Separate disciplines: The study of behavior and the study of the psyche.
Behavior analysis had to divorce psychology to grow up—and the custody battle for boundaries continues today.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Williams et al. (1986) wrote a position paper. They argued that behavior analysis should leave psychology and become its own field.
The authors said the field needs its own schools, journals, and licenses. They warned that staying inside psychology would limit growth.
What they found
The paper did not test people. It stated that behavior analysis and psychology ask different questions.
The authors claimed the two fields need separate homes to thrive.
How this fits with other research
Davison (1992) extends the 1986 call. After independence was claimed, M sketched two training tracks: one for scientists, one for practitioners.
Baires et al. (2020) also extends the idea. They say the now-free field must use its own tools to fix sexism inside its walls.
Snyder et al. (2024) shows the split is still messy. Their survey finds BCBAs and school psychologists still overlap in schools, proving the boundary work started in 1986 is ongoing.
Why it matters
You work in a field that won its own seat at the table. When you write "behavior analyst" on a form, you are living the 1986 victory. Protect that identity. Use behavior-analytic language in IEPs, hospital notes, and funding requests. Remind team members why our measures, graphs, and ethics differ from psychology. Each time you do, you keep the independence alive.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The study of behavior differs fundamentally from the study of the psyche and logically cannot share the same discipline. However, while disciplines might be defined through technical exercises, they function through exercises of political power. The evolution of a discipline, though based on field and laboratory data interpreted within a specific paradigm and justified publicity by its utility to solve personal and social problems, follows a course of development in the political arenas of the academies and the professions. We happen to have a discipline, roughly connoted by the label "behavior analysis," without an academic home (the present ones haphazardly tolerate our activities), without a professional organization (the present one lobbies only "for behavior analysis"), and without a true professional name (the present one implies an approach not a discipline). No scientific community lasts long without a supporting professional infrastructure. In explicitly asserting ourselves as a discipline, we confront a number of difficult issues such as continuing to work in departments antithetical to behaviorism and a number of problems such as what we call ourselves to identify our professional and scientific concerns. (For example, we need a term descriptive of our science in its broad sense. That term is not psychology. Too many people persist in maintaining its commitment to cognitivism. On whatever term we agree, "behavior" should constitute its stem, for our efforts focus there, not in the putative underlying psyche or its current cognitive update.) The focus of our concerns and the solutions of our problems rest on one issue: Will our discipline prosper most as a branch of psychology or as an independent discipline? Slowly, but surely, our actions demonstrate that the latter is the preferred option, but these actions, though fortuitous, occur almost by accident. By specifically programming to achieve an independent professional status we increase the probability of doing so.
The Behavior analyst, 1986 · doi:10.1007/BF03391929