Convergences with behavior analysis: Recommendations from the rhetoric of inquiry.
Stop preaching to the choir—export behavior analysis to neighboring fields and watch influence grow.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Crosbie (1993) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.
He told behavior analysts to leave their comfort zone.
He said study verbal behavior and talk to rhetoricians, economists, and philosophers.
What they found
The field was talking to itself.
J warned that staying inward would keep behavior analysis small and ignored.
He urged us to export our science the way other fields import ideas.
How this fits with other research
Later papers took the same warning and built road maps.
Morris (2014) shows you how to rewrite articles so non-BA journals will print them.
Lerman (2024) hands you a step-by-step blueprint for training police, teachers, and nurses.
Fraley (1998) and Ghaziuddin (2000) prove the tools already work: stimulus equivalence explains decision making and reinforcement predicts why bosses double-down on bad projects.
The message stayed the same for thirty years; only the instructions got clearer.
Why it matters
If you want your work to leave the clinic, start a crossover project.
Team up with a rhetoric, philosophy, or economics professor this year.
Write one article for their journal, not ours.
Your data will still be behavior analytic, but the audience will grow.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This analysis speculates on reasons why behavior analysis has not had the professional impact it desires, and suggests that increased contact with non-behavior-analytic research traditions and increased research in the area of verbal behavior may reverse the profession's fortunes. Behaviorists have accured a number of advantages from constituting themselves as a separate school in psychology. Nonetheless, school status can lead to isolation from other research traditions and can restrict communicative encounters with outside scholars to efforts to attack their research programs and defend one's own. Efforts to counteract these tendencies should help bring behavior analysis into the mainstream of contemporary social science research. In addition, if behavior analysts reconsider some of their assumptions about verbal and nonverbal behaviors and some of their methodological assumptions about how verbal behavior is to be studied, and if they place verbal behavior research on center stage, they may make substantive contributions to the contemporary multidisciplinary study of language.
The Behavior analyst, 1993 · doi:10.1007/BF03392604