied behavior analysis practice in recent years, even counting all behavior analysts, we’re not such a big movement. All of behavior analysis is smaller than both USA Triathlon, a decidedly niche organization of no obvious relevance to the Fate of the World, and the U.S. Libertarian political party, which is laughably inert when it comes to influencing national policy.
Our discipline is thus a very tiny slice of a very big world that needs more help with each passing day. Our tendency to fractionate compromises the kind of impact we might have if we spoke and acted together.
An evolutionary analogy. Evolutionary biology offers a decent model of how we become silo-ed in the first place. One way that a founding population can splinter is through geographic isolation: Different subpopulations, isolated in different places, function independently and evolve differently. We’ve approximated this by creating countless institutions to represent and advance behavior analysis. Example: Although we are a movement of modest size, we have something like 20 scholarly journals. Does anyone believe we produce enough top-notch scholarly work to support so many? Another example: I have lost count of all of the member organizations which have popped up at the international, national, regional, state, and local levels, not to mention all of the ancillary Boards, Institutes, Centers, and Foundations. Do we really have enough committed behaviorists, enough resources, to justify so many entities?
Of course, natural selection is driven by variation, so presumably some silo-ing is healthy. And of course it’s a subjective call as to how many silos is “too many.” With respect to journals, however, elsewhere I’ve shown objective data indicating we have too many. With respect to organizations, simply ask yourself to what extent the success of one of them comes at the expense of others. Many of our institutions have overlapping missions, which is an inefficient use of resources for a smallish discipline. And to some extent, the leaders of those institutions are aware of the redundancies. I’ve been on the inside of a number of our behavior analytic institutions, and you’d be surprised how often leaders of one group derogate other institutions for going about behavior analysis “the wrong way,” and how averse they can be to proposal for collaborating with other groups on some project. All of that is a pretty good hint that they those other institutions as competitors rather than partners or colleagues.
Another way a founding population splinters is through reproductive isolation, which can imply behavioral rather than geographic barriers to intermixing. Biologically compatible subpopulations become so behaviorally distinct that they cease to interact. In behavior analysis, our subgroups employ separate vocabularies and practice separate situations, which they teach to their “offspring.”
C’mon, admit it. If you’re not a Precision Teacher, do you grasp the religious significance of the Standard Celeration Chart? If you’re not an RFT insider, I challenge you to explain what DAARRE is (nope, it’s not sending cops into classrooms to mitigate drug use and gang involvement). If you’re not a SQABie, do equations make you queasy? Do you have any clue what a behaviorologist is?
Internecine squabbles. I want to be very clear about two things. First, I offer all of these examples with love (the relevant sub-groups do work for which I have much respect), and only to illustrate how disconnected we are from one another. Second, the problem is not just that we specialize in different things, but that we impugn people who do different things than us. For instance, Precision Teachers have not always had nice things to say about folks with the gall to employ equal interval graphs. RFT insiders and outsiders have not always been… chummy. Scientists and practitioners tend to roll their eyes at each other. And so on. If you were to magically forbid this kind of tribalism, I believe behavior analysts would have nothing to talk about at conference bar gatherings.
And so we build and defend our silos. We appear to be more concerned with the differences among behavior analysts (with deciding who is an isn’t might even thing than we are with finding common ground to maximize our discipline’s impact.
Fortresses
We do something very similar when it comes to our professional appraisals of ad interactions with people who are not behavior analysts.
If you have a conventional education in behavior analysis, you’ve likely been told that our discipline developed an approach to science that’s unlike pretty much anything that came before, and is light years ahead of how science is conduced in most other quarters where behavior is of interest. You might have been told that people who aren’t behavior analysts not only are wrong, they’re dangerous. Their ideas muddle things in a way that causes you to take your eye off of the behavioral prize and draw faulty conclusions about how the world works, so you definitely don’t want to interact with them. You’ve probably been told that correcting the sins of their science is a primary motivation for doing things our way.
I like our science, a lot, but I don’t tend to subscribe to those views, and in past posts I’ve tried to dispel them. For instance, I asked how you would prove that our approach is objectively better, and I did a whole series of posts extolling the virtues of a broad knowledge base that you can get only through interdisciplinary engagement.
Here I want to take a different tack by suggesting that you read a recent post on Adam Mastroiani’s Experimental History blog (you can also access the post as an audio file). FYI, the author is a psychologist who writes engagingly so that his posts, which tend to run a bit long, feel effortless to digest. The post I’m recommending asks what’s wrong with contemporary Psychology, and how that might be fixed.
Now, the post doesn’t use behavior analysis language or even our standard arguments about possible shortcomings in other disciplines, but I think that if you give it a chance you will find a lot of common ground. Here are a few of the main points:
- Whatever its accomplishments, when it comes to public acceptance, psychological science still struggles to outpace folk psychology and outright malarky.
- The acid test of our knowledge is whether it can be used to reliably effect change, and a lot of Psychology doesn’t come close to meeting this standard.
- Psychology won’t be a social force until its most effective ideas can be readily disseminated technologies that don’t require a PhD to implement.
I submit that there’s a lot of Skinner and Baer-Wolf-Risley in there, despite the fact that (as far as I can tell, anyway) the author’s background intersects with mine not at all. In other words, the world of non-behavior-analysts includes people who both do and don’t “get it,” and people who “get it” are potential allies if we allow them to be.
But what that means requires a more nuanced approach than simply categorizing people as behavior analysts and “something else.” Which is a discrimination we love to make.
Here’s a case study to illustrate. Some years ago I was charged with arranging a keynote speaker for a major behavior analysis conference. I chose Anders Ericsson, who at the time was making a splash with his “10,000 hours” account of the development of high-level expertise. His account is more nuanced than in popular-press treatments, but here’s the gist: (a) Exceptional skill comes from tons of practice, with feedback, in a context of successive approximations. (b) The notion of fixed “individual differences” is way overblown. Unless I totally misinterpret my training as a behavior analyst, that’s hardly heretical stuff.
Ericsson was excited to visit with us. He agreed to accept much less than his customary speaker fee because he recognized us as Fellow Travelers in the eternal clash of “Nature” and “Nurture” perspectives. He definitely resonated to Skinner’s view that what’s worth concentrating on is what can change, and he clearly believed that what we call contingencies can create a lot of change.
But when Ericsson’s address was announced, I received nasty notes from several Famous Behavior Analysts who objected that, “He’s not even a behavior analyst!” and “He talks about cognition!” Some of those folks said they would boycott the address.
My point is simply that drawing strict distinctions between “us” and “them” might make us feel proud for having defended our intellectual standards, but doing so tends to leave us lonely — veritable saints in the desert.
Percenters
And that’s not a necessary outcome, even if we believe ourselves to be closer to The Absolute Truth than other people. In his fascinating book The Persuaders, which focuses on successful communicators in politics, Anand Giridharadas notes that, in the political world, if you seek out only people with whom you agree on everything, you’ll probably never find a candidate to vote for or someone with which to share the burden of pursuing important civic projects.
The alternative is to approach things contextually, to identify where you do and don’t agree with various parties, and to harness the points of convergence without pretending this sullies you in some way. In a 2022 radio interview, the author gave the following example. Let’s say you are passionate about women’s health issues. You could look with disdain at the Girl Scout organization because of its lack of support for women’s reproductive freedoms. However, overall you might agree 90% with the organization, which does a lot to promote female health. So, if you are interested in promoting breast cancer awareness and early detection, should you reject the Girl Scouts as a potential partner because of its abortion stand? Or should you set aside your differences to work together on this shared priority?
Effective politicians, the author says, do the latter, and I’m saying this also ought to be our approach to collegial relations with non-behavior-analysts. It’s the behavioral approach, and if you need further persuading (albeit in nonbehavioral language), listen to the excellent TED talk by activist Loretta Ross below. I think it should be required background for every behavior analysis student.
Ask yourself:
- What have you done to actively “call people in” to behavior analysis? Do you have a strategy for identifying the “conditional allies” that Ross describes?
- Do you “call people out” (for instance, when you don’t like how they speak of or intervene with behavior)? And if you do, what’s the result? Do they become more likely to seek you and approach problems your way?
But back to Anders Ericsson. His work has been cited close to 114,000 times. He also was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, the focus of numerous popular press articles and interviews, and a key subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Outliers. Seems to me that if I wanted to accomplish something on behalf of behavior analysis, if I wanted to spread the gospel about the amazing power to effect behavior change of the right kind of experience, I could do it a lot easier with a guy like Ericsson on my side. Even if he did occasionally speak of cognition (insert 😱 here).
I am sure you and Adam Mastroiani (and Anders Ericsson, and Anand Giridharadas, and Loretta Ross) won’t see eye to eye on everything, but you’ve got some shared values and priorities. And there are lots of potential allies like this out there. Embrace the connections and you will improve your odds of spreading behavior analysis far and wide.