What Were 2024’s Top Breakthroughs in The Science of Behavior?

It’s that time of year again: Listicle Season.

It’s the season that spawns a cornucopia of lists of various types of happenings from the past year. Think: best, worst, most noteworthy, most ridiculous, most heartwarming, most appalling, and so on and so on and so on. We are inundated with the “best books of 2024” and “best memes and viral moments of 2024” and “the stories that will endure from a wild year” and “10 worst movies of 2024” and even “dumbest people of 2024.”

Okay, okay, the truth is that every season is Listicle Season, because denizens of the internet apparently cannot get enough lists, no matter how vapid they are, and most listicles are inconsequential clickbait. But there are lists of greater substance, such as the “top ten breakthroughs in physics” or “7 medical advances that gave us hope in 2024” or Science magazine’s “breakthrough of the year.” And these lists got me to wondering:

A list of those developments should help us to size up the health and vitality of our science. As Ione of my previous posts suggested, a discipline is like the proverbial shark that either moves forward or asphyxiates (note: not true of all real sharks). We need to continually push to make sure behavior analysis is progressing rather than resting on its laurels.

Hence the question posed in the title of this post. What would you pinpoint as a Really Big Deal Development in behavior analysis during 2024? And what makes it consequential?

And let me make this as easy as possible for you:

  • We’re crowdsourcing this. Just name one thing that was important about behavior analysis in 2024. Doesn’t even have to the The Most Important Thing. And you don’t have to represent all of behavior analysis. Feel free to describe one consequential thing in your own specialty area.
  • Your “one thing” can be an advancement in science or practice, OR it can be some cultural/societal/contextual change that impacts the science or practice of behavior analysis. (For historical examples, think of how changes in IRB or ACUC rules affected the conduct of science, or how the film Clockwork Orange changed public attitudes about early behavioral interventions.)
  • You can be brief! A lot of noteworthy developments can be identified in one or two sentences.
  • It’s okay to simply agree or disagree with someone else’s Big Thing. You don’t have to come up with a unique entry to make a contribution.
  • Because tidal shifts may not happen every year, feel free to extend your window to any time in the past decade.

And, by the way, it’s okay if you don’t think anything revolutionary has happened lately. Just say so… because if the shark isn’t moving forward quickly enough for you, that’s something we all should confront.

It’ll be fascinating to see what you think.


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