B. F. Skinner's contributions to applied behavior analysis.
Skinner gave ABA its raw materials but never built the applied house himself.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors traced what B. F. Skinner actually gave to applied behavior analysis.
They read his books, papers, and lab notes.
They sorted each idea into five bins: basic science, technology, conceptual, training, and public statements.
What they found
Skinner fathered behavior analysis but never ran a full applied program.
He supplied the principles, gadgets like the teaching machine, and the talk-track we still use.
Yet he never stitched those pieces into the seven-dimension cloak we call ABA today.
How this fits with other research
Schaal (1996) shows moms in the 1950s already used Skinner’s ideas at home.
That work is a predecessor: it proves the principles worked before anyone named the field.
Delprato (2002) pulls Skinner’s old “counter-control” idea back into today’s FBA forms.
This is an extension: it takes a dusty concept and makes it a Monday-morning tool.
Morris et al. (2022) write a teaching guide that folds the target paper into class reading.
This is synthesis: the history is now part of standard BCBA coursework.
Why it matters
You can stop saying “Skinner founded ABA.” He gave us the bricks; Baer, Wolf, and Risley built the house.
Use the bricks with confidence—principles, gadgets, and plain talk are still solid.
When you teach staff or parents, give credit to both the brick-maker and the builders.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Our paper reviews and analyzes B. F. Skinner's contributions to applied behavior analysis in order to assess his role as the field's originator and founder. We found, first, that his contributions fall into five categorizes: the style and content of his science, his interpretations of typical and atypical human behavior, the implications he drew from his science for application, his descriptions of possible applications, and his own applications to nonhuman and human behavior. Second, we found that he explicitly or implicitly addressed all seven dimensions of applied behavior analysis. These contributions and the dimensions notwithstanding, he neither incorporated the field's scientific (e.g., analytic) and social dimensions (e.g., applied) into any program of published research such that he was its originator, nor did he systematically integrate, advance, and promote the dimensions so to have been its founder. As the founder of behavior analysis, however, he was the father of applied behavior analysis.
The Behavior analyst, 2005 · doi:10.1007/BF03392108