The speciation of behavior analysis.
Treat EAB and ABA as two species that no longer share the same habitat.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author watched two wings of behavior analysis drift apart.
He said the split works like animal species that no longer mate.
Lab scientists and front-line clinicians now live under different rules.
The paper claims the gap is natural and will keep growing.
What they found
No data were collected.
The claim is conceptual: EAB and ABA face separate survival contingencies.
Like Darwin’s finches, each group adapts to its own island.
How this fits with other research
Fantino (1981) cheered the same outward spread that Reed (1991) later called a break-up.
The earlier review saw growth; the later paper sees speciation.
Carr et al. (2002) warned the PBS-ABA split repeats the pattern, echoing the 1991 thesis.
Jiménez et al. (2022) tried to glue concepts back together with one CHL framework, pushing against the inevitability claim.
Why it matters
You can stop feeling guilty if you rarely read JABA and EAB in the same week.
Accepting the split lets you focus on the journal chain that feeds your practice.
When you teach supervisees, point them to the literature that actually pays their paycheck.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The relationship between the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (EAB) and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) has been the subject of several editorials and commentaries in recent years. Various authors have argued that researchers in these two fields (a) have become isolated from each other, (b) face different requirements for survival in their respective fields, and (c) possess different skills to meet those requirements. The present paper provides an allegory for the relationship between EAB and ABA in terms of biological speciation. The conditions that have changed the relationship between EAB and ABA are parallel to those responsible for biological speciation: (a) isolation of some members of a species from the rest of the population, (b) different contingencies of survival for members of the two separate groups, and (c) divergence in the adaptive characteristics displayed by the two groups. When members of two different groups, descendants of common ancestors, no longer are capable of producing viable offspring by interbreeding, the different groups then represent different species. To the extent that members of the EAB group and members of the ABA group interact with each other only trivially, they each represent allegorically different species. Changes in the relationship between EAB and ABA are part of a natural process that takes place in many other sciences, and the course of that process can hardly be reversed by us.
The Behavior analyst, 1991 · doi:10.1007/BF03392567