The future of Behaviour Analysis

Behaviour Analysis has been around for approximately 50 years. It all started with a paper by Baer, Wolf, and Risley (1968) titled "Some Current Dimensions of Applied Behavior Analysis" which you can read by following that link.

Formally, one could say it actually started with the work of Skinner who, in the early part of the 20th century, made it a bit of a mission to drag Psychology up from it's pre-scientific roots and make it something that could stand proudly shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the sciences. However, Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) as we know it today is really a product of work done after Baer, Wolf and Risley published their article.

In it's time ABA has tackled a number of problems. Environmental behaviours, autism, reading, education, business management and so on. It is successfully applied to any area it's wielder chooses. The emerging field of Behavioural economics and Behavioural public policy stand testament to that. Yet there is a note of discord in the ranks. Subtle though it may be. The flagship journals for ABA (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and Journal of Analysis of Experimental Behavior) are largely concerned, these days, with Autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Much can be said about Autism and the negative impact it has on peoples lives. Similarly much can be said about the amazing work Behaviour Analysts do around the world helping children learn to overcome any difficulties associated with Autism and lead vastly improved lives. The problem with this, however, is that we are now type-cast.

A typical conversation may go like this;

Person A: "I'm a behaviour analyst"
Person B: "Oh isn't that like a therapist?"
Person A: "Well not necessarily..."
Person B: "No it is, my friends sister had a child with Autism and they had to see a Behaviour Analyst, but she said..."

 And so on, and so forth. Behaviour Analysis is now synonymous with treatment for Autism.

If we pull back slightly and take another look at what  Behaviour Analysis actually is, we might gain some perspective on this development.

Behaviour Analysis is the application of behavioural principles to real life settings. Behavioural principles, in turn, are derived through experimental data. Radical Behaviourism - the philosophy of science - is induced from these principles and acts as a guiding framework within which we understand and interpret human behaviour. To claim that ABA is just about Autism is to grossly underestimate the scope of Behaviour Analysis as a tool.

It is my opinion that if ABA wishes to have a future in Psychology and more broadly in the culture at large, then it needs to expand it's remit to cover over things. As I've said before it DOES cover these things and has done in the past but few have dared to extend it to the same extent that Skinner did.

 How could we apply it further then? Some have suggested a Cultural Analysis of Behaviour is needed. I concur. We can, as it were, analyse and help people on an individual level. We help people with financial difficulties by looking at what they do with their money. We help people with educational difficulties by revising the way they are taught. We help businesses with poor management cultures to see things a different way, but we miss a trick here because rarely is there any engagement on the meta-level.

Whoa. Jargon-y word. I apologise, but it is necessary. By meta-level I mean the level above. We can say that person X is acting under ABC contingency but what created ABC contingency in the first place? What is systematically causing people to have trouble with their weight? or remain unable to save for retirement? or manage a group of people successfully?

We might say that many meta-level contingencies are the product of political engagement. But I say this is only indirectly true. Skinner was not a big fan of politics. He argued that real change would be grass-roots. I agree. Politics tends to do more harm than good, even when well-intentioned. We need a culture that is fluid and capable of adapting to new problems quickly and efficiently without harming the interests of the individuals acting within it. Skinner understood that you couldn't do this from a top-down perspective. It had to be ground up.

Unfortunately we cannot do this just yet. We haven't the understanding of how cultures work - for lack of a cultural analysis - and so we cannot make changes on that meta-level. If we aren't careful we will forever remain hacking away at the leaves of a weed, when really we need to uproot the whole thing.

The future of Behaviour Analysis then is a difficult thing to predict, but certainly something possible to guide. I for one will be working towards a future where Behaviour Analysts are the biggest proponents of evidence-based culture change that relegates the blunt-edge of government to the historical dust-pile.