Behaviorists for Social Responsibility SIG – 2025 Annual Report

By Behaviorists for Social Responsibility Board of Planners

The Behaviorists for Social Responsibility (BFSR) Special Interest Group (SIG) is composed of dedicated volunteers and a board of Planners (drawing on Skinner’s Walden Two). The Planners, who meet on a monthly basis, currently include Jose Ardila, Amanda Chastain, Traci Cihon, Brett Gelino, Albert Malkin, Camila de Melo, Richard Rakos, Michael Passage, and Kathryn Roose. The Planner structure, active volunteers, easy availability of digital communications, and the resulting mutual accountability continues to produce a high level of activity by the SIG. The following report summarizes some of the SIG’s past activities and upcoming plans.

The Matrix Project

BFSR has continued to focus on the Matrix Project (see BFSR’s website at https://bfsr.abainternational.org/ for more information) which was first introduced in the 2014 Behavior and Social Issues editorial (Mattaini & Luke, 2014). The Matrix Project is focused on increasing the number of behavior analysts working on social issues (e.g., social justice, poverty, sustainability, public health) using behavioral systems analysis to identify interrelations and practical steps that may be taken across more than two dozen sectors/players (e.g., behavior-analytic education programs, faculty, journals, students) who might have an impact on this goal. A significant amount of activity has continued to occur in the last year, so we will highlight a few of the recent activities.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Education Group (DEIE) – The goal for this group is to develop materials to increase the inclusion of cultural/behavioral systems level content, particularly with emphasis on social issues, in university coursework. The group is working on a second iteration of a survey they developed in 2020 to better understand how individuals were contacting behavior analytic content on social issues and what resources would be most beneficial. Additionally, the group has been working on the development of resources that can be shared in Google classroom. The DEIE working group is currently recruiting new members to support strategic planning and pragmatic action pertaining to the two projects mentioned above. Persons who are interested should contact us at bfsr@abainternational.org.

Regional BFSR Groups – The goal for the regional groups is to create a network of BFSR SIGs in affiliated chapters of ABAI. To date, two affiliated state chapters of the BFSR SIG (TxABA in 2016 and KansABA in 2017) and one regional chapter (O-BFSR in 2022) have been formed. The ABAI BFSR Planners are continually working with state/regional/international affiliated chapters interested in developing BFSR SIGs that extend the reach of the Matrix Project to local action.

Established in 2021, the O-BFSR has been active in connecting the Ontario-based group with the ABAI BFSR SIG regarding collaboration efforts and social media. The mission of the O-BFSR is to expand applications of behaviour science and cultural analysis addressing social issues, particularly those with social justice, human rights, and environmental implications. In 2024, O-BFSR worked to engage members through its presence at the annual ONTABA conference, hosting a poster competition and showcasing two of our own posters (one highlighting the SIG and the other highlighting one of our task forces that seeks to foster environmentally-sound rewilding efforts). The SIG also began to collaborate with the Culturo-Behavior Science Innovation Network (CBSIN) through participation in regular meetings. In addition, the SIG collaborated with the ABAI BFSR to host a webinar addressing cultural humility in ABA service delivery. The group continued their practice of publishing newsletter updates via the ONTABA quarterly newsletter and attempted to engage the community through social media outlets. In the coming year, the O-BFSR plans to continue the above activities along with outreach and recruitment activities with O-BFSR members and the broader community.

In 2024, Tx-ABA BFSR organized another outstanding lineup of speakers at the annual Texas Association for Behavior Analysis (TxABA) conference in Houston, TX. The Social Issues Track hosts presentations on issues broadly pertaining to human welfare and culture. Topics include, but are not limited to, poverty, environmental sustainability, social justice, cultural analysis (e.g., metacontingencies), and at-risk youth. Last year’s track featured presentations by Billy Baum, Rogelio Escobar, Brett Gelino, Trina Spencer, and Stuart Vyse. We are hard at work preparing for the 2025 conference, and recruiting new members to assist with growing our presence in Texas.

Sustainability Group – The group continues to apply the matrix analysis to identify feasible practices that ABAI affiliate chapters could engage in to increase behavior analytic activity in the area of sustainability. The group is working on developing a structure to facilitate community meetings of affiliate chapter sustainability liaisons. In addition, the group developed a questionnaire that conference planners can use to evaluate areas in which they may be able to reduce the environmental impact of their conferences. The group partnered with Behavior Analysts for Sustainable Societies SIG and the Center for Behavior and Climate to run a booth at the Association for Professional Behavior Analysts Conference to disseminate resources to conference attendees. Please contact bfsr@abainternational.org for more information or to join the working group.

Community Resilience Group – This working group was created in late 2020 with an initial focus on understanding how individuals as cultural collectivities respond and recover from systemic issues related to climate change such as hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, among others. The overall goal of this group is to develop measurement tools with a behavior systems orientation for assessing the practices involved in community resilience seen as adaptive outcomes. The group has collected relevant literature from within and outside behavior analysis that discusses resilience as a concept. The outcomes of this first step were presented at ABAI 2021 during a BFSR symposium. Following the completion of literature review, a measurement tool that identifies the multiple contingencies constituting a community’s recovery efforts is the next goal. Currently all the group members are Spanish speaking behavior analysts working in Bogotá, Colombia. Consequently, the object of analysis has been adapted to the cultural context, that being, resilient actions of individuals living in armed conflict. Please contact bfsr@abainternational.org for more information or to join the working group.

Public Health Group – This working group was established in 2020 and has been actively exploring how behavioral scientists and the public health workforce can collaborate to improve health and developing resources for behavior analysts since. In 2024, members worked to create a document that provides guidance to people working in behavior analysis on how to get involved in public health, presented at the annual ABAI convention, and released a special section on human behavior and public health in Behavior and Social Issues. Currently, the group has a presentation scheduled for the 2025 ABAI annual convention, are working on hosting a webinar on behavioral science and public health in collaboration with other members of BFSR, and are creating a document for students that identify behavior analysts who are working in the area of public health. Please contact bfsr@abainternational.org for more information or to join the working group.

Public Policy- The Public Policy Working Group was established at the 2024 ABAI Annual Conference to strengthen the influence of behavioral science in public policy and drive large-scale social change. The group aims to enhance collaboration with key stakeholders and expand policy engagement amongst behavior analysts, increasing the visibility of behavior analysis in addressing critical social issues. Key accomplishments this past year include connecting with ABAI-affiliated public policy organizations to expand public policy discussion at the next ABAI conference, growing its membership to more than 30 active members, and planning engagement opportunities with members of Congress at the upcoming annual conference. Additionally, the group has initiated the development of subcommittees focused on specific policy areas, such as education and healthcare. Members of this working group are also working on manuscripts for submission to journals within and outside of behavior analysis to foster progress towards the overall goal of the Matrix Project. Future efforts will center around building relationships with government officials and lobbyists, coordinating webinars and training aimed at educating behavior analysts how to navigate public policy, and further integrating behavioral science into policy initiatives. Please contact bfsr@abainternational.org for more information or to join the working group.

Individual Student- The Individual Student Working Group was established in 2016 to encourage students to support and engage with the overall goals of the Matrix Project. The group lost momentum around 2020 and took a short break until recently. In 2023, efforts resumed to reinstate this working group. The overall goals of the Individual Student Working Group are to encourage student engagement in socially significant applications of behavior analysis, increase the number of behavior analysts conducting research and practice in these areas, and foster collaborations with others outside of the field of behavior analysis to integrate the science into communities, organizations, and institutions. Currently, the group is focused on expanding its membership and establishing initial initiatives to guide collective efforts. By building a strong foundation of student involvement, the group seeks to ensure a lasting impact on the field, increasing the role of behavior analysis in solving complex social challenges. Future opportunities, and facilitating collaboration with professionals and institutions working on issues of social importance. Students who are interested in getting more involved should reach out to us at bfsr@abainternational.org.

BFSR will continue to work on the Matrix Project over the coming year with several main areas for development:

To review areas of the Matrix that were completed many years ago, and update them as relevant.
To initiate or revive work on sectors that are not complete.
To identify additional sectors for inclusion.
To measure and track our progress with the Matrix Project through our Organizational Development, Planning, Measurement, and Sustainability Project

Behavior and Social Issues Journal

The BFSR Planners also maintain a collaboration with the journal, Behavior and Social Issues (BSI). Working with the support of our continuing Associate Editors (Rich Rakos, Sarah Richling, Denise Ross, and Laercia Vasconcelos), we published two issues of the journal in 2024. The spring issue (August 2024) included 26 articles including those published as part of a special section focused on Social Justice and Literacy (Guest Editors: Drs. Shannon Hammond, Denise Ross, Gwendolyn Cartledge, and Jane Howard). The fall issue (December 2024) included 16 total articles including those featured in our special section on Integrating Public Health and Behavioral Science (Guest Editors: Jonathan Schulz, Crystal Slanzi, Sarah Weinsztok, and Elizabeth Schieber). Both issues also included several manuscripts featured in our ongoing special sections (i.e., the Forum on Diversity and Inclusion, and Activism, Advocacy, and Accompaniment). BSI also maintained a 1.6 impact factor from 2023 to 2024.

Efforts are already underway for what we hope to bring to our readers in 2025 and 2026. First, we are currently reviewing papers submitted to our special section on Interprofessional Collaboration (Guest Editors: Holly Brown, Louis Busch, Kim Crosland, Deborah Napolitano, Tziporah Rosenber, and Adrienne Jenning). We are accepting submissions for this special collection of papers until March 15, 2025 and hope to bring the collection to readers by spring 2026. We are also currently reviewing papers based on presentations from the 8th Think Tank in Cultural Analysis held in November 2023 at the University of Nevada-Reno (Guest Editors: Aecio Borba, Angelo Sampaio, and Laercia Vasconcelos). And, we recently announced a call for papers for a special section on Natural Experiments using Open Access Data (Guest Editors: Kathryn Roose, David Cox, Kristi Thompson, and Albert Malkin). We are accepting papers for this special section until November 15, 2025. Finally, BSI is always recruiting papers for its ongoing special sections in the Forum on Diversity and Inclusion and on Activism, Advocacy, and Accompaniment. More details about the journal, including the calls for papers regarding these special sections can be found here: https://link.springer.com/journal/42822.

Finally, we would like to thank our outgoing Associate Editors Denise Ross and Laercia Vasconcelos for their two years of service to the journal, and to welcome our new Associate Editors, Crystal Slanzi and Marco Tagliabue. Please stay tuned for future journal updates; we anticipate there will be even more featured collections of papers to come that we have yet to develop!

For those who are seeking a more in-depth experience, they might consider joining the Culturo-Behavior Science Innovation Network (CBSIN), a recently developed initiative, co-facilitated

by Drs. Traci Cihon, Kyosuke Kazaoka, and Albert Malkin. The mission of the CBSIN is to create a community of faculty, scholars, and practitioners interested in learning more about CBS and advancing the corresponding research and practice (cf. Cihon, 2023). We aim to foster mentorship and collaboration in CBS research and practice. Members of the CBSIN will engage in critical analyses of the existing literature (behavioral analytic and from related natural and social sciences) on CBS, develop basic and translational experiments that extend this literature base; and apply cultural level and contingency analyses to problems of social importance. This lab meets monthly, virtually on Mondays of each month from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. CST. Persons who are interested in joining are encouraged to reach out via email (cbsinlab@gmail.com) for more details.

Organizational Development, Planning, Measurement, & Sustainability

In recent years, the BFSR SIG Board of Planners has engaged in strategic planning activities to identify goals and determine how to allocate time and resources. Through these activities, the Planners identified a need to establish data collection and measurement processes. To achieve these goals, BFSR has secured support from an outside consultant, Ian Paterson, to provide assistance in the completion of three long-standing objectives:

1) Develop a list of accomplishments produced by BFSR as an organization and current Matrix Project working groups.

2) Develop a set of criteria and measurement for each of the accomplishments.

3) Design a sustainable system for measuring these accomplishments.

Webinars

On February 15, 2024, BFSR hosted a webinar in collaboration with OntarioABA and OntarioABA’s BFSR subchapter. The event titled, “Cultural Humility in ABA Service Delivery,” was a success, drawing attendance from over 200 registrants. Since then, BFSR Planners have been refining our webinar hosting process and seeking new speakers for a series of 2025 webinars.

As of 2025, BFSR is collaborating with ABAI to offer a series of free webinars to ABAI and BFSR members. The tentative schedule of webinars includes:

An Introduction to Behaviorists for Social Responsibility
Operating as a Behavior Analyst in the Public Health Space
Building Community Resilience for Natural Hazards and Disasters
Culturo-Behavior Science and Contextual Behavior Science

Social Media

BFSR social media activity has declined in recent years as the landscape of social media has changed. BFSR has not utilized X (formerly known as Twitter) in the past year due to the changing perception of that platform. BFSR continues to post announcements relating to Behavior and Social Issues and the ABAI Annual Conference on Facebook. Discussions have taken place regarding developing a presence on LinkedIn; this will be a focus in 2025. BFSR is committed to finding the most effective way to communicate with its members and others on social media in a way that fits with our values. Any interested people can volunteer at bfsr@abainternational.org and mention that they are hoping to get involved with social media.

Volunteer Opportunities – BFSR has steadily received the help of hundreds of volunteers throughout the years. In fact, much of what has been and can be achieved through the Matrix Project is through the support of BFSR members and volunteers. Currently, aspiring volunteers

can reach the group via our webpage, and based on their interests and skills, we can suggest one or more working groups within the Matrix with which they may participate. If you are interested in volunteering, please reach out at bfsr@abainternational.org.

Mark Mattaini Student Engagement Award

In 2021 the BFSR Planners created an annual award to recognize the significant contributions that Dr. Mark Mattaini has made to BFSR, and culturo-behavior science. Dr. Mattaini was passionate about motivating students of behavior science to be actively engaged in work pertaining to social issues. BFSR is pleased to announce that David N. Legaspi, M.S., BCBA has been awarded the 2025 Mark Mattaini Student Engagement Award for his work relating to delay discounting and pro-environmental behavior change. Mr. Legaspi will receive a $1,000 award from BFSR at the 2025 ABAI Annual Convention in Washington, D.C.

More information on the award and how to apply can be found on the BFSR website: https://bfsr.abainternational.org/student-award/.

Membership Options and Benefits

The BFSR membership structure includes student members ($5), full members ($20), supporting members ($50), and sustaining members ($100). The SIG has also developed a process for getting volunteers involved with SIG activities (email bfsr@abainternational.org if you are interested in volunteering). The SIG has been actively working on developing our website to house resources, disseminate information, and provide members with a way to connect with the SIG.

ABAI Annual Convention

Please join us at the 2025 Annual Convention in Washington, DC. for BFSR sponsored events. Notably, the BFSR/BSI Business Meeting (event 126) and a PDS on books promoting sustainability (event 116) will be held on May 24, and an update on the Matrix Project will be held on May 26 (event 344). In addition, to align with the location of this year’s conference in Washington, DC. and the initiation of the BFSR Public Policy Working Group, BFSR members and volunteers have assembled a variety of public policy events (events 033, 181, 251, 275, 319, 368).