A Functional Analysis of Psychological Terms Redux.
Quit defining—start observing the reinforcers that keep your vocabulary alive.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Abbott (2013) re-stated Skinner’s 1945 warning: stop fighting over dictionary meanings of ABA words. Instead, watch how the verbal community rewards or punishes the way we say ‘mand,’ ‘EO,’ or ‘transcription.’
The paper is a short, sharp essay. No new data. It reminds us that terms live or die by the social consequences they produce in journals, staff meetings, and supervision.
What they found
The field still wastes hours in ‘definition wars.’ These debates never end because they ignore the real cause: environmental contingencies that shape how we talk.
If we tracked those contingencies—who gets cited, who gets corrected—we would understand why one term spreads and another fades.
How this fits with other research
Embregts (2000) tried to fix the EO concept by refining its definition. Abbott (2013) says that move misses the point; look at the contingencies that make analysts prefer one EO label over another.
Fryling (2017) and Smit et al. (2019) extend the same lens to verbal operants. They agree: test how ‘mand’ and ‘duplic’ actually function in classrooms and journals instead of arguing about ‘true’ meaning.
Becker et al. (2022) show the payoff. They take aphasia rehab as a ‘natural lab’ where contingencies are visible—staff reinforce some client words, ignore others—and use that data to sharpen theory.
Why it matters
Next time your team circles the whiteboard defining ‘transcription,’ stop. Ask: who in this room is reinforced for saying ‘duplic’? Who gets eye-rolls? Map those consequences and you will see why the term sticks or splits. Then you can change the contingencies instead of the dictionary.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In his seminal paper, "An Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms," Skinner (1945) offered the revolutionary suggestion that, rather than endlessly debating the meanings of psychological terms, psychologists should analyze the variables that control their occurrence as verbal behavior. Skinner's suggestion reflected the essence of his 1957 book, Verbal Behavior, wherein he argued that the behaviors of which language is composed (i.e., speaking and listening) are controlled by variables found in the social environment (which he called the verbal community), and that analyzing those variables would lead to an understanding of the behaviors. Although Skinner formally introduced his radical approach to language in 1945, it has yet to be fully realized. The result is that psychologists, including behavior analysts, still debate the definitions of terms. In the present paper, I review Skinner's functional approach to language and describe ways in which behavior analysts have already applied it to traditional psychological terms. I conclude by looking at other current terms in behavior analysis that engender some confusion and encourage behavior analysts to apply a functional analytic approach to their own verbal behavior.
The Behavior analyst, 2013 · doi:10.1007/BF03392312