ABA’s Eighth Dimension

There is a dimension beyond that which is known to behavior analysts…
a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.
— Rod Serling, “The Twilight Zone” opening credits (paraphrased)

Behavior analysis has had many successes worth celebrating… but one overarching failure. The successes are varied enough to fuel optimism that our science really is, as Skinner told us, adaptable to pretty much any problem involving behavior. The failure lies in recruiting people who are not behavior analysts to share in the enthusiasm.

Sure, we have a major boom in autism services (try persuading an overworked practitioner that people aren’t enthusiastic about behavior analysis!). But because that sector of behavior analysis has grown so prodigiously it’s easy to forget that we remain a niche discipline. I’m not criticizing here, just reading the numbers. Try comparing any objective measure of interest in behavior analysis to that of more mainstream disciplines — I’m talking about citation counts, article downloads, membership in professional organizations, altmetric stats like posts in X/Twitter or mentions in public policy documents, and so on. In every case you’ll find that even our most popular, in-demand stuff has caught the eye of a relative few.

There’s not a lot about behavior analysis that I would change, but when I look at what we all, collectively, have created, I think we missed one critical point: A science that doesn’t sell doesn’t change the world.

Skinner told us that we could solve any behavior problem, and the world would be better off if we did. That makes the spreading of our gospel not just an aspiration, but an ethical imperative. Behavior analysts generally agree that people should have to right to the best that our science of behavior can give them. This means, of course, that behavior analysts have the ethical responsibility to give it to them. Not to craft small proof-of-concept experiments or create resource-intensive clinics that can never be replicated or write persuasive-sounding conceptual analyses. No, “giving it to them” means getting what works implemented on whatever scale it takes to move the old meaningfulness meter.

It follows that if we can’t get people excited about behavior analysis, then we’re not implementing, and therefore not delivering.

So let’s formalize this. I’m mostly talking about applied behavior analysis (ABA), though of course it’s important to explain the value of basic science too. As every reader of this blog knows, Baer, Wolf, and Risley (1968) offered the seminal and defining account of ABA, the famous “seven dimensions” framework, which is summarized in white below.

A guiding idea in my blogging has been that, in order to assure that behavior analysis is not the proverbial tree falling in the woods, there should be an Eighth Dimension focusing on getting what we do to the people. To make a difference, to capitalize on the potential that comes from doing what Baer et al. described, ABA has to be accessible, by which I mean at least four things.

1. We must explain what we do in a way that’s engaging and understandable.
   We do what’s necessary to understand people’s existing verbal repertoires and to meet those organisms where they are. This implies research and applied technology focused on verbal behavior at a different level of analysis than emphasized in systems like Skinner’s Verbal Behavior and Relational Frame Theory. We need a science of persuasion.
2. We must work as hard to promote behavior analysis as we do to create and apply it.
   That means employing whatever media are available and will reach people. Outreach can mean speaking to and collaborating with community organizations and writing for local newspapers and building a social media presence and and working with policy makers and creating interesting television and film and so on and so on. Wherever eyes and ears may be found, there should be a behavior analyst showing how to build better lives. Important side note: Behavior analysts won’t systematically embrace this kind of outreach unless the discipline actively values it. We teach our students about academic journals and conferences, and those serve a purpose, but they are not dissemination vehicles. I think that all graduate training in behavior analysis should include a healthy dose of dissemination education.
3. We must routinely demonstrate that our solutions make a difference in ways people intuitively understand.
   Both science and practice prosper by focusing on well-defined behaviors, but the prevailing culture doesn’t think this way. Lovaas understood this when, for his work on early-intensive behavioral intervention, he chose to emphasize outcomes like school placement and IQ scores. Let’s be clear here: Doing that kind of thing may seem to runs afoul of the behavioral dimension of ABA, but think of it this way. The mechanical and electronic components of your car cannot, in most cases, be explained simply, but your car gets you to work every morning. Similarly, the stuff that makes behavioral science and practice effective might require a specialist to understand, but what is accomplished should fit with societal expectations of what really matters.
4. Once we have solutions, we must make them available to everyone.
   Behavior analysis is very good at rigorous, impactful, small-scale interventions, but we don’t always take the important next step of scaling up. The more people who are affected by some problem, the bigger the required machinery of intervention (think: PBIS). To wit: In actuarial terms, autism is a small concern, affecting only a tiny slice of the population. Even here we have yet to operate at sufficient scale. Most of our solutions require intensive one-one-one attention to a single individual, and we don’t train enough practitioners to meet demand for that service or have ways to fund all of the services that are needed. The result is that a lot of people with autism don’t even have the opportunity to benefit from ABA. To do better we would need solutions that map onto societal systems and are implemented widely, even universally. What’s discouraging is that even in the world of autism, our discipline’s best-case scenario currently, I just don’t hear much discussion of what universal access would look like or how it might be achieved.

In general terms what I’m pushing with this example is embracing ignorance without fearing it. The four goals mentioned above for our Eighth Dimension of ABA have one thing in common: We don’t yet know enough about how to accomplish them. And we never will if we don’t plunge in and work our butts off on pursuing them. In that pursuit, we’ll likely do some amateurish things and have a low batting average of successes at first, but as a community of scientists and practitioners we ought to try. Our discipline deserves that much.

For role models, look no further than the first generation of applied behavior analysts, who entered developmental centers and psychiatric hospitals and prisons and confronted behavior problems that were thought to be intractable. One of my favorite things in all of behavior analysis is Ted Ayllon’s reaction (quoted in Alexandra Rutherford’s [2009] Beyond the Box) to the notion of using derived from animal experiments to address the behavior of people who society regarded as beyond help. The gist of his thoughts: I didn’t think it would work, but I figured I might as well see for myself.

The first applied behavior analysts had no pre-defined solutions to guide them. But they tried something, and they tried something else, and they kept trying until they could reliably make good things happen. The reason we are able to help people with autism today, the reason so many practitioners are in demand, is that the founders were open to making mistakes on the way to making fewer mistakes and eventually getting really skilled at behavior change.

None other than Baer, Wolf, and Risley (1987) pointed out that, “Failures teach.” Similarly, Skinner told us, ““A failure is not always a mistake. It may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”

With a nod to the good folks who are already engaging with Eighth Dimension problems — Kudos! We need to learn from you! — it’s time for our discipline to put those problems front and center, to give them the same kind of attention as ABA’s other seven dimensions. Among other things that means:

• Making Eighth Dimension goals and techniques a cornerstone of behavior analysis education
• Granting the same status to Eighth Dimension accomplishments as we do to more traditional successes
• Creating research programs on Eighth Dimension problems that are as systematic and rigorous as those guided by the original seven dimensions
• Building systems into academic departments, professional organizations, and practitioner agencies that expressly reward Eighth Dimension efforts
• Rejiggering our journals to require their articles to grant more attention to Eighth Dimension issues (and, no, standard social validity data are not enough)

When we prioritize ABA’s Eighth Dimension we are bound to make a lot of mistakes, but they can be informative mistakes that will make us better. And, when we eventually succeed, when Eighth Dimension prowess finally is woven into everything we do, our discipline may look a bit strange to us, because we’ll need to evolve in order to meet new goals. Which is perfectly fine, because

• As Skinner told us in The Shaping of a Behaviorist, we should, “Regard no practice as immutable. Change and be ready to change again.”
• We’ve given seven dimensions a good go, but more than half a century of structuring ABA around them simply has not yielded much Eighth Dimension progress — and you know what they say about the definition of insanity.

No, to break out of our little niches, to become the positive force in a big world that we’ve always imagined behavior analysis could be, we must be willing to become whatever is demanded of us. And changing the world, as behavior analysts love to say they can do, demands dissemination and implementation on a scale not imagined in a seven-dimension conception of ABA.