Behavioral Basics
So, you want to learn a little bit about behavior analysis? That’s awesome! But where the heck do you get started? It’s a little overwhelming for folks who just want to “jump in” to the field - this is a profession that loves acronyms and field-specific jargon. And, let’s be honest - there’s plenty of redundant terminology, too.
From the outside, listening to two behavior analysts talk kinda sounds like people speaking a foreign language, or maybe like reading a teenagers text messages: you hear exchanges consisting of cryptic acronyms, baffling terminology... nothing makes sense anymore. You might have even taken a few classes in psychology in undergrad, so words like “stimulus” aren’t scary to you, yet you hear people talking about echoics, mands, tacts... it just goes on and on. Someone says “es-dee”, “em-oh”, ABC, BCaBA, IRT, QWERTY... alright, I made that last one up. But the jist is there’s a lot of terminology being thrown about and nobody is any damn sense.
WARNING: what follows is a rough draft, and I have not cited any sources. I plan to, but as a good scientist, you should always be very skeptical when some guy on the internet says a bunch of stuff without backing any of it up with some kind of supporting evidence.
A Primer: First Things First
- Section Objectives:
- Differentiate between Behaviorism and Mentalism
- Describe what makes Radical Behaviorism “radical”
- Learn (define and functionally use) the term(s): operant, operant contingency
Ok, so this is a science that is heavy on vocabulary. Let’s get you up and running with a little introduction and short history of behaviorism (to provide context) before we jump into learning terminology and basic principles.
For a long time, people have wanted to know why people do the things they do. In the last century, a great many scientists have dedicated their careers to identifying how and when people learn certain skills. Why are some people “quick learners
while others are “slow learners?” What makes some folks extraordinary at certain skills - your Michael Jordans, Mozarts, etc. Are they just biologically better, or was their something unique to their training process and life experience? Was it some combination of the two? Scientists have asked and attempted to answer these questions since time immemorial. At the turn of the 20th century, a divide between members of psychological science began to form, with two basic ideas (among, well, others) coming forth.
The Mentalists: folks like Freud, Piaget, Chomsky - these guys espoused notions centered around what we behavior analysts call “hypothetical constructs” - that is to say, they theorized that there exist machinery in the brain that develop and grow like your arms and bones do. These machinery enable us to produce all of the range of overt behaviors we see in humanity, like learning to talk, murdering each other, painting, building rocket ships, scuba diving, and creating governments. Neurology has begun to identify how some of these mechanisms might work, and has produced empirically validated models. However, this field is still much in its infancy and while exciting work is being done, we still have so much to learn. However, the future is bright! Perhaps, some day, we will be able to exactly pinpoint what parts of the brain do what.
However, there is one type of drawback to this approach, which was of particular concern in the 1950s, prior to the advent of fMRIs and positron imagining technology and all that nice stuff. The mentalists offered explanatory models - however, these models were explanatory in the same sense that calling a bird a bird explains not a whole lot about what makes it able to fly, grow feathers when it loses them, etc.
Here’s a breakdown of the two common criticisms of mentalism:
Problem #1: the models often were predicated on circular logic - i.e. a person is autistic if they exhibit certain types of developmental delay. Okay, that’s all very well - then why, you might ask, do they have these developmental delays? Why, because they have autism, of course! It becomes quite circular without a biological understanding of the disorder of interest. The term “autism” and any hypothetical construct models
Problem #2: the models (especially in their early phases in the 1950s) produced limited predictive value. That is to say, they functioned more as a taxonomy of disorders than a list of problems that could be treated with specific procedures. This led to a rise - and perhaps over-emphasis - on what is purely and discretely measurable. If it happens in your head, some scientists decreed, it’s of little value to the practitioner. Only the overt and observable were workable without lots of introspective analysis, and the results of that type of therapy have accrued dubious value. Furthermore, for individuals - such as those who have not yet acquired language, such as those with autism - introspective “couch therapy” can’t work. It’s hard to conduct a typical “talking cure” counseling session with an individual who can not communicate traditionally.
At this time, the best solution for folks with mental illness was institutionalization. Of course, in contemporary times, we have heard many horror stories, ranging from Nurse Ratchet in fiction to Sunland in reality. Bad things happen when people don’t have the tools and skills needed, and for a long time, there simply was no way to practically approach treatment for most mental illness.
So, these concerns above led some practitioners and scientists in the early and middle of the 19th century to seek another way to approach treatment for folks who wanted it or needed it. Psychiatrists and other practitioners were happy to refer their patients who did not or could not benefit from therapy and only seemed to respond to being heavily medicated.
The Rise of the Behaviorists:
So, we had some folks who wanted to prove there theories about observable behavior, and we had a group of professionals in the field of psychiatry that had patients that had proven to be intractable to every intervention available with the exception of powerful drugs or mechanical restraints.
The behaviors were not prepared, but still accepted these patients readily. Their approach was thus: instead of postulating on hypothetical models of often unobservable events in the brain, the behaviorists focus exclusively on what can be concretely measured and observed. What were their patients doing? What stimuli in their environment occurred before and after those behaviors? We’re there reliable “triggers” for these behaviors? Could modifying the environment change the behavior of even the most difficult and intractable patient of the psychiatric ward?
These Behaviorists embodied in some respects the “I have to see it to believe it” philosophy and they also place a heavy emphasis on the nurture in the classic nature vs. nurture argument. They espoused that behavior was deterministic - it is lawful and ordered by a learning history (an organism’s sum life experience) and that history can be changed to modify behavior.
Eddie Murphy’s Classic
Trading Spaces: https://youtu.be/tFcyEVnIoes - nature or nurture? This was the attitude of some early scientists, such as Watson & Rainer of John Hopkins University who conducted the infamous
Little Albert study.
So, how does this “learning history” work, exactly? How does “nurture” shape behavior, practically speaking?
The idea was simple: organisms engage in behavior of phylogenetic origin, that is to say, behavior that the organism is innately genetically programmed to do. This will be things like respiration, coughing after you inhale a puff of black pepper, and blinking.
However, we all know that organisms do things that are not reflexive. This is the result of what we call colloquially “learning.” Organisms will, over time, encounter stimuli that correlate with forthcoming “good” or forthcoming “bad,” and this causes lasting change in their behavior over time. We call these behaviors “operant” - behaviors that are learned as the organism gains experience in it’s environment. The base for all these behaviors still originates from those simple phylogenetic roots. Our reflex responses serve as the primordial building blocks that predispose us and eventually help construct the sophisticated operant behavior seen by astronauts, mass murderers, your ability to spell, and poets like Lord Byron. B.F. Skinner (we’ll get to him next) was a scientist who coined this term (operant). He went even further, developing the operant contingency: the fancy, scientist way of describing a learned relationship. Pretty darn simple stuff, but powerful.
It’s easy to take for granted that these ideas are “common sense” and “basic” - just like the trappings of modern houses, such as flowing water, lights, and a hodgepodge of AI assistants that respond to your voice. Remember that, at the time that Skinner and other Behaviorists were first putting forth these ideas, well, folks were still espousing Freud’s ideas about obsessive compulsive folks being stuck in a childhood phase predisposed to a fascination of their own anus. You can’t tell me the operant contingency isn’t an improvement over Freud’s logic.
In in Skinnerks book, The Behavior of Organisms, he likened operant behavior to the same evolutionary processes (“fitnesss”) that shape the genetic code of every animal on earth.
This is profound, at least to me. The process of evolution is the very same fundamental force that drives changes in the operant behavior of organisms, and in the behavior of groups of organisms - for example, groups of humans arrange themselves in all kinds of ways, like the state of Florida, poetry societies, the civil rights movement, your local DMV, and that pesky homeowners association. All of these groups are, as a whole, sensitive to the evolutionary process that shapes both genes and behavior: the more adaptive a behavior (or gene) is for an organism, the more likely it will persist or even spread and grow, promulgating itself.
They are all being shaped by consequences, just like a gene’s ability to make an organism more “fit” gives that gene a greater chance of becoming more widespread if fitness is described as “I can make more babies than my peers.” Obviously, not all behaviors that we learn are related to sex and reproduction.
Instead of sex, the relative “good” that the behavior produces for the organism could be assessed in terms of survival value. Some behaviors produce food, money that can be used to buy food. Some behaviors produce abstract things, like “power” or “respect” that may give you security and the ability to care for your loved ones more effectively.
What “good” is will vary from organism to organism based off what it needs to maintain itself biologically, and things that have gained value through the process of conditioning (more on that soon). It’s wild how Darwinian this sounds, but that’s no coincidence - everything is inexorably linked in nature.
Evolutionary theory is currently the most parsimonious explanation for not only how genetics works, but also why animals behave the way they do. Somewhere down the evolutionary tree of life, some organism experienced a mutation, and gained some primordial way to change its behavior by “learning” from consequence and not just rotely performing the instructions of it’s genetic code. This critter probably did something simple - maybe just as simple as “if some behavior produces nutrients, do that behavior more.” Perhaps it was the opposite - “if a behavior produces no food, do that less.” Who knows.
This “first learner” was probably wildly successful because it could recover from mistakes without the delay of generations of reproducing - it’s behavior could change within a single individual, in a single generation! The rest, as they say, is history - that “first learner” was wildly successful, procreated like nobody’s business, and now that adaptive quality is shared by most organisms in Earth’s tree of life.
The processes that govern behavior analysis are the same processes that govern evolutionary biology and genetics. Everything is linked - science is awesome like that!
The Radical Behaviorists (that’s us): alright, so you may have heard of a funny looking guy named B.F. Skinner. His first name, Burrhus, is a little unique so maybe that’s why a lot of folks call him B.F. He had the (at the time) radical idea that behaviorists should also include what Skinner called “private events” - these are events that are perceptible only to the organism and do not produce any overtly measurable result to anybody observering the organism when the private event occurred.
So, what exactly are “private events”?
So, Skinner considered things like “thoughts” or feelings as private events - things that only the organism engaging in the behavior could perceive, thus, they are private. The voice inside your head - the one you are using to read this text, for example, is a type of private behavior. Some private behavior is becoming public with the advent of modern technology - for example, your heart beat was once fairly private, but nowadays your common smart watch will monitor your health statistics and post your peak beats per minute to social media, forever immortalizing your cardio awesomeness on the internet - hardly a “private” event anymore. Skinner predicted this - that technology would eventually make more and more private behavior “public” - which was profoundly prescient for a man working in the 1940s, long before the age of FitBits and Instagram.
This was a bit of a controversial notion at the time, and a lot of folks would argue about the validity of this concept for quite some time. In contemporary behavior analysis, radical behaviorism is currently the mainstream, and it serves as a bit of a happy compromise between the world of the mentalists and the world of the Behaviorists.
Pardon the abrupt ending - this is still a work in progress. I’ll update (and finish) this page after I brew up some more coffee. Sorry for the delay!