Behavior Curious: Prelude

The rough-draft introduction to what I hope will one day be a book or e-pub, "Behavior Curious"

As you will learn from following this publication, context is inseparable from our behavior. Here is some context for what you will encounter in Behavior Curious. It might one day be the prelude to the book/e-pub I hope comes from writing weekly pieces for this publication.

Radical Behaviorism will blow your mind

Prelude

This publication (eventually a book or e-pub, fingers crossed) is my attempt to share some of the basic concepts and principles of the science and practice of Behavior Analysis (BA) and its underlying philosophy, Radical Behaviorism (RB), in easily digestible bits for a lay audience or students of BA/RB. (Note the acronym, BA/RB.)

Behavior Analysis (BA) — the science and practice — and Radical Behaviorism (RB) —the philosophy that underlies the science and practice— are complex, misunderstood disciplines of psychology and philosophy. In fact, no other psychological discipline has a unifying set of principles, or theory, that underlies and connects all of the science and application. How neat is that!

Typically, when sharing concepts of BA/RB, one has an idea of who the audience is and how they will use and apply it — usually there’s a commonality among the audience, such as being students of BA/RB, or a having a shared profession (such as education, nursing, healthcare, fitness) or niche (relationships, parenting). These commonalities in audience lend themselves to starting and talking points.

There are no such commonalities here. I am writing these posts (eventually chapters) for laypersons of any profession, who simply want to know more about BA/RB. I suppose your one commonality is curiosity. I hope other commonalities include open-mindedness and patience.

I say this because, although this publication is intended for a lay audience, as anyone who has formally studied BA/RB knows, the concepts and principles don’t fit with what we’ve learned elsewhere — it takes a lot unlearning to change the ways we’ve been taught to think about the causes of what we do/say/think/feel — especially when those types of explanations are continuously and concurrently available. Plus, I only have you for a few minutes at a time, and this is a one-way interaction. So, conveying the concepts will take time, as will learning to value them above other types of approaches.

Not to get too far off track, but, to further make my point, I’ve been immersed in BA/RB for two decades and still I don’t know everything there is to know about these topics! But, I know a lot, having attended four graduate programs, taught in several more, and have otherwise been practicing, researching, and applying this discipline for others and myself over the years. And, I’ve been practicing “talking to the locals” about it for that same amount of time, too. Within the past few years, I put the local-yokel talk about BA/RB to writing — this is an extension of those efforts.

So, in short, this publication is an attempt to bring some of my BA/RB knowledge together into a product that doesn’t currently exist: A lay-friendly introduction to BA/RB that is technical enough to be accurate and loose enough to be readable.

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash (Chosen because the birds you release from your mind will land, eventually)

What’s my goal for readers?

I’d like to introduce you to some basic concepts, principles, and resources related to BA/RB — maybe spark a fire for learning more.

If nothing else, I’d like to show you that BA/RB provides a compassionate, highly useable and generalizable ways of looking at the world.

To get more in the weeds of my motivation, a major reason for starting this project is because there is a lot of mis- and disinformation making its way across the internet with respect to BA/RB, especially when it comes to applications with autistic populations. It is my goal to not only teach you more about BA/RB but to show you that it’s not as simple as dissenters make it seem, we’ve been far more impactful than we’ve ever been given credit for being, and we have much potential for more impact, across a variety of areas, if people would stop dismissing us offhand. This science and philosophy truly is generalizable to almost all aspects of organisms’ experience.

So, I’ll take interested readers on a journey through our philosophical foundations and the basic behavioral principles you might be able to use in your own life. After reading, if nothing else, I hope you say, “Hey, this stuff is complex, kind of interesting, and highly useful” — especially if you ever encounter a behaviorism dissenter. There are lots of haters out there, almost all of whose beef with BA/RB is the result of misunderstanding, a bad experience with its application, and/or ignorance of the vastness of the science and the cultural events that have shaped it.

What should readers expect?

I haven’t yet committed to an order or sequence of content, so I can’t give you a chapter outline (yet). But, in general, expect weekly or bi-weekly writings about the concepts and principles of BA/RB. More in the post introducing this publication.

Upcoming posts:

• The BA/RB conceptualization of “behavior”

• Determinism, empiricism, monism, parsimony, and other philosophical tenets of RB

• Distinction between BA and RB, and applications thereof (“ABA", applied behavior analysis)

• Respondent vs operant conditioning

• Lots more!

  All will include recommended resources and further reading (hyperlinked)

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Feel free to ask questions and bring anything to the table. There might be moments of “we haven’t gotten there yet,” but that’s okay. This is a work in progress, and I appreciate you being beta readers of sorts. Thank you, truly, for listening.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer