Being a Radical Behaviorist
Revisiting the concept of behavior, what it means to be a radical behaviorist, and future directions here
This post was inspired by a note I wrote in January that got positive feedback.
The contents flow from conceptual, to philosophical, to practical:
what it means to be a Radical Behaviorist (to this one, at present),
other posts that might interest Behavior Curious readers
The process of finding what I have to say1 is iterative. Your readership, expert or not, is valuable to my dissemination efforts, which center around softening behaviorism, addressing misconceptions, and explaining some of the basics to change how we view self and other. Thanks for your patience and for being curious with me!
100% human generated, flaws and all
Revisiting “Behavior”
We dabbled in it previously, but let’s revisit the concept of “behavior” before getting into what it means to be a radical behaviorist.
There is a resistance to using the word “behavior,” culturally. It is typically associated with action, moving parts, or, more abstractly, “being good.” Basically, none of what we already know helps us when learning about behaviorism. So, forget it. Blank slate it up! (That’s a joke about a misconception of behaviorism that we’ll revisit later.)
Behavior is not a bad word. It is just one word for the entirety of our human experience, beginning to end. “Behavior” is everything and anything we are doing, saying, thinking, and (sometimes) feeling, at any given moment. It is continuous, throughout our lives, and any given unit is defined by its interactive effects on the world around it. I find the words “expression of experience” or “being” to be imperfect but workable substitutes outside science and practice.
Importantly, form or observability do not determine whether something is behavior — its functional effect on the environment, and its ability to be elicited/evoked from external stimuli do. That is, everything that occupies our time while living, if not physiological process, can be conceptualized as “behavior,” and whether we know it’s behavior or not depends on its effect on, or interaction with, the environment.2
Why put experience all in one bucket?
We put “behavior” in one bucket because subcategorizing natural phenomena according to form or observability obfuscates the fact that the same principles that account for one instance account for another, within and across organisms. This is not an oversimplification of organismic complexity: it is a way of identifying order in apparent chaos, with practical, far-reaching, and compassionate implications.
Explanations of behavioral phenomena can get as complicated as the environments in which they occur,3 but we have to have the same starting point and agree that what we are observing is of the same type of event, generally. Nature does not work differently on different forms of experience simply because humans have long thought it does.
Once this view is taken, behavior can be defined, observed, measured, and demonstrated to be a function of (caused or predicted by) external events. Just because one cannot readily identify the many additive external events — in present or retrospect — does not mean the cause is inside the organism.
Taking this view is automatically compassionate and actionable. Removing static, unobservable, and unchangeable variables inside us helps us better see the interactive effects of our biology, learning history, current circumstances, and cultural conditions, as additive causal agents.
Being a Radical Behaviorist Means…
Given this, being a radical behaviorist means, at any given moment, when trying to understand any organism’s behavior, including our own, we must take the causes [of XYZ] out of the organism — out of their brain or nervous system, out of the “disorder” the behavior supposedly indicates — and put the causes in the environment, of which other humans and cultural systems are an interactive and ongoing part.
This is a complex task, as most of “the environment” goes unobserved, only reacted to, and we’ll never have access to all of someone else’s environmental variables — or even our own!
It’s much easier to look for a static cause — often, a diagnosis, a dysfunction — than to try to imagine the total conditions from which someone is responding. We continuously act on the 3-D world from its apparent static point, and we prefer explanations that represent static points of action — they’re easier, meaning they require fewer words, and they’re reinforced by more people in our broader verbal communities. There will always be someone — scientists, influencers, spiritualists, educators, people of power, your grandmother— that puts forth or argues for mentalistic, neurologically simplistic, or disorder-driven explanations. And there will always be something — an emotional anecdote, unexplainable phenomena, scientific findings (!) — to back it up.
It’s hard to be a radical behaviorist all of the time because traditional interpretations of behavior are everywhere, and everything we’re doing is behavior! Verbal behavior comprises most of our day, so unless we surround ourselves with other behaviorists, our explanations for behavioral events will not be reinforced, thus will not sustain across interactions. Looking to a multitude of variables — and not settling for ones that are unobservable — is not what most people do, in everyday discourse or science.
So, it’s a challenge to be a radical behaviorist. To me, at present, it means letting go of the tradition of identifying a single cause for any given instance and just allowing someone’s humanity to flow, by and through you, in accordance with their mostly unknown (but not unknowable) environment in motion — and continuing to do so when that environment is continuously telling you otherwise. It means dropping the labels and doing some experimenting.
It means bearing objective witness to the continous flow.
Current and Future Directions Here
I started Behavior Curious, a sub-publication of Everyday Behaviorist (my catch-all for memoir, fiction, poetry, and prose) to test content for a lay-friendly book — technical but accessible, lay-friendly and non-niche (not specific to parenting, dog training, autism, or our usual problem-oriented dissemination). That project will be slow going4, due to many concurrent projects.
Such books already exist in various forms5 , but I feel I can add something different and unique, I just don’t know what yet. This publication is my place to explore that. It might take a while, given I have lots of choices and nothing currently selecting amongst them but my ever-changing self.
Going forward, this content will not be linear, and I cannot predict its rate. For a few years, I have had a pin in two ideas: a misinformation podcast/vodcast or writing/book club — something more than writing alone, something interactive and educational. I will need some assistance or collaboration for the former and some changes in my everyday life for the latter. I guess it’s good you’re curious. I hope you’re patient, too!
Other Posts for ‘Behavior Curious’ Readers
In addition to previous posts in this publication, here are other recent posts and notes that might interest you:
Happy belated birthday, B.F. Skinner! Published in Everyday Behaviorist, this post was a “birthday gift” to Skinner that included examples of where not to get information about radical behaviorism and behavior analysis, and where to get information…
Misinformation in the wild : A note in which I shared a video of Robert Sapolsky, who is very much an expert in neuroscience but very much not an expert in behaviorism (in fact, it sounds as if he has not encountered any behaviorism beyond a misinformed Psych 101 textbook) , juxtaposed with B.F. Skinner addressing each of his points decades prior. I’m considering a longer post on Sapolsky here. Please let me know if that might interest you.
The ends of my posts in Everyday Behaviorist often contain behavioral explanations and citations. Consider subscribing or checking out previous posts there. I also share other behaviorist Substackers, so check them out, too. :)
Thanks for reading!
I’m lucky to have a small but diverse audience for Behavior Curious. Some readers are experts (and have been in the field much longer than me), some are brand-new to radical behaviorism/behavior analysis, and some are in between. I appreciate the mix, as these different sources of audience control help keep me technical but lay-friendly. I have no agenda other than to share and learn. Even if you are brand new to behaviorism, my goal is not necessarily “teaching” you something you didn’t know, just modeling different ways of talking about the world and our experience within it. Learning is a fun side-effect of behaving alongside each other.
Peace, love, and stimulus control,
Jennifer
Skinner, B. F. (1981). How to discover what you have to say—A talk to students. The Behavior Analyst, 4(1), 1.
This paper served as inspiration for my “writing journey” and dissemination efforts. I recently gave offered a continuing ed event on establishing a daily writing practice. Will visit this topic in a future post, either here or Everyday Behaviorist.
Catania, A. C. (2013). Learning, Interim (5th) Edition. Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY: Sloan.
Many references could fit here, but for an idea of complexity with respect to behavioral explanations of cultural selection, see:
Glenn, S.S., Malott, M.E. Behavior and Cumulative Cultural Evolution. Perspectives on Behavior Science, 49, 129–155 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-026-00496-2
Herrnstein R. J. On the law of effect. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. 1970;13:243–266. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1970.13-243.
When many choices exist, responding goes where reinforcement most flows, and responding tends to distribute across options when reinforcement rates are similar. But if reinforcement is indiscriminable, never contacted, unpredictable, or has similar outcomes, the organism will allocate behavior amongst its many choices. (Many refs for the latter.)
Wow this is so excellent! Thank you for all you put here — so well put. I’m excited for future entries.
The political strategist Frank Luntz wrote that, "It's not what you say, it's what people hear." It's odd that a discipline so attuned conceptually to the interactive nature of social relations would have evolved to be relatively tone-deaf to this problem. "Behavior" may not be a bad word, but to a lot of people it FEELS bad, which epistemologically is about the same thing. We do love our precise verbiage, but to my knowledge nobody has ever checked, empirically, whether there are alternative ways to convey the same thing (including, potentially, some that smack of mentalism! gasp!) that might be as effective but better appreciated by "people out there." Instead we mostly keep insisting that precision is needed, in the process alienating a lot of potential converts.