This is my final “Something Interesting” post. If you followed along at any point, thanks! I don’t know what else these posts accomplished, but I had a lot of fun writing them. Know that I (almost) always wrote with you in mind, rather than giving in to my aging-professor instinct to simply be enraptured by my own voice.
Parting advice: (1) Work hard to help people understand why behavior analysis is special, but also ask hard questions about it. (2) Think creatively about how to make behavior analysis better, including by trying to make sense of things behavior analysts don’t normally focus on (like this and this and this). (3) As the present post suggests, spend more energy on finding productive synergies with other people than on delineating how your perspective is unique. Saving the world is a team effort.
“Friend” as a Contextual Concept
As I was working on this post, it happened again.
It is when some culturally-sensitive or scientifically-unsettled issue crops up on a listserv, triggering a predictable series of events. First a few people stake out contrasting positions. Then others 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, in the vacuum of silent eye-rolling, the thread dies out, usually with nobody persuading anyone of anything.
On the surface, there is no obvious point to these episodes, but just because the debate isn’t resolved doesn’t mean nothing happens. As views are shared, people make “with me or against me” evaluations about one another, and typically the participants drift away once everyone is neatly parceled into tribal silos… suggesting that this is in fact the function of the conversation.
And that shouldn’t surprise us. Humans are social creatures, and many primates (including humans in hunter-gatherer cultures) are known for organizing into rather small groups that are wary of other groups. Silo-ing, therefore, seems to go way back in our evolutionary history. As much as we’d like to think of ourselves as intellectually enlightened, we remain very picky about whom we’ll accept as Silo Buddies. And, consistent with that contemporary phenomenon called cancel culture, we’re very quick to ostracize those who don’t meet our silo standards. That’s very human, but for purposes of maintaining a vibrant discipline, it’s counterproductive.
Silos
To understand the problem with silos, consider that, even with the vast expansion of applied behavior analysis practice in recent years, even counting all living behavior analysts, we’re not such a big movement. Behavior analysis is smaller than USA Triathlon, a decidedly niche organization of no obvious relevance to the Fate Of The Free World (sorry, triathlete pals, I know you see it differently). It’s smaller than the U.S. Libertarian political party, which is laughably inert when it comes to influencing national policy. Followers of the Instagram account Stick Nation [Stick Tok on TikTok], who share videos of awesome sticks they’ve found, outnumber behavior analysts about 10 to 1. They outnumber readers of the typical blog post on this site by about 10,000 to 1.
Thus our discipline is 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.
Evolutionary biology offers a decent model of how we find ourselves in different silos. A biological population can splinter through geographic isolation: Different subpopulations, living in different places, evolve separately and come to function independently. Behavior analysts have metaphorically mimicked geographic isolation by creating countless institutions to represent and advance the discipline. 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?
Presumably some intellectual silo-ing is healthy because it assures that different sub-groups are working on different things in different ways, thereby providing the variation on which selection processes depend. And it’s a subjective call as to how many silos is “too many,” but with respect to journals, at least, elsewhere I’ve shown objective data indicating we indeed have too many. With respect to our organizations, well, many simply have overlapping missions, which is an inefficient use of resources for a smallish discipline.
Here’s an example. In September, 2025, ABAI will host a conference on single-case methodology. In one sense, that’s great, because recent advances make your grandpa’s single-subject designs archaic. Yet by the time ABAI’s conference convenes, the Wing Institute will have already hosted three annual conferences on more or less the same topic. Sure, these conferences differ in structure and scope, but does anyone really believe our discipline needs four single-case conferences in three years? Couldn’t something more impactful (and less redundant) have been accomplished with the interested parties collaborating?
To some extent, leaders of behavior analytic institutions are aware of such redundancies. I’ve been on the inside of a number of those institutions, and you’d be surprised how averse leaders of one group can be to collaborating with other groups on some project. That’s a pretty good hint that they view other institutions as competitors rather than partners or colleagues.
A key aspect of the competition concerns battling it out over the “correct” way to study and describe behavior. To extend our evolutionary analogy, note that when biological subpopulations separate, they develop different behavioral tendencies that affect their likelihood of intermingling. For example, leopard frogs and wood frogs technically can interbreed, but due to dissimilar mating calls, do not recognize each other as potential mating partners.
Analogously, as behavior analysts have occupied different silos, they have developed different ways of communicating that interfere with the cross-fertilization of ideas. C’mon, admit it. If you’re not a Precision Teacher, I doubt you understand the deep religious significance of the Standard Celeration Chart. If you’re not an RFT insider, I bet you can’t explain what DAARRE is (nope, it’s not cops trying to prevent teen drug use and gang involvement). If you’re not a SQABie, you probably don’t speak Equationese, and does anyone except a behaviorologist know what a behaviorologist is? Whatever purpose these varied ways of approaching behavior may serve, they are not warm invitations to behavior analysts from other sub-populations.
I want to be very clear about two things. First, these examples are offered with love (the relevant sub-groups do work that I respect) and merely to illustrate how disconnected we are from one another. Second, the problem is not that we specialize in different things, but that we reject people whose “thing” are different things than ours. For instance, Precision Teachers have not always had nice things to say about folks with the audacity to employ equal interval graphs (and, oops, conversely, my equal-interval self just poked fun at The Chart – sorry!). RFT insiders and outsiders have not always been chummy. Hatfield-McCoy-style feuds separate people who do and don’t approve of methods that employ hypothetical scenarios and verbal reports (e.g., discounting). And of course scientists and practitioners may as well be dogs and cats.
Thus we build and defend our silos, apparently more concerned with delineating the differences among behavior analysts than with finding common ground to maximize our discipline’s impact.
Fortresses
Now, silo-ing is how we treat each other, but we do something similar when it comes to people who are not behavior analysts.
If you have a conventional education in behavior analysis, you’ve likely been told that our discipline developed a science that’s far superior to how behavior is studied anywhere else. You may have been told that non-behavior-analysts not just are wrong; they’re dangerous because their practices cause you to draw faulty conclusions about how behavior works. You definitely don’t want to interact with them.
I like our science, a lot, but I don’t subscribe to those views, which in past posts I’ve tried to dispel (for instance, in a previous post I asked how you would ever 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). I’m a fan of learning everything we can from everyone, including people who aren’t behavior analysts. But you can’t learn from someone you’ve “canceled” because they failed to meet your rigorous behavior analytic standards.
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 framework is more nuanced than in popular-press descriptions, but here’s the gist: (a) Exceptional skill comes from tons of practice, with feedback, in a context of successive approximations, and (b) because learning is so powerful, popular assumptions about fixed “individual differences” are way overblown. Unless I totally misinterpret my training as a behavior analyst, that’s pretty close to how we see things.
Ericsson was excited to visit with us. He agreed to accept less than his customary speaker fee because he recognized us as Fellow Travelers in the eternal struggle between “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.
MIDDLE: A scholarly compendium on expert performance. (image credit: Cambridge University Press).
RIGHT: Perhaps my favorite Ericsson article, which expertly (pun intended) dismantles a Nature-first perspective on behavior development, in a way that broadly echoes Skinner in “Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Behavior.”
But when Ericsson’s address was announced, I received nasty notes from several Famous Behavior Analysts who objected that he was not a behavior analyst and he sometimes spoke of cognition. Some of those folks said they would boycott the address. Presumably they assumed nothing useful is to be found in Ericsson’s work.
Drawing strict distinctions between “us” and “them” might make us feel noble for defending our intellectual standards, but it also leaves us isolated and short of allies. Note that Ericsson’s work has been cited close to 116,000 times. Unlike most behavior analysts, he 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 of experience to create behavior change, I could do it more easily with a guy like Ericsson on my side… even if he did occasionally speak of cognition (😱).
Meeting People Where They Are
To sum up in plain English, we often seem to get angry at people, both behavior analysts and outsiders, who don’t approach behavior quite like we do. From a behavior analytic standpoint, this makes zero sense. Concerning those outside of the discipline, well, they’re doing the best that they can given their immersion in a verbal community that’s hazy on how behavior works. Being unkind to them is a form of victim blaming. Concerning how we treat other behavior analysts, B.F. Skinner himself urged us to not get too holy about having all the answers (“Regard no practice as immutable. Change and be ready to change again. Accept no eternal verity;” 1979, p. 346).
When “being right” assumes primacy over being influential, maybe it’s time to take a humility pill. Because to be effective in changing the world, we need allies, and cancel culture is the polar opposite of recruiting allies.
Here it can be instructive to examine the practices of people who are effective at recruiting allies. For instance, Anand Giridharadas‘ book The Persuaders highlights successful political communicators who understand that, if you seek out only people with whom you agree on everything, you’ll be searching a long time. You’ll probably never find someone to share your burden of pursuing important civic projects. Or even a candidate you’ll feel comfortable voting for.
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 dirties 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 namby-pamby position on women’s reproductive rights. However, overall you might agree with 90% of the organization’s efforts to promote female health. So, if you are interested in promoting, say, breast cancer awareness and early detection, should you reject the Girl Scouts as a potential partner because of its abortion stand? Giridharadas argues that you cheat yourself if you don’t at least consider setting aside your differences to work together on shared priorities.
I’m saying this also ought to be our approach to collegial relations. It’s the behavioral approach, and if you need further persuading (albeit in nonbehavioral language), listen to this excellent TED talk by activist Loretta Ross. I think it should be required background for every behavior analysis student.
Calling people out is a form of cancel culture in which we treat people with whom we disagree on something as Eternal Bad Guys. Calling people in is finding ways to collaborate where that respects shared values. Calling in simply creates more opportunities than calling out. I mean, sure, some folks will probably never be your ally, but in the video Ross’ provides a simple framework for deciding who should and shouldn’t be called in.
Now ask yourself:
- What have you done lately to actively call people in to behavior analysis? To call in other behavior analysts (especially those with whom you disagree) to solve problems of mutual interest?
- How often do you call out people with whom you disagree, for instance, when you don’t like how they speak of or intervene with behavior? And be honest: Have any of these efforts left our discipline bigger, stronger, and more widely accepted?
There are few people with whom you will see eye to eye on everything, but many with whom you’ve got some shared values and priorities. Thus no matter what you believe and work on you have more potential allies than you can shake a stick at. Ditch your silos and fortresses and embrace those connections.
Postscript: Practice Exercise
Here’s a quick way to try out your chops at identifying potential allies. Read a recent post on Adam Mastroiani’s Experimental History blog (you can also access the post as an audio file). The author is a psychologist, not a behavior analyst, and his post certainly doesn’t use the language of behavior analysis. But in asking wrong with contemporary Psychology, and how it might be fixed, the post treads a path that behavior analysts have walked. 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.
Seems like there’s a lot of Skinner and Baer-Wolf-Risley in there, illustrating that in the world of non-behavior-analysts there are people who “get it,” at least on some topics, making them potential allies. See if you can get past Mastroiani not being a behavior analyst to find points of connection with him.