On the Disruptive Effects of Behavior Analysis on Behavior Analysis: The High Cost of Keeping Out Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Training
ACT and RFT aren’t optional extras; they force us to re-check every direct-contingency result.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dixon et al. (2025) wrote a position paper, not an experiment.
They argue that bringing ACT and RFT inside behavior analysis will shake every direct-contingency finding we trust.
The authors say we must re-test old data through the lens of relational operants.
What they found
The paper claims the field has been "disrupted" by keeping ACT/RFT out.
Letting them in means every study that ignored private verbal events may need a second look.
How this fits with other research
Hoffmann et al. (2016) already asked ACT to fill the private-events gap for clients with disabilities.
Sandoz et al. (2022) demanded explicit functional assessment before calling ACT "ABA."
Dixon et al. now go further: even well-run ABA studies may be incomplete without relational framing checks.
Harte et al. (2023) and Harte et al. (2024) showed new RFT tools that could do the re-analysis Dixon wants.
Why it matters
If you supervise programs, start asking: "What verbal relations might change this contingency?"
Add one RFT probe to your next functional analysis.
The field may not rewrite the book, but you can begin footnoting it with relational frames.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
ACT is entering its 40th year of development. Despite its undeniable historical origins in behavior analysis, extensive basis in behavior analytic research, and now enormous body of empirical research supporting its basic claims, some are still arguing that ACT is not legitimately part of behavior analysis. We agree with the target article that it is. We argue, however, that critics are right to feel that ACT will disrupt the field. It will do so not because of ACT per se, but because it brings relational frame theory (RFT) in with it and vice versa, and relational operants operate on other behavioral processes. This empirically established effect means that the vast literature on direct contingency control will need to be reexamined piece by piece while considering relational learning abilities. Such an agenda is exciting, but it is also daunting and disorienting. For behavior analysis to reject either ACT or RFT, both must be rejected. That appears to be the only way to avoid the coming disruption, but the cost would be in the distortion of the field itself that would result. Sometime the products of a scientific field require a fundamental rethinking of that field. In our view, that is the situation behavior analysis now faces. It is a kind of test, and we do not yet know if behavior analysis will pass it.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s40617-022-00742-4