 Hey everyone, it's Professor Howard. I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the major names in the history of the field behavior analysis. So we're going to be talking about really, really early researchers whose work does not approximate what we do today, all the way up through more contemporary researchers. And there are four major names that I want you to be paying attention to as we're talking about the history of behavior analysis. Let's go ahead and get started with a researcher that would not call themselves a behavior analyst. We're going to start with Ivan Pavlov. So that name, and of course I can never pass up an opportunity to make this joke, that name should ring a bell because Ivan Pavlov was the researcher who is most well known for teaching dogs to salivate at the sound of an arbitrary stimulus. In later replications, this was an actual bell, but early on Pavlov discovered that when his research assistant was coming into his physiology lab, the research assistant would come in with these very loud kind of footsteps, like and eventually after a few days, the dogs would start to salivate when they were hearing those very loud footsteps. Pavlov hypothesized that there was something about these dogs. They were able to emit these psychic secretions, like they were able to predict what was going to happen. And so from there, that's when Pavlov did a number of studies where he was trying to figure out and isolate those psychic secretions. Pavlov is most closely associated with classical conditioning. And in classical conditioning, what we're talking about is the way in which a stimulus in the environment can influence the organism's behavior. Classical conditioning is all about the way in which environmental stimuli that occur prior to behavior elicit or draw out of the organism this kind of reflexive response. So Pavlov is all about reflexes. We're talking about responses that the organism does not choose to emit, but rather that are kind of elicited or drawn out of the organism against their control. There are a few ways in which we'll talk about reflexive responses in the human organism throughout the semester, but for the most part, we don't focus a lot on classical conditioning. We tend to focus on a different kind of conditioning. Another researcher that you want to be aware of is El Thorndike. And when we're talking about Thorndike's work, Thorndike has this really wonderful video describing the ways in which he would take stray animals, like stray cats from the community. These are ones where he did not control their learning history. These were just available research subjects. He would put them into a puzzle box and try to measure how long it took the learner to get out of the puzzle box and to get access to a preferred stimulus. So they would be in the puzzle box, they'd figure out the lever to press or how to get out of the box. And then as soon as they were released from that puzzle chamber, they would get access to a small amount of food. Thorndike was the first researcher to hypothesize that if behavior produces what he called pleasant consequences, then it's going to be repeated. But if behavior produces unpleasant consequences, then the organism won't repeat that behavior. And you can see that that kind of jibes with or that makes sense. It conforms with our expectation that good things make behavior happen more and bad things make behavior happen less often. Kind of like a proto-reinforcement and punishment description. But it's really important to note that most behavior analysts do not use terms like pleasant and unpleasant when talking about reinforcement and punishment because you have to assume what's happening in the organism. So Thorndike we think is kind of an early proto-behaviorist. He's a learning theorist. And from Thorndike's work, that's where we get later researchers. Now, when we talk about John Watson, he was the very first person to label himself as a behaviorist. So John Watson is the first behaviorist, but he was also incredibly controversial. So there are lots of different kinds of behaviorism and lots of different researchers in the realm of behavior analysis. Watson's behaviorism was incredibly controversial for a number of reasons. We're going to talk about a few of them here, but it's important to note that Watson is a methodological behaviorist. And a methodological behaviorist is very different from modern behavior analysts because for the most part, they have different opinions about private events. So Watson is really, really well known for the Baby Albert study. And I encourage you, if you have not already heard of the Baby Albert study in your previous studies, go ahead and have a look at it. Go find some information about it. Most sources are pretty accurate. Essentially, Watson wanted to know, can you condition fear? So it's very similar to the Pavlov studies where we're looking at, can you draw something out? Can you elicit something out? Watson is what's known as an SR psychologist. So he's looking at the stimulus and the way it produces a response. The difference between Watson and Pavlov is that it's not necessarily a reflexive response that we're looking at. It is a voluntary response, but it's nevertheless one that is elicited by the environment. And Watson, from that research with Baby Albert, suggested that fear and emotions are a result of the environment, that they're not private events. So it was important to note that that fear didn't kind of just well up within us, that it wasn't uncontrollable. But if we understood the environment well enough, we could point at or point to the places where that fear had developed, which is good because it tells you that, you know, fear and strong emotions have a cause. They're not uncontrollable. But unfortunately, Watson took it to an extreme. And like other methodological behaviors, he started considering things like private emotions or private events, explanatory fictions. So what I mean by that is he would say they don't have any causal power. And so we should, for the most part, not include them in an explanation or understanding of human behavior. So you could imagine that that alone, beyond traumatizing a baby, that alone is incredibly controversial. It would be like me saying to you that what you think and what you feel are not important, which modern behavior analysts don't believe that. Watson also had a number of other kind of controversial comments. Watson would say other things like don't praise mediocre children, because if you praise children for being okay, but not very good, then what you'll get is more mediocre performance. Watson really tended to speak beyond his data. And he stayed in academia for just a little bit. There was some outrage. He was kind of pushed out of the academy, and then he went into marketing, which seemed to work really well for him. Watson's work, however, a lot of that controversy, a lot of that really controversial, those controversial beliefs persist, though. And so when you talk to other psychologists, many of them will say that behavior analysts think things like John Watson, they say that we think things like we don't believe in thoughts and feelings or that it's all habits and we don't have any control over it, which is false. The researcher that it's really important to know when understanding modern behavior analysis is BF Skinner. Because BF Skinner's work changed behavior analysis forever. Skinner is considered the father of modern behavior analysis. He coined the term radical behaviorism. When we talk about radical behaviorism, what we mean is that we want to explain all behavior. We want to understand not only what you do publicly, but what you're feeling privately. When you're thinking to yourself, when you're making a mental grocery list or a list of things you have to do later, I can't see you thinking about your grocery list or your plans to go shopping or the things that you have to do for the rest of the day. But nevertheless, they exist to you. And even if it has just an audience of one person, you thinking to yourself, planning for the future, it's still nevertheless behavior. Skinner was the first person to suggest that private events are also behavior. Private events are very important. And we have to understand private events as well as public events. That's what the radical means. It means we have to explain everything public and private. And we also see that with Skinner's work, what he's interested in understanding is a lot of the human experience. And most human experiences come down to voluntary behavior. The vast majority of our behavior every day is stuff that we choose to do. Now my decision to get up in the morning and take a shower and get dressed and go to work, it doesn't always feel as if I'm consciously choosing a lot of those things, like maybe I'm brushing my teeth and not paying attention. But even if I'm not giving it my full attention, it's still nevertheless a voluntary response. Very different than, for instance, blinking, blinking. If you puff air into my eye, I'm going to blink reflexively. I'm not thinking about that. But choosing to brush my teeth, choosing to put on pants or comb my hair in the morning, very voluntary. And Skinner's interested in voluntary behavior. Most modern behavior analysts are primarily focused on voluntary responses. And we tend to be radical behaviorists. We want to know about the personal events, the private events. We want to know everything. Skinner was very popular, did a lot of work in the 40s and 50s, and discovered a lot of the really basic concepts that we're going to cover in this course. He was the first to publish extensively on things like schedules of reinforcement, did a lot of work on reinforcement and shaping, auto shaping, some contemporary researchers with Skinner did work on punishment and understanding the way that works. So when we talk a lot about the basic principles behavior analysis, we're always going to be tying our work back to things done by BF Skinner when he was a researcher at Harvard. He also pioneered a lot of social uses of behavior analysis. So Skinner was not only interested in, you know, what do we do in the lab, but how can we take those discoveries, those basic principles that we're discovering and how can we apply them or translate them for use in everyday life. And those everyday translations are quite important because in the case, for instance, I'm showing you a shot here from something called Project Pigeon. It's great to have scientific knowledge, but if you can't do anything with it, if you're not improving the quality of people's life with that knowledge, then are you really doing much good for the world, for the community. And Skinner wanted to see a lot of those basic principles that he discovered translated into popular use. Project Pigeon was one way that Skinner wanted to use the science of behavior analysis to actually save lives of soldiers in World War II. So if you haven't heard of it, you may want to check it out. Now Skinner's principles of behavior analysis were first applied in the early 1970s, so late 60s or early 70s. One of the first applications of behavior analysis was to help patients living in psychiatric institution. The nurse as a, as a technician, as a behavioral technician was one of our first applied studies. And the purpose of the study was essentially that there was a treatment facility where clients living in inpatient psychiatric treatment would kind of mob the nurses. They would, you know, the only source of enrichment for the clients living in that facility were interactions with staff, but there weren't very many staff. And the researchers in the study tried to find ways of providing enrichment, providing reinforcement for behaviors that didn't involve, you know, ganging up on and surrounding and making unsafe conditions for the psychiatric staff. So once we saw that it was pretty effective and pretty easy to take a lot of those basic principles that Skinner was discovering, there was a whole new focus and behavior analysis on taking our principles and applying them for the public good. That's where we get the idea of applied behavior analysis. Behavior analysis is the science, but when we're applying it to solve a particular social issue or a problem with the client, then we're taking those principles and applying them or solving something that we need to be working on. We see that there was a lot of emphasis and popularity and behavior analysis through the 1970s. Skinner as a researcher, but also as a psychologist and a philosopher suggested that we can take those principles that we're going to learn about in this course reinforcement and punishment and understanding why people do certain behavior under certain circumstances that we can understand the human condition well enough to actually solve big problems. Like we could figure out waste and sustainable use of resources. We can figure out health and longevity and make sure that people are being supported and learning and becoming their best selves. We can make sure that we're designing educational systems that will better support our learners. And so we see that Skinner kind of goes from being a basic researcher, someone who spends all their lives in the lab. And as he retires, he starts talking about well, these are all the many different ways in which we can kind of save the world with behavior analysis. Unfortunately, by this point, a lot of the world had moved on. So we see that while we're seeing these meteoric rises in behavior analysis and the ways in which you could apply them, that around this time there was the Chomsky Skinner debates. And because of the Chomsky Skinner debates and Chomsky's critique of Skinner's theory of language, that a lot of cognitive psychology came in. So if you've ever heard of, for instance, cognitive therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, you'll see that the emphasis on thinking and the way in which people approach and perceive their world became much more popular. And in the 70s and 80s, behavior analysis fell out of favor. And so many modern psychologists actually believe that for the most part, behavior analysts no longer exist, that we're just kind of a passing fad very much like psychoanalysts who they think don't exist. But in both of those places, they're very wrong. People still follow a lot of these principles of psychoanalysis, behavior analysis, you name it. And we see that it wasn't until the early 2000s that there was a big resurgence in behavior analysis, because it's a very useful, very functional science for understanding people's behavior. So there's been a resurgence in the popularity of behavior analysis. So for instance, you'll most often see behavior analysis used when we're talking about the treatment of autism spectrum disorder, or teaching habilitative skills for folks who have intellectual or developmental disability. You see that behavior analysis is used widely when we're talking about positive behavioral supports in schools, when we're talking about ways in which you can redesign the school culture to better support the learner in the school. Behavior analysis and behavioral principles are used widely in most effective forms of animal training that humane and effective forms of animal training are all about behavior analysis. I use behavior analysis in staff training and management, in child and adult education. And you see applications of behavior analysis to places like substance abuse treatment, healthy living, just a whole gamut of different ways in which you can use behavior analysis. So just as a refresher, we talked about the major researchers in the history of behaviorism. We talked about some of the differences between classical and offering conditioning. We talked about the differences, especially between Watson and Skinner, and moving forward some of the ways in which we saw an increase and decrease in the popularity followed by the resurgence of behavior analysis. Looking forward to knowing if you guys have any questions. I'll see you next time.