The gifts of culture and of eloquence: An open letter to Michael J. Mahoney in reply to his article, "Scientific psychology and radical behaviorism".
Radical behaviorism is selectionist, not mechanical—use that line when critics call ABA cold or outdated.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author wrote an open letter to psychologist Michael Mahoney. Mahoney had claimed that radical behaviorism is outdated and mechanical.
The letter explains that radical behaviorism is actually selectionist. It acts like natural selection, not like a simple stimulus-response machine.
What they found
The paper shows that radical behaviorism picks successful behaviors the way nature picks fast rabbits. It is not stuck in old Cartesian mind-body splits.
Calling the field "associationist" or "mechanical" misses this Darwin-like core.
How this fits with other research
Shafer (1993) backs the same field a year later, but moves from philosophy to attitude. It says behavior analysts welcome criticism, so the fight is about personality, not theory.
Dougan (1992) uses the same selectionist idea in schools. It claims we already own a science of teaching; we just need to sell it to educators.
Schmitt (1984) seems to clash by wanting to drop the word "behaviorism" altogether and call the science "praxics." The clash is only skin-deep: Hayes (1991) defends the philosophy behind the name, while R wants a new name to protect the science.
Why it matters
When teachers, parents, or colleagues say ABA is "mechanical," you can reply that it is selectionist. Share the quick analogy: we let successful behaviors survive and weak ones fade, just like evolution. Knowing this philosophical root lets you defend the field without sounding defensive.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Next time someone says ABA is robotic, reply, "Actually, it works like natural selection—successful behaviors survive," and give a quick example from your client.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In what seems to be a response to a paper by Skinner (1987), Mahoney (1989) provides evidence of unfamiliarity with and intellectual intolerance toward radical behaviorism by presenting a critique of it that includes a variety of improper and counterfactual attributions. For example, he argues that radical behaviorism is Cartesian rather than Baconian when the historical record shows the opposite, that it is fundamentally associationist when in fact it is selectionist, and that its philosophy of science is essentially that of operationalism and logical positivism when instead it moved on to other criteria decades ago. The details of Mahoney's history are sometimes flawed and sometimes unsubstantiated, as when he provides a distorted account of the origins of the Association for Behavior Analysis or when he makes undocumented claims about the banning of books. On examination, many of his arguments are couched in stylistic terms that share their rhetorical features with racial, ethnic, and religious stereotyping.
The Behavior analyst, 1991 · doi:10.1007/BF03392553