Teaching Behavior Analysis through Its History: Narrative and Stories
Teach behavior-analysis history by nesting short, juicy stories inside a clear main narrative.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hineline (2022) asked a simple question. How do we make the history of behavior analysis stick?
The paper is a how-to guide. It tells teachers to weave two things together. One is a clear story line. The other is short, vivid tales nested inside that line.
No new data were collected. The author mapped out a teaching trick anyone can copy.
What they found
The trick is contrast. A smooth, formal narrative gives the big picture. Tiny, dramatic stories give the color.
Learners stay awake because each story acts like a pop-up cue. The cues link to key terms, dates, and people.
How this fits with other research
Three other 2022 papers chase the same goal: better history lessons. Morris (2022) hands you a full course blueprint. Morris et al. (2022) adds ethics readings on punishment. All three papers agree history must be taught, yet each offers a different recipe.
Older works give the raw material. Sidman (2002) shares early-day lab gossip. Schaal (1996) tells how moms in the 1950s ran home programs. Hineline shows you how to turn those facts into gripping mini-stories.
Looking forward, Jackson-Perry et al. (2025) push for critical, neurodiversity-friendly history. Hineline’s story-plus-narrative method is the delivery tool they need.
Why it matters
If you train RBTs, supervise students, or run CEUs, you can lift this idea today. Open your next lecture with a short tale—maybe how Skinner’s box almost wasn’t built—then slide back to the main plot. Your listeners will remember more and scroll less.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Four articles appear in a special section of the current issue of this journal. Each offers methods for introducing students to the history of behavior analysis. Their distinctive approaches vary from delineating a course addressed specifically to history, to combining issues in behavior analysis with those within related fields, or to splicing historical events or methods into various courses within behavior analysis. I sketch these briefly to encourage readers to read them directly before proposing that the history of our field can also be understood both as an overarching narrative and as a collection of stories. Boje (2008) distinguishes between the two by characterizing narrative as a rather formal, organized account, on the one hand, with stories, on the other hand, being more disorderly episodes of behavior-in-process. Each has its roles for introducing behavior analysis—and even for effectively understanding it ourselves—and thus, the best place of each within strategies of teaching, bears systematic examination. Although narrative supplies an organized account, stories more strongly engage the reader. Stories are especially effective at keeping the reader or listener engaged when they entail nested relations delineated by establishing stimuli. Besides offering a principle of organization, this formulation yields a strategy for using stories to enable the overarching narrative to sustain the reader’s or listener’s behavior.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2022 · doi:10.1007/s40614-022-00355-w