Teaching Behavior Analysis through Its History: Narrative and Stories

Abstract

Four articles appear in a special section of the current issue of this journal. Each offers methods for introducing students to the history of behavior analysis. Their distinctive approaches vary from delineating a course addressed specifically to history, to combining issues in behavior analysis with those within related fields, or to splicing historical events or methods into various courses within behavior analysis. I sketch these briefly to encourage readers to read them directly before proposing that the history of our field can also be understood both as an overarching narrative and as a collection of stories. Boje (2008) distinguishes between the two by characterizing narrative as a rather formal, organized account, on the one hand, with stories, on the other hand, being more disorderly episodes of behavior-in-process. Each has its roles for introducing behavior analysis—and even for effectively understanding it ourselves—and thus, the best place of each within strategies of teaching, bears systematic examination. Although narrative supplies an organized account, stories more strongly engage the reader. Stories are especially effective at keeping the reader or listener engaged when they entail nested relations delineated by establishing stimuli. Besides offering a principle of organization, this formulation yields a strategy for using stories to enable the overarching narrative to sustain the reader’s or listener’s behavior.

When I was introduced to “operant psychology,” as it was known in 1960, what I found compelling was its coherence. It was presented as an interrelated set of principles instantiated by experimental procedures and their results, which we students could implement and directly observe in the laboratory-based course. As each new term was introduced with its defining procedures, “it clicked.” I seldom had to read anything twice. Regarding rationale, having begun as a physics major, I understood that just as inclined planes studied in the laboratory stand in for what can happen on wet roofs or icy driveways, laboratory-arranged contingencies of reinforcement stand in for what can happen in the workplace or at the bus stop. No separate theoretical “inclined planeness” is required to make a worker slip or an automobile skid (a vector analysis would merely provide a more detailed description); no motivational construct is needed to account for the persistence of intermittently reinforced behavior (although distinctions among types of intermittency would enable greater precision). The conceptual basis of each behavioral term was enhanced as the network of relations was built up. Over the ensuing years, as the conceptual system has been further elaborated and its subtleties revealed, its conceptual coherence has continued to enhance my satisfaction with the behavior-analytic viewpoint (Hineline, 2017).

Behavior analysis can also be introduced in another way, by emphasizing its history. As Edward K. Morris’s “Teaching a Course on the History of Behavior Analysis” points out, this can yield additional understanding. Thus, for example, familiarity with history enables us to recognize that the contemporary tension between agendas of science and practice is not a problem peculiar to us, for it has long been a theme in other histories of science and technology. Also, Morris’s quoting from Santayana (1905/2005)—“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”—prompts me to recall that early behavior analysts were criticized as arrogant for criticizing other viewpoints by means of ridicule. The contemporary casting of behavior analysis as a selectionist approach having much in common with, has much to learn from, the biological sciences. For example, Schneider (2017) suggests that we may have become wiser in that regard. But further, historical accounts are framed as narratives, and narrative is often construed as a mode of coherent organization. Thus, Currie and Sterelny (2017) advocate “narrative explanation” as fundamental to several scientific disciplines, including archaeology, geology, and paleontology. And, in its appeal to the history of an individual organism, a behavioral interpretation is also a narrative explanation. In the legal domain, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor (2013) asserts that the validity of the prosecution’s case rests upon the coherence of its underlying narrative. In the clinical domain, psychologists Adams and McLean (2013) propose that a personal narrative is essential for an individual’s sense of well-being.

Boje (2008) distinguishes between narratives and stories, with the former tending to be orderly, organized, and formally promulgated, and the latter being more disorderly, containing episodes of behavior-in-process. Viewing the present venue in that light, I find that J. Moore’s “Conceptual Foundations Teaching the Historical Development of Radical Behaviorism as a Philosophy of Science” fits the formalized narrative form. It delineates both historical and conceptual developments as they evolved as early as the 19^th century, and then proceeding in the 20^th century, with disagreements as well as affinities developed. By the mid-century, B. F. Skinner was in the midst of the controversies detailing rejections of others as he developed his systematic program. Moore covers much of this, and then closes with eight points he offers as that providing a summation of the philosophical, conceptual, and historical foundations of radical behaviorism.

In contrast with those by the others (including my own) in the symposium, whose approaches mainly splice historical materials within courses on other topics, Edward K. Morris’s article offers an extensive course devoted explicitly to the history of behavior analysis. He encloses a number and range of references that are well beyond what most of us would be able to enclose within a single course. On the other hand, his expansive collection of references provides a superb set of articles and books one can draw from, for addressing a topic within the history of the field, as well as providing a starting point for devising one’s own course on the history of behavior analysis.

Kennon Andy Lattal’s article, “Confluence of Science and History in the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Course,” weaves elements of the experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) with interrelating historical people and events, in ways that could accommodate the reader’s own approach of the field. Contributions by B. F Skinner and by other intellectual leaders are briefly described, and major researchers are identified with specific milestone experiments. Research topics and conceptual issues are enumerated, along with a list of seminal studies in chronological sequence not otherwise identified. Lattal sketches the founding of JEAB, the evolution of MABA to ABAI, and the recognition of women increasing over decades. He then briefly addresses how to splice into courses on the experimental analysis of behavior.

Finally, of the four articles, Cody Morris and Stephanie McPerson’s “Teaching Behavioral and Cultural History to Applied Behavior Analysts” focuses on a basic course on behavior analysis, with special emphasis on details that are especially important for students who are planning to become applied behaviorists. Early on, these authors provide an exposition of “early ethical standards”—topics that are more typically addressed in a behavior analysis program in a course on ethics. But then, selecting of punishment for their examples, they can provide plenty of historical interactions between the culture at large and behavior-analytic literature and events. Some of the issues of historical interest are of current interest as well.

Whether beginner or professor, a behaviorist is likely to find each of the four articles to be a source of useful advice and information for working history into their own teaching. Rather than offering further, more detailed commentary on those current efforts of my peers, my emphasis here is to focus on a way in which the presentation of narratives can be enhanced by focusing on the potential role of stories that underlie, comprise, or are hidden in them. Although they can support the organizing, coherence-building function of narratives, individual stories tend to reflect, as Boje proposed, ongoing, more disorderly behavior in process.

The Ubiquity of Stories, and a Basis for Their Potency

If you tune into them, you will find that stories are all around you: We all share personal stories when we engage in Monday-morning discussions of the past weekend or a recent vacation; a newspaper or magazine article that addresses a social issue is likely to begin with the story of someone whose circumstances illustrate that issue; political speeches typically include stories of individual people who accomplished heroic deeds or suffered tragic misfortunes; the most effective fund-raising appeals offer stories of individuals whose circumstances fit the agenda of the request. Stories are even at the foundation of major religions (the Bible is largely a collection of stories) and of conflicts between them (such as the Suni–Shiite struggles). Bruni (2018) lists storytelling as among the most important skills to be acquired in college:

[Storytelling] is different from communication: a next step. Every successful pitch for a new policy, new product or new company is essentially a story, with a shape and logic intended to stir its audience. So is every successful job interview. The best moment in a work-place meeting belongs to the colleagues who tells the best story. (p. 7)

Of course, the entertainment industry is built upon stories presented in theater and film, and, more broadly, the literary category of fiction is comprised of stories. Painting with a broad brush, Chu (2018) suggests that industry not merely a moneymaking enterprise when he quotes Gottschall (2018) as saying: “Story is the grease and glue of society; by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values” (p 3).

I had been dimly aware of all this, but began to accept the behavioral importance of storytelling only when I recognized that stories dominated my own behavior: I sometimes stayed up too late reading mystery novels. Indeed, my bedtime reading provides an informal assessment of the degree to which a given sample of prose will maintain the behavior of reading it. Other literary forms—nonfiction on interesting topics, experimental reports, and conceptual articles—seldom if ever have kept me awake deep into the night. This experience suggests that embedded anecdotes might be used to maintain the behavior of reading a formal narrative. More important, if we can identify the key features that make stories so potent, and frame them in terms of behavioral principles, those principles might be incorporated directly into the crafting of the more formal narratives of our field’s history.

A possible opening wedge for this comes from Child’s (2012) one-page article that ingeniously illustrates a technique while describing it. A successful mystery writer, Child begins by noting that people often ask him how to produce suspense. He suggests that this is a misguiding question, analogous to “How do you bake a cake?,” for it leads one to look for the answer among ingredients and techniques for combining them—character development and the like. He asserts that one should instead ask: “How do you make your family hungry?” And he answers: “By delaying dinner by four hours.” Child then appears to digress by noting that he had once been on a TV production team when something was invented that nobody had possessed in 1980, and most everyone had by 1990, which required his team to completely reorganize their approach.

His mention of hunger already provides a hint of how a behavioral account might work, but that appears to have been sidelined by his prompting the reader to wonder: What could possibly have appeared during the 1980s with such a potent effect? With a deliberate lack of subtlety, Child teases the reader about what he’s doing—just as I am doing now—noting that, to be effective, the raised question need not even be crucial to the story (Who cares about TV gadgets?) before identifying the device. If I had sufficient control over the production of this article, I would edit this passage so you, the reader, would have to turn the page before reading the next sentence. As it is, lacking anything clever to say, I’m just crudely stalling before revealing the answer: the device was the remote control, which enables viewers to change channels without getting off the couch. Before the remote-control device became available, viewers tended to wait out the commercials, but with remote controls in hand, each commercial break risks the push of a button that changes the channel.

The solution for Child’s writing team—perhaps you’ve been wondering about that as well?—was to raise a question, no matter how trivial, just before each commercial break and perhaps a salient “cliff-hanger” at the end of each episode. This proved effective for holding the viewers or even bringing them back if they had left the channel. In behavior-analytic terms, the posed question was an establishing stimulus—a stimulus that potentiates some other stimulus as a reinforcer.

By way of background on establishing stimuli: the initial development of behavior-analytic theory was derived from research with nonhuman animals, where the typical establishing operation was mild deprivation of food or water, potentiating those substances as reinforcers to a relatively constant degree throughout a given experimental session. Unplanned satiation effects constituted failures of the establishing operation. Michael (1982, 2000) recognized that extension of the analyses to include verbal behavior required the additional term, establishing stimulus, to handle relations such as portrayed in the following example from my lecturing days.

I used to illustrate establishing stimuli by pulling a $5 bill out of my pocket and saying: “The first person who can show or tell me how to spell onomatopoeia and prove that they are is correct gets this $5 bill. Does anyone want a free lunch?” (These days, I would have to increase the ante!) I was counting on at least a few students having dictionaries at hand or in their backpacks and was never disappointed in this. Note that the dictionary (whether a paperback book or cell-phone file) was continually available to the students, but only when I posed the spelling challenge did it become a reinforcer for the behavior of fetching it. Thus, my announcement was an establishing stimulus. It was not a discriminative stimulus because the students could have fetched their dictionaries without my having made that announcement. Also note that removal of an establishing stimulus can quickly eliminate the potency of a reinforcer: if in my classroom example I had said “I was just kidding” before anyone had supplied the answer, dictionaries would no longer have been reinforcers.

As I recently described in a more extensive article on narrative and storytelling (Hineline, 2018), it is useful to augment the traditional contingency diagrams not only to accommodate the quick appearance or disappearance of establishing stimuli, but also to portray relations between them as they change over time. For example, Fig. 1 depicts a very short and simple story with time (or pages) progressing from left to right. Each bracket with dashed lines delineates an establishing condition, identified by the symbol “EC.” Each is precipitated by an establishing stimulus, with the ordinal positions of their onsets indicated by subscripts. In the example, the posing of a dilemma or description of a crime (the first establishing stimulus) yields an establishing condition, EC₁, which typically will not be eliminated until the end of the story. Although not shown here, there might have been some preliminary questions raised and people or situations described (e.g., supplying character development or contextual background) whose “payoff” comes with the arrival of the main establishing stimulus (the present EC₁), but that would then have a higher ordinal number. In any case, one might say that the main establishing stimulus constitutes “what the story is about.”

Fig. 1.

A diagram, with passing time or continuing text indicated from left to right, portraying the relationships between establishing operations, discriminative stimuli, and behavior reinforced in the presence of the discriminative stimuli, as they might occur within a brief and simple story

The solid brackets delineate situations, accompanied by discriminative stimuli, whereby specified responses can produce reinforcing events that were potentiated by corresponding establishing stimuli. As applied to situations other than storytelling, repeated responding during a given establishing condition sometimes can produce repeated reinforcers. By the nature of stories, however, receipt of a reinforcer eliminates occasions for further receipt of that reinforcer. Once a question is answered, that part is done. And so, in Fig. 1, S^d₁, S^d₂, S^d₃, and S^d₄ each identifies a solid bracket within which a response—reading or listening—produced a reinforcer and terminated the discriminative stimulus. The reinforced response is that of reading or listening to the “payoff”—the answer to a question, the unmasking of a culprit, or, frequently, telling “what happened”—the completing of a coherent pattern.

Part of what keeps people engaged in a good story is the occurrence of small payoffs for reading as the story progresses. In the words of Child (2012): “Like the old cartoon of the big fish eating a smaller fish eating a very small fish, you’ll find out the big answer after a string of smaller drip-drip-drip answers. The big answer is parceled out slowly and parsimoniously.” Thus, in Fig. 1, EC₂ occurs quickly, and the S^d for its payoff follows quickly as well so as not to lose the reader. Then EC₃ follows closely on the heels of that, but the S^d for its reinforced response does not occur until much later. Establishing conditions can be interrelated, as indicated by the overlap of both EC₂ and EC₄ with EC₃, while EC₂ and EC₃ are mutually independent, and all three are subsumed within EC₁. That is to say, they are all part of the same story. There may also be “extraneous” establishing conditions that lie outside the main bracket, but run in parallel with it. Those would be the independent but interesting “factoids,” such as Childs’s TV remote-control device. Scientific writers who successfully address general audiences often will sprinkle in interesting extraneous facts that the reader had never wondered about: Stephen Jay Gould was especially effective at this, thus making arcane archaeological facts interesting to the general reader (e.g., Gould, 1980). The final reinforcer, terminating its establishing condition, often has special potency by virtue of completing the story.1 It should be noted that one can usually discriminate the end of a story without being told “and they lived happily ever after” or its equivalent. This is the subtlety of a story’s coherence. It’s commonplace that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but here, the devil is in the details—depending upon an intuitive match between the author’s and the reader’s discriminations.

Effective Use of Stories When Teaching

Framed on multiple levels, this diagramming technique might be used to make a historical account the organizing basis for teaching topics within behavior analysis. The broadest level would encompass the whole course, promising interesting, preferably counterintuitive things that will be learned. Thus, on the first day of an introduction to behavioral principles, I offered the following2:

Within our culture, consciousness and rational thought are taken as basic to human functioning; they seem straightforward, non-mysterious, and directly accessible via self-examination. Unconscious human action is acknowledged, but is commonly viewed as mysterious or even sinister, as revealed in fascinations over "primal unconscious urges" and the like. An alternative viewpoint will be presented here, one that accepts action without awareness as basic, benign, and relatively non-mysterious. In this view, it is awareness that is more difficult to account for, but the origins of awareness and of logical action can be understood in terms of the same principles that apply to more basic functioning. In the context of these developments, we will examine what is involved when we speak of knowing, of acting rationally, and of being aware.

I presented that paragraph again on the final day of the course, noting the ways in which each promise had been kept.

Had I understood Child’s (2012) principle at the time, I could have included occasional “teasers” about fascinating things to come as the weeks progressed. This would have begun to enhance the narrative characteristics of the course. Sketching diagrams for intermediate levels of organization—perhaps corresponding to chapter headings or particular days’ topics—could yield prompts for implementing this strategy. For example, schedules of reinforcement, which many students find a rather dry compendium of perplexing labels, might be introduced with a bit of Skinner’s history. At first, Skinner characterized all behavior as reflexive (e.g., Skinner, 1931, 1935), and it took some time, and an argument with a couple of Polish scientists (Konorski & Miller, 1937), for him to distinguish between conditioned reflexes and operant behavior—that is, to clearly delineate the operant principle of reinforcement (Skinner, 1937). This subplot might be used in teaching the distinction, pointing out that people outside of behavior analysis still often confuse the two. Subsequently treating operant reinforcement as a separate matter, Skinner initially arranged intermittency of reinforcement mainly as the practical matter of not needing to make so many food pellets, especially on the weekend, when he had other things to do (Skinner, 1956). At some point a question got refined: What happens if the behavior doesn’t produce the reinforcing consequence every time? Or, to address that question experimentally, given the many possibilities, how should one arrange for this to occur? From this came time-based intermittency and count-based intermittency. Add to this the concept of a discriminative stimulus, and the students should be able to generate their own catalogue of reinforcement schedules. And thereafter they should be invited (establishing operation) to compare their compendia with the one that Ferster and Skinner (1957) published, and that students can find in their textbooks (this activity yielding differential reinforcement). This would be a far more engaging and insightful activity than merely memorizing a list of definitions.

The particular stories one uses in teaching often arise from one’s own personal experience. Given our extensive histories of storytelling outside the classroom, one might risk slipping from mainly didactic to mainly entertainment. Indeed, students may reinforce storytelling on the assumption that the more time spent on stories, the less time will be spent on stuff to be included in examinations. Whatever the potential sources of digression, a diagramming technique such as that suggested here can serve to keep the storytelling “on track.” It also can frame the guide for studying a chapter or instructional unit, thus suggesting the points where stories might be needed, and informing the way in which they are related to the exposition of concepts and principles.

In the end, the objective or strategy is not only to use stories to reinforce the reading of or listening to the narrative, but also to acquaint our students with the history of our field as a way of understanding it and as a record of its accomplishments:

Did you know that a half-century ago, a behaviorally-based approach proved to be superior to several other approaches, in a massive study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education (Watkins, 1997)? The study included urban, suburban and rural schools, with each school exposed to one of the approaches. Despite a few notable exceptions that have continued to demonstrate its effectiveness (Raspberry, 1998), the approach has never been widely adopted. Did you know that several of the bases for contemporary behavioral economics were anticipated and documented by behavior analysts working with pigeons, rats, and monkeys? (e.g. Hursh, 1980; Mazur, 1997; Rachlin et al., 1976). Did you know that today, “Positive Behavioral Support” uses behavioral principles to convert schools from chaotic jungles of misbehavior, into orderly places that enable students and teachers to work constructively, in peace? (e.g., Tincani, 2011). Did you know that there once was a behaviorally-based school for delinquent teenagers, called The Case Project, where nearly all prisoners made academic progress? Coercion was absent, the facility was no more expensive to run, and the recidivation rate was far lower than in more standard “reform schools” (Cohen & Filipczak, 1971). This one has never been replicated, but a similar approach, the Teaching Family Model has been replicated many times, usually with success (Fixsen et al., 2007). Did you know that the label, “nudge” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) is about the subtle application of behavioral principles? Did you know that cognitive psychologists have adopted several basic positions that they once criticized as behavioristic? (Hineline, 2013).

Each “Did you know?” is an establishing stimulus, offering the entry to a story and thus potentiating a reinforcer that comes from reading or studying further. Readers here may add their own “Do you knows?” and may devise more artful ways than described here to make stories the reinforcers for learning the narratives of behavior analysis.

Recognizing that those narratives comprise our history—eight decades of cumulative science through the efforts of interesting and dedicated people—can help to provide a coherent understanding of what we are about and why.

Declarations

Conflicts of interests

This article has not been published elsewhere, and it generates no conflicts of interests.