A Eulogy for Jack Michael

A Eulogy for Jack Michael

Jack Michael had a profound influence on my professional career. I believe that I was the first of a legion of Jack’s students who “discovered” him through his teaching at the University of Houston (U of H) in the mid-1950s. I say that because my PhD dissertation, “The Psychiatric Nurse as a Behavioral Engineer,” was based on several studies showing the powerful influence of hospital staff’s typical reaction on the maintenance of unusual behaviors of long-term patients at the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Canada. This was the first clinical application ever published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (Ayllon & Michael, 1959), the same year I got my PhD. My coauthor was Jack Michael. As chair of my doctoral dissertation, he directed it.

Upon getting my PhD degree, I accepted the Saskatchewan Hospital’s offer of a 2-year research grant to continue my work there. This period allowed me to test a variety of social interactions between patients and nursing staff with the goal of reducing symptomatic behaviors and increasing competing and appropriate ones. I was fortunate to find Eric Haughton, who joined me for the 2-year period of the grant. Eric was creative, resourceful, and fun to work with. The resulting data confirmed the preliminary results gathered for my dissertation. Further yet, we explored the use of pennies that patients could earn for positive behaviors and exchange to have the nurse turn on the TV or to go outdoors as a special request. And then, my wish came true: Nathan Azrin asked me to join the Behavior Research Laboratory that he directed at Anna State Hospital in Illinois. Nate was already well known for his behavioral research with animals. He wanted me to establish a behavioral-therapeutic component at the research lab. The idea was to extend my experience with pennies and replace them with specially made tokens that could be exchanged for a wide range of backup reinforcers. I would be the one in charge of running the clinical unit. The results of our work together were published in The Token Economy: A Motivational System for Therapy and Rehabilitation (Ayllon & Azrin, 1968).

We employed the single-case design with a group of 40 patients and identified the powerful effects of contingent versus noncontingent reinforcement, among other special comparisons, within and between groups. It took 7 years to develop the various techniques that are included in the book. At the end, we both felt we completed our work and were ready to move on. Shortly after I left Anna State Hospital, Nate closed the behavioral clinical unit and the animal lab. He then embarked on a long and fruitful program of research involving creative approaches to clinical problems. For my part, I continued to look for research opportunities in areas that were new to me, including education, sports, and medical issues. Working with Nate was both a major professional growth experience and a warm and enduring personal experience. Still, I attribute the 1st decade of my professional career largely to Jack’s excellent teaching and friendship.

To appreciate Jack’s daunting task of teaching Skinner at that time (1950s–1960s), it should be pointed out that Skinner’s operant conditioning was typically dismissed as a fruitless theory of human behavior by many, if not most, psychology departments. Admittedly, everyone was interested in learning about human behavior, but Skinner’s approach and that of his collaborators eschewed the theories and statistical models that predominated and characterized psychology at that time. Further, their research involved mostly rats or pigeons, not people. Students in applied areas of psychology, such as education or mental health, showed little interest in such an approach. Indeed, it required an act of faith to believe that Skinner’s approach would be useful in the real world. Conversely, there were two alternative psychological approaches. One was well represented in the work of Allport, Maslow, and Rogers. They led the humanistic rejection of the mechanistic and materialistic explanations of psychological processes of Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner. The other comprised the learning theories of Guthrie’s one-trial learning, Hull’s hypothetic-deductive theory, Estes’s probability learning, and so on. All these psychological theories and approaches competed with one another so that it was difficult for a student to really know how it would all end. In practice, different approaches appealed to students who assumed that they would lead to an understanding of perception, motivation, personality, and, in time, that they would also lead to applications.

Personally, I was disabused of such hopes. After all, I had worked in several mental health settings as a psychologist with my 1955 master’s degree from the University of Kansas. But after a year and a half of trying to come up with some psychologically effective way to help patients, I had to admit my own limitations. I simply could not understand, let alone solve, clinically relevant problems encountered daily by staff in a mental hospital for adults or in a training school for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Gradually, I found it difficult to believe that more courses in psychology would offer helpful ideas to meet the daily challenges posed by the severely mentally ill. That was the context of my becoming disillusioned and discontent with psychology when I was accepted for the PhD program at U of H.

I had applied to U of H because their program included Spanish, German, and French to meet the two required languages for the PhD degree. Because I came from Bolivia and spoke Spanish, that basically reduced the burdensome language requirement for me. However, once I began to take the required courses, I wondered if I really belonged in the psychology department. This was a very difficult time for me. I really did not know what to do. Still, I continued taking the assigned courses for a doctoral degree. Then, on the advice of a good friend of mine, I took a graduate course in phenomenology and Sartre’s existentialism under a remarkable professor in the philosophy department. I enjoyed the course very much, as well as the challenge of immersing myself in something that was intellectually challenging and fun. This course gave me such a boost of energy that I even entertained the idea of switching from psychology to the philosophy department. This is when Jack Michael came into my life.

My first graduate course at U of H was an intro course labeled Learning Theories. Jack taught it, emphasizing Skinner’s operant conditioning as the learning theory. Because Skinner’s research was largely based on the behavior of lower organisms, I wondered how that could really be a better approach than the learning views that were much more popular at that time. Jack did not seem interested in a general discussion of psychology. That left me disoriented. However, in introducing an alternative way of approaching problems, he would not insist on his being right. Rather, he would leave the discussion or speculation with “that’s an empirical question” and let it go like that. Through his course, Jack transformed a dry and technically forbidding literature into a more accessible one. Further, it gave me a kind of magnifying glass or tool that enabled me to observe behavior in a way that I could gain a better understanding of its connection to ongoing environmental conditions. Coincidentally, he and I often met playing ping-pong in an outdoor area next to the lab. It was a competitive game that we both enjoyed very much. Further, I found out we shared other interests: He liked the West Coast jazz that I also enjoyed. He would ask me who was playing when we listened to the radio. He knew the different tones of saxophones, trumpets, and so forth. I learned a lot about jazz, and so in time, I felt less fearful of taking his course in statistics. I would not have made it, however, without a lot of instruction. As luck would have it, I functioned as the guinea pig for his early efforts to develop an errorless training for a statistics course that I believe he finished after I was gone from the scene. I got to know Jack and liked him very much. I think he became more relaxed, friendlier, and happier in the 2 years I was in Houston.

I also took a course on verbal behavior that Jack taught and that was an eye-opener. There was a growing interest in behavioral studies involving college students as subjects that showed the influence of reinforcement for statements of opinion (“you’re right,” “I agree”) and extinction that consisted of saying nothing or disagreeing with the subject. But what was most exciting to me was the work being done by Ogden Lindsley in the 1950s. He was the first to extend the application of operant-conditioning methods to psychotic patients at the Metropolitan State Hospital at Waltham, Massachusetts. He investigated the effects of reinforcement, extinction, and discrimination training on the rate of response in patients at the hospital. His patients were brought to a small room where various reinforcers (e.g., candy, cigarettes, consumables) were automatically delivered contingent on pulling a plunger. The fact that Lindsley selected patients with mental illness as his subject population was to me a breakthrough.

And then, one day, Jack invited me to see something he was working on. He asked me to watch a 5-to-6-year-old child’s behavior through a one-way mirror. The little boy was in a small cubicle pulling a plunger to get some trinkets delivered through a chute. I really did not think much about it. Then, he turned to me and asked if I could get the child to touch the wall instead and then deliver a trinket by pressing a microswitch. Under Jack’s guidance, I waited until his hand was close to touching the wall and pressed the switch that delivered the trinket, and gradually the child’s hand touched the wall. Jack continued to ask me to gradually get the child’s hand to go in a particular direction, and then to “shape” the wall–hand touching to go to a greater height.

Somehow, I saw that the child gradually touched the wall as if I had “instructed” him to do it. I thought what I was watching was definitely weird and that the child was doing things that did not make sense. He was in a small cubicle by himself. The whole scene was bizarre. It was like watching someone doing the shell game or watching a well-known “magician” pulling a rabbit out of a hat! One is left asking the same question, namely, “How does he do it?” At the time, I did not fully understand the import of what I had seen or the implications of the technique. That experience led me to believe that this kind of research might not be relevant to clinical psychology. Still, I was curious to find out.

As it happened, shortly after Jack’s course, I got a summer job in a mental hospital in Canada through Dr. Robert Sommer. We had known each other at the University of Kansas, and he was doing research at the hospital. His recommendation helped me meet the superintendent, Dr. Humphrey Osmond, who was in charge of the hospital. Dr. Osmond was very supportive of research at the hospital, and he asked me what I was interested in doing there. It was then that I shared with him my hope that we could test the relative effectiveness of new psychological treatments for long-term patients whose mental illness made them very difficult to treat. He was receptive to this idea, and he arranged for me to spend the summer doing research with this goal in mind.

That’s when I thought I would test what Jack had been teaching as the way to change behavior. Frankly, I thought the operant approach would not work with the individuals housed in the mental hospital. I will spare you the details, but, surprisingly, I found the method worked despite my initial doubts. For me, this was a revelation of sorts. I was amazed and excited by what I was watching—namely, change occurring in what patients with mental illness did after the behavioral treatment. What was most reassuring to me was that the staff in different wards also reported positive changes in the behavior of hospitalized chronically mentally ill patients who for years seemed refractory to change. When I returned to Houston, I showed my initial applications to Jack, who encouraged me to return to Canada and collect more data on the behavior of patients with mental illness. In doing so, I added 3 months for a total of 6 months of research for my dissertation.

For years Jack Michael was a kind of latter-day John the Baptist among the “heathens.” He lectured everywhere about the scientific basis of an analysis of behavior and gradually introduced his audience to a view that was often anathema in the academy. He knew Skinner’s work inside and out. Indeed, in his lectures and presentations, he often quoted Skinner and the page and title of the book where you could find the quotation. Over time, Jack developed a bilingual skill that enabled him to function as a kind of Rosetta stone. He translated difficult concepts from radical behaviorism to psychological ones and vice versa by giving detailed examples from daily experiences that included feelings and thinking.

Jack not only was a gifted teacher, but, over time, also developed into an accomplished writer who pursued the technical nuances of a rapidly developing formal language to describe in detail what went on in the dynamics of the acquisition and maintenance of behavior. His contribution to the dissemination of the experimental analysis of behavior found in his technical books and his published reports remains invaluable. Jack Michael was one of the best ambassadors for the behavioral movement, which today has grown from the laboratory to clinical and educational applications, as well as to business and sports, to cite a few.

Jack changed me from a rather lackadaisical graduate student in psychology to one intrigued by behavioral research and eager to find out whether Skinner’s operant conditioning worked with real people. In time, my professional career combined intellectual stimulation and personal meaning by working on behavioral applications for a wide range of human problems in a variety of living environments. I will always remember Jack as the one who changed me along my career path.

Declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.