History of Behavior Analysis Special Interest Group – 2025 SIG update

By Edward K. Morris

Author’s Note

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.

Update from ABAI’s Special Interest Group for the History of Behavior Analysis 2025

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 annually since then, except during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aim, Mission, Objectives, Purview, and Audience

The SIG’s aim is to advance behavior analysis nationally and internationally through its history and historiography. Its mission is to cultivate and nurture, improve and enrich, and disseminate the field’s history. Its objectives are to advance (a) instruction in the history of behavior analysis (e.g., content, pedagogy), (b) research on its history (i.e., historiography), (c) the dissemination of its instruction and research (e.g., presentations, publications), and (d) service to ABAI in these regards (e.g., leadership, communications). Its purview is the field’s long past (500 B.C.E–1900), short history (1900–1930), and recent origins (1930–present). Its audience is behavior analysts, other interested 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 basic, applied, and translational sciences and their conceptual foundations) 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 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 an almost 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)

As the cosmologist, Carl Sagan (1934-1996), stated: “You have to know the past to understand the present” (Sagan 1980, p. 57).

A few years later, the American novelist, William Faulkner (1897-1962), offered a more personal rationale for history, writing:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images seen as new, but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. (Faulkner, 1951, Act 1, Scene 3)

In a 2008 campaign speech, Barack Obama (1961-present) adapted and adopted Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past” (Obama, 2008). More recently, Ibram X. Kendi (1982-present) extended Faulkner and Obama: “To know the past is to know the present. To know the present is to know yourself,” that is, to be mindful about what you know and do not know (Reynolds & Kendi, 2020, p. ix).

Membership

At the end of 2024, the SIG had 277 members; membership has been stable. It 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, Cheiron: the International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, the History of Science Society), and (d) independent scholars. The SIG’s members need not be ABAI members. The SIG has no membership fees. To join the SIG and the ListServ, contact Pat Williams (University of Houston-Downtown) at WilliamsP@uhd.edu. The SIG’s members are its ListServ members and vice versa (see HOBA@LISTSERV.UHD.EDU).

Governance

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

Business Meetings

Its activities have been hosting the ListServ for its members and holding business meetings at the annual ABAI conferences. Despite having over 277 members, attendance at the business meetings had become modest (e.g., Morris, Wagner, n ~ 4-6 members) compared to earlier years (n ~20). This probably reflects the SIG’s lack of engagement with its members other than through its Listserv. The SIG’s activities and its leadership have changed little since its founding.

Preceding the 2023 and 2024 Business Meetings, the SIG leadership addressed these issues with its members via the ListServ and invited them to participate in the SIG’s revitalization and expansion at the SIG Business Meetings. The Business Meeting attendance increased to 10-20 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 at these meetings, about half signed up to serve as committee chairs or members.

Toward the end of the 2024 meeting, the SIG’s leadership and members discussed two issues. The first was based on an initiative taken by then past-ABAI president Chris Newland to correct misrepresentations of ABAI on 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, but received no communication from ABAI Council about this. The second issue was based on informal conversations with several members of the ABAI leadership prior to the SIG’s 2023 Business Meeting about the SIG’s leadership and its members’ involvement in ABAI’s 2024 50^th anniversary conference. This became the SIG’s priority over its 2023-2024 efforts at revitalization and expansion. In the end, ABAI did not notify the SIG’s leadership of any involvement, but then, none was promised. On August 14, 2023, 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 deferred 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 2025

The SIG’s goals for 2025 are to begin, again, the revitalization and expansion described above (e.g., by-Laws, committees). To re-start the process, the SIG’s president – Ed Morris – will propose appointing a new President and an Executive Council and then step aside from the SIG’s formal governance. The process was discussed at the Saturday, May 24, 2025 HoBA SIG Business Meeting. The outcome will be announced later. In addition, the SIG’s new initiative for 2024 may roll over to 2025: 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 (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.