Adlerian psychology as an intuitive operant system.

The author read Alfred Adler’s ideas from the early 1900s. He asked, “Do these sound like operant principles?”

He focused on Dreikurs’ four goals of misbehavior: attention, power, revenge, and display of inadequacy.

He wrote a paper showing how each goal lines up with reinforcement, punishment, and extinction.

Adlerian goals match common ABA functions. A child who seeks attention gets it from the teacher. That social reward keeps the behavior alive.

Power and revenge goals fit the escape and avoidance patterns we see in classrooms every day.

The paper says Adler sketched an intuitive operant system long before Skinner named it.

Morris et al. (1982) did the same thing with Kantor’s interbehavioral psychology. Both papers mine old theories for hidden operant gold.

Farmer-Dougan et al. (1999) found the same pattern in horse training. Non-behaviorists discovered shaping and reinforcement without data sheets.

Leland et al. (2022) and Pavlacic et al. (2022) stretch the idea further. They map restorative justice onto ABA ethics, showing the method still works today.

Together these papers form a toolkit: look outside our field, spot the principles, then formalize them with our science.

You can use Dreikurs’ four goals as a quick interview guide. Ask the teacher, “What keeps this behavior going?” Match the answer to attention, power, revenge, or avoidance. Then pick an ABA plan that cuts the same reinforcement. No new jargon needed—just faster assessment.