The selective renaissance of the experimental analysis of human behavior.
Human operant research tripled, but almost all growth sits in three narrow lanes—schedule control, reinforcement, and stimulus control.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author counted every human operant paper from 1977 to 1992.
He sorted them into topic buckets like schedules, reinforcement, and stimulus control.
Then he tracked which buckets grew and which stayed flat.
What they found
Human operant papers tripled in 15 years.
But a large share of the new work landed in just three buckets: schedule control, reinforcement, and stimulus control.
Other areas like punishment and verbal behavior barely moved.
How this fits with other research
Podlesnik et al. (2023) zoomed in on one of those three buckets—schedule control—and found 200 basic resurgence studies.
Ferrier et al. (2025) shows the reinforcement bucket is still growing, but with softer methods: less physical punishment, more social-validity checks.
Morris et al. (2023) proves the stimulus-control bucket is alive too, with video-based preference tests now beating photo cards.
Cryan et al. (1996) and Auten et al. (2024) both extend the reinforcement line into developmental disabilities and client choice, showing the 1994 gaps are finally filling in.
Why it matters
If you run preference assessments, teach schedules, or study resurgence, you are riding the only wave that grew. Check the newer reviews for updated tools—video prompts, concurrent-chains, and social-validity checks—so your methods stay current.
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Join Free →Swap your photo-based preference test for a 30-second video clip—Morris et al. (2023) shows it predicts reinforcer value better.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two recent articles (Dougherty, Nedelmann, & Alfred, 1993; Hyten & Reilly, 1992) have favorably appraised the growth and health of the experimental analysis of human behavior as a whole. Within the last decade alone, there has been a more than threefold increase in the percentage of human operant papers appearing in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. In the present paper, a more molecular analysis is used, and some concerns are raised about the overall health of the field. The analysis included a determination of the rate at which new authors have appeared, how several areas of research have grown, and a contrast between the proportion of papers appearing in each of several areas of research during the last two decades. Two primary concerns are raised in this paper: (a) The recent growth within the field has been in only three select research areas (general schedule control, reinforcement, and stimulus control), and (b) there is an increasing disparity between the number of papers published in the few areas of research receiving the most attention and the number of papers published in the other areas of research receiving the least attention. Although the experimental analysis of human behavior has made considerable progress in the mere number of publications, these publications have been somewhat limited in scope.
The Behavior analyst, 1994 · doi:10.1007/BF03392663