Jack and Me

Abstract

Although Jack Michael has greatly influenced the field of behavior analysis, very few have had the opportunity to be directly supervised by him. In this article, I share my personal history as one of Jack’s last graduate students to illustrate his teaching and mentorship approach. Jack was a caring advisor who has had a long-lasting impact on both my personal life and my professional career.

Most behavior analysts, especially those dedicated to practice, may know Jack Michael for his work on motivating operations (MOs). The concept is part of the behavior-analytic vernacular (Behavior Analyst Certification Board, 2017), as it has been useful in understanding the transitory effects of reinforcing and punishing consequences (Michael & Miguel, 2020; Miguel, 2013). It has also driven much research and practice on how to teach mands to children with developmental disabilities (e.g., Pyles et al., 2021). However, very few behavior analysts have had the privilege to learn directly from Jack. I was fortunate to be one of them. Jack has influenced how I talk, think, and write about behavior (Miguel & Petursdottir, 2021; Petursdottir & Miguel, 2021). To celebrate his life, I have decided to share my personal history with Jack Michael.

It was not until my first semester in college1 that I heard about Skinner. The instructor used Portuguese translations of Millenson’s (1967) Principles of Behavioral Analysis and Skinner’s (1953) Science and Human Behavior as the textbooks for the course. The class was hard, and Skinner was not an easy read, but I was hooked. I loved the rat lab and by the end of the semester had decided I wanted to become a behavioral psychologist. Incidentally, my 1st year in college was also the year Jack Michael published his seminal paper on establishing operations (EOs; Michael, 1993). Although he had previously distinguished between discriminative and motivational functions of antecedent stimuli (Michael, 1982), most behavior analysts were still approaching motivation as drive operations (Skinner, 1938, 1953). I remember being fascinated by the topic after reading Millenson’s chapters on motivation and hearing my professors discuss the new term: EO.

In the years that followed, I took all the behavior analysis courses offered by the department and served as a research and teaching assistant, while still fascinated by the concept proposed by Jack Michael. In 1995, one of Jack’s former students, who was a professor at the University of Brasilia, published a paper summarizing Jack’s proposal and describing a few basic experiments on the topic, some of which were unpublished (Da Cunha, 1995). This is when my advisor (Dr. Maria Amalia Andery) and I started to plan my honors thesis—an experimental demonstration of control by the conditioned transitive EO with rats.

I had also become quite interested in the applications of behavior analysis to organizations (organizational behavior management; OBM) after taking Dr. Dennis Reid’s workshop at the Association for Behavior Analysis International’s (ABAI’s) conference in 1996. Later that year, Dr. Richard Malott came to Brazil and told me I should get my master’s degree at Western Michigan University (WMU) so I could learn about OBM and systems analysis from him, Dr. Dale Brethower, Dr. Alyce Dickinson, and Dr. John Austin. I would also have the opportunity to learn about EOs directly from Jack Michael. I applied to the program at WMU and got accepted to start in the fall of 1998.

My first interaction with Jack was at the 1998 ABAI conference a few months prior to moving to Kalamazoo. He came to see my poster displaying the results of my honors thesis (Miguel & Andery, 1998). I was, of course, very nervous to have him read my work. After spending a few minutes inspecting my graphs, during which my heart was pounding, Jack uttered, “This is a great study.” I think I must have breathed a sigh of relief. He asked me a couple of simple questions about the equipment, after which I told him I was coming to WMU as a master’s student. He smiled and said, “Well, I guess I won’t need to spend much time explaining EOs to you; it seems you’ve got it.”

Even though I really enjoyed the OBM courses I took during my first semester, everything changed after I took Jack's Verbal Behavior (VB) course. Jack was an amazing lecturer. He spoke very quickly, which was a little challenging for me, but I benefited from his very detailed study objectives, which directed us to specific parts of the book where the answers to the questions he was asking could be found.

It was during the unit on the mand relation that Jack introduced the EO concept. The first several study questions were about the distinction between its reinforcing-establishing and evocative effects. Jack reprinted one of the graphs from a study by Clark (1958), which showed the effects of different deprivation times on response frequency for groups of rats performing on variable interval (VI) schedules. The figure showed that irrespective of the VI schedule, the rate of responding varied as a function of the level of deprivation. Since reinforcement was being delivered, differences in response rates were likely a function of the reinforcing-establishing effect. In yet another graph based on early experiments conducted by Skinner (1938), Jack showed extinction curves in which response frequency also varied as a function of deprivation levels, but in this case, when no reinforcer was delivered. According to Jack, these data showed the evocative effect of the EO. I was finally able to have all my questions about EOs answered by him. After taking Jack’s VB course, I fell back in love with basic research and conceptual issues. I was also fascinated with Skinner’s approach to language. I needed Jack to be my mentor.

When I first asked if I could have him as my advisor, Jack responded by asking me if I played table tennis. When I said no, he replied, “Well, this would have increased your chances of becoming my student.” Jack was very sarcastic and had a dry sense of humor that I came to appreciate over the years. In spring 1999, Jack became my official advisor. After a few months working with him, he asked me to stay for my PhD. I could not believe that Jack Michael would want to supervise me for another 5 years. I had to call my parents in Brazil to postpone whatever plans they had for my return—which, as we all know, never happened.

Jack was an outstanding mentor. I had weekly meetings in his home office (his basement), in which we would talk about research, conceptual issues, the history of behavior analysis, and other random things. Jack loved taking pictures at conferences and had an amazing collection of photo slides. Thus, most of his stories were illustrated by photos of the important people and events in the field. His wife, Alyce Dickinson, who was my mentor in all things OBM, would often join us at the end of our meetings for a social hour. It was delightful.

Jack also encouraged me to get applied experience working with children with disabilities. My involvement with autism intervention coincided with the hiring of two new faculty members with a very applied research focus, Drs. Jim Carr and Linda LeBlanc. Jim was looking for additional students to jumpstart his research agenda, and Jack thought it would be a great opportunity for me to work alongside an ambitious young researcher. Thus, I joined Jim’s lab, and he ended up agreeing to co-supervise my thesis (Miguel et al., 2002), as he was becoming interested in VB research himself. A year or so after being hired, Linda LeBlanc started an autism center on campus and asked me to work under her supervision. Thus, my time in grad school was split between learning how to be a researcher with Jim, a clinician with Linda, an OBMer with Alyce, and how to make sense of it all with Jack.

My experiences with both Jim and Jack solidified my interest in becoming a college professor. Jim shaped me into a productive researcher, whereas Jack taught me how to be an effective teacher. I took Jack’s College Teaching course and became a teaching assistant for his graduate courses in Skinner’s writings and VB. Moreover, toward the end of my doctoral program, I was asked to teach one section of his undergraduate course Concepts and Principles of Behavior Analysis. So that I could experience what it was like to be a junior professor, Jack did not share any of his materials with me, but instead told me to prepare a whole new class by using a completely different book and creating my own materials. I have been using an updated version of these materials for the past 15 years in one of my undergraduate courses.2

Jack was amazing at promoting his students. Once I became interested in autism intervention, he made sure to introduce me to Dr. Mark Sundberg, who, following in Jack’s footsteps, taught me much about the applications of Skinner’s analysis of VB to children with autism (Sundberg & Michael, 2001). Jack would also ask me to give him feedback on his manuscripts. I was able to see, for example, early versions of one of his papers on EOs (Michael, 2000) and edit his paper about Skinner’s book Science and Human Behavior (Michael, 2003). However, when I first learned about an upcoming article arguing for the refinement of the EO concept—from EO to MO (Laraway et al., 2003)—I was not sold. The EO had just started becoming part of the behavior-analytic vernacular, so I thought the change would get everyone confused.3 Jack’s primary reason for the reconceptualization was didactic. The new term would better account for all possible effects of motivational variables (i.e., establishing and abolishing, evocative and abative). He first introduced the MO concept in his undergraduate course for which I was serving as a teaching assistant. Unfortunately, during that specific lecture, I was suffering from the stomach flu and had to leave as soon as he started talking about the MO. Jack thought that I had exited the class to protest the new concept and never believed I had been ill. Despite this perceived protest, Jack continued to ask for my input on his subsequent work.

A couple of years before I completed my doctoral degree, I had become interested in the phenomenon of stimulus equivalence after organizing a weekly study group to read the newly published book about relational frame theory (Hayes et al., 2001). Although Jack attended our first meeting, he never came back, mostly because of the book’s contemptuous tone about Skinner’s and Jack’s own work. He claimed he was too old to learn something new. He did, however, encourage me to continue studying the book, if nothing else, to make me a better critic of it. My interest in equivalence kept growing despite Jack’s lack of enthusiasm about it. He criticized the methodological reliance on matching-to-sample procedures, which did not fully capture the many ways by which dissimilar stimuli came to exert similar functions, such as through verbal instruction. Our discussions on the topic led me to read Horne and Lowe’s (1996) paper on naming.

I became fascinated by the way Horne and Lowe (1996) integrated findings from the child development literature with Skinner’s (1957) analysis of VB. They carefully described the contingencies that lead children to learn incidentally simply by observing their parents talk about things in their environment. Their explanation did not appeal to any new concepts or constructs. Even their “naming” unit was simply a description of a sequence of behaviors that, eventually, objects came to occasion (Miguel, 2016). Jack agreed that this was a worthy topic for a dissertation, and Jim was ready to take over as my primary advisor, as Jack would likely be officially retired by the time of my defense. Although Jack left all the methodological details for Jim to address, he made sure my interpretation was as conceptually systematic (and molecular) as possible.

I remember Jack criticizing the way I talked about the main dependent variable of my dissertation. My study was on visual categorization, which was defined as participants selecting all comparisons that matched the sample in an experimentally defined class (Miguel et al., 2008). Thus, when participants responded correctly, I described them as “categorizing” stimuli. Jack thought that I was implying some type of (cognitive) process, rather than describing responses to the contingencies I had arranged. The term, as I was using it, could serve as an explanation for the behaviors that it served to describe. He was right. I still avoid using terms such as “categorizing,” “discriminating,” or “choosing” as actions. It is better to talk about the stimulus evoking a response, than the participant discriminating the stimulus, as the former implies a history of differential reinforcement that gave rise to the control exerted by the stimulus, whereas the latter suggests the participant serving as an initiating agent for their own behavior. Jack’s way of precisely describing and identifying functional relations continues to guide my analysis of verbal and verbally mediated behaviors to this day (Miguel, 2018).

Jack promoted me and my work past my dissertation defense. When he became the editor of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, he appointed me to the board and later made me one of his associate editors. When it was time for him to retire from the journal, he and his current associate editors agreed that I should be the one to take over the journal. It was a huge responsibility, but with the help of my wife, Danielle LaFrance, acting as editorial assistant, we organized four amazing issues (2008–2011).

Since 2005, I have been teaching a graduate course on VB while trying to give students the same (life-changing) experience I had when taking Jack’s class. When I first started teaching it, Jack sent me all his materials. He used to joke and say I could use them and pretend they were mine. In 2019, I was given the inaugural Excellence in Teaching Verbal Behavior Award by the Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group (VBSIG), whereas Jack was recognized with the Honorary Award. After the conference, I went to Kalamazoo to see him, show him my award, and thank him for being an amazing role model. Later that year, I went back to receive the department’s alumni award. On both occasions, Jack made sure to tell me he was very proud. Unfortunately, he was not able to see me accept the VBSIG Jack Michael Award for Outstanding Contributions to Verbal Behavior. It is the greatest honor I have ever received. Jack would have probably asked me who I had secretly bribed to receive that award. I wish I had spent more time with him over the past decade. However, I was lucky to celebrate his last birthday in Kalamazoo a few months before the global pandemic.

As an undergraduate student in Brazil, I would have never imagined that I would end up being one of Jack’s students or that I would be publishing with him and about him or having others cite my own conceptual work. I owe most of it to Jack. He has inspired, supported, and promoted me over the course of my studies and my career. It has been my lifelong goal to carry on Jack’s legacy and try to give students at least a fraction of what Jack gave me.

After Alyce called me to give me the news of Jack’s passing, I was devastated. My wife embraced me and, as a way of telling me that it was OK for me to cry, whispered, “It’s OK, baby. He was, after all, your American dad.” That he was.

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