History of Behavior Analysis

By Edward K. Morris

The History of Behavior Analysis (HoBA) Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) was founded in 2011. Our Listserv was established in 2012. Our first business meeting was held at the 2013 ABAI conference and has been held there annually since, except during the COVID-19 pandemic. As of May 16, 2024, we had 285 members, one more than last year. Our membership is stable. To join the SIG and the ListServ, contact Pat Williams (University of Houston-Downtown) at WilliamsP@uhd.edu.

Aim, Mission, Objectives, Purview, and Audience The SIG’s aim is to advance behavior analysis nationally and internationally through its history and historiography. Our mission is to cultivate and nurture, improve and enrich, and disseminate the field’s history. Our objectives are to advance (a) teaching the history of behavior analysis (e.g., content, pedagogy), (b) researching its history (i.e., historiography), (c) disseminating its teaching and research (e.g., presentations, publications), and (d) serving ABAI in these regards (e.g., leadership, communications). Our purview is the field’s long past (500 B.C.E–1900), short history (1900–1930), and recent origins (1930–present). Our members and our audience include behavior analysts, other scientists and scholars, and the public at large. Reasons and Rationales

Jack Michael (2004) offered the following reasons and rationales for teaching, researching, and disseminating the field’s history:

Students of behavior analysis who know little of its history will be less than optimally effective in acquiring new knowledge. They will also be unaware of relations among various parts of their professional and scientific repertoires. In short, it is important to know where we came from. (p. 93) More specifically, the history of behavior analysis situates the field’s (a) discipline (e.g., its conceptual foundations and its basic, applied, and translational sciences) and (b) its practice in relation to one another. The field is more than the sum of its parts. It has breadth, depth, and interdependencies. Its history also addresses the field’s relation to other sciences, the humanities, the culture, and the world at large. The field is defined, in part, by its comparisons and contrasts with them.

History also has more general rationales. The Roman philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), offered perhaps the first: “Those who know only their own generation remain children forever.” Another is based on an observation by the American author, Mark Twain (1835–1910), about travel in The Innocents Abroad, but here about history: “[History] is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime” (Twain, 1869, p. 243). Perhaps the most common rationale for history is attributed to the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana (1863–1952): “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” (Santayana, 1905). In 1949, the Irish historian, Benjamin Farrington, summarized these and other rationales in almost a behavior-analytic idiom:

History is the most fundamental science for there is no human knowledge which cannot lose its scientific character when men forget the conditioning under which it originated, the questions which it answered, and the function it was created to serve. A great part of the mysticism and superstition of educated men consist of knowledge which has broken base from its historical moorings. (p. 173; see also Coleman, 1995) More recently, Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996) observed, “You have to know the past to understand the present” (www.quteslyfe. com). Ibram X. Kendi (1982-present) elaborated: “To know the past is to know the present. To know the present is to know yourself” (Reynolds & Kendi, 2020, p. ix).

Membership
Our membership is open to anyone interested in the history and historiography of behavior analysis. This includes (a) ABAI members, (b) members of other behavior-analytic organizations (e.g., Division 25 for Behavior Analysis of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, the B. F. Skinner Foundation), (c) members of organizations outside of behavior analysis (e.g., APA Division 26 for the Society for the History of Psychology, the International Society for the History of the Behavioral Sciences (aka Cheiron), the History of Science Society), and (d) independent scholars. The SIG’s members need not be ABAI members. The SIG currently has no membership fees.

Governance
Of late, the SIG’s governance has consisted of just its president, Edward K. Morris (University of Kansas), its vice-president, Karen Wagner (Behavior Service of Brevard, FL), and its Listserv moderator, Pat Williams (University of Houston-Downtown).

Business Meetings
Our primary activities have been hosting the ListServ for our members and holding business meetings at the annual ABAI conferences. Despite the number of SIG members, attendance at the business meetings has become modest (e.g., Morris and Wagner plus n ~ 4–6 members) compared to earlier years (n ~20). This probably reflects the SIG’s current lack of engagement with its members other than through its Listserv. The SIG’s activities have changed little since its founding—and neither has its leadership. Preceding the 2023 Business Meeting, the SIG leadership addressed these issues with its members via its Listserv and invited them to participate in the SIG’s revitalization and expansion at the SIG meeting that year. Attendance was ~ 30 members. The SIG discussed changes in its structure and functions, the most fundamental being establishing By-Laws (e.g., for its governance and structure) and setting a calendar for elections and the succession of leadership. Its expansion could be addressed, in part, through committees. These might include a membership committee (e.g., growth, diversity), finance committee (e.g., dues, donations, IRS status), website committee (e.g., management, communications), publications committee (e.g., a newsletter), program committee (e.g., conference posters, papers, symposia), education committee (e.g., a syllabus bank), dissemination committee (e.g., bibliographies, a YouTube directory), obituary committee (e.g., published obituaries), archival committee (e.g., listing and promoting archives), and awards committee (e.g., for the best annual HoBA presentation or publication). Of the members in attendance, more than half signed up to serve as committee chairs or members.

Toward the end of the meeting, the SIG’s leadership and members discussed two pressing issues. The first was based on an initiative taken by then-ABAI president Chris Newland to correct misrepresentations of ABAI in the ABAI Wikipedia page. The page is not managed by ABAI. The SIG supported establishing a History of ABAI Committee to develop and maintain an ABAI history for ABAI’s website. The second issue was based on conversations with several members of the ABAI leadership prior to the SIG’s 2023 Business Meeting about the SIG’s leadership and its member involvement in ABAI’s 2024 50th anniversary conference. The SIG supported its involvement, making this a priority over its 2023–2024 revitalization and expansion. In the end, ABAI did not notify the SIG’s leadership of any involvement in the 2024 conference, but then, none was promised. On August 14, ABAI invited the SIG president to write a history of ABAI for its website, but with insufficient time and access to archival materials (e.g., minutes of ABAI’s Executive Council meetings). After writing half a history, he requested an extension to December 31. ABAI did not reply. In the end, the HoBA SIG defers to the 2024 ABAI Board Coordinator and Program Committee Chair and the ABAI CEO for writing ABAI’s history (see, e.g., M. Malott, 2024, May).

Goals for 2024
Given the SIG’s anticipated shift of its 2023–2024 goals to the 2024 ABAI conference, the SIG’s 2023 goals became its 2024 goals, discussed at its 7:00 to 8:00 PM Business Meeting on Friday, May 24, 2024 in the Marriott Hotel (Franklin Hall 4) before the conference. Discussion again involved establishing SIG By-Laws and a committee structure, but with a new initiative: a daily calendar of noteworthy events in the history of behavior analysis. In 1994, Warren Street published a related calendar for APA titled, “A Chronology of Noteworthy Events in American Psychology” (Street, 1994; see Eshelman, 2023). Travis Thompson began a calendar for behavior analysis, but did not complete it before his death last year (see R. Malott, 2023; Newland, 2023; Rehfeldt, 2023). The SIG has his hard-copy files and thumb drive for the calendar and plans to complete and post it on its website. The future of the history of behavior analysis looks bright. Correspondence may be sent to the Department of Applied Behavioral Science, 4001 Dole Human Development Center, 1000 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, KS 66044. Email: ekm@ku.edu.