Variables involved in the acquisition and maintenance of racial aggression and its victims’ reactions
Racism follows the same learning laws as any other behavior, so you can measure and change it with ABA tools.
01Research in Context
What this study did
de Sousa et al. (2022) wrote a theory paper. They asked, 'Can ABA explain racism?' They mapped basic terms like rule-governed behavior and motivating operations onto how people learn and keep racial aggression. No kids were tested. No trials were run. The team only built a blueprint for future work.
What they found
The paper shows racism acts like any other learned behavior. Rules from family, school, or media create the first learning. Social rewards keep it alive. Victims often learn to stay quiet because protest is punished. The authors give no numbers, just the map.
How this fits with other research
Hollins et al. (2023) extends this idea. They give you a shopping list of DEI readings you can drop into any VCS class. Where de Sousa shows why racism happens, Hollins shows how to teach it in class.
McComas et al. (2025) is a conceptual twin. They swap the word 'racism' for 'ableism' and tell the same story: ABA once helped oppression by trying to fix people instead of listening to them. Both papers push you to check your own bias.
Araiba (2024) looks at a different pillar—conceptual systematicity—but uses the same tool: plain theory. The three papers together say, 'Use ABA language to talk about hard social truths.'
Why it matters
You can use this paper like a lens. When a supervisor says, 'Leave politics out of ABA,' you now have behavior-analytic words to show that racism is learned behavior, not politics. Start by naming the rule that may drive a biased comment in your team. Then plan a replacement rule and a new consequence. That turns ethics into skill-building, not just talk.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study aimed to investigate how behavior analysis can contribute to the understanding of some variables and processes involved in the acquisition and maintenance of racial aggressors' behaviors, as well as the victims' reactions. We describe how the concepts of rule-governed behavior and motivating operations may be involved in institutional racism: Individuals belonging to ethnic groups who hold the social administration in a context may keep important reinforcers available for their own group, while other racial groups may have their access to those reinforcers hindered. For these privileges to be perpetuated, the ruling group can arrange contingencies that reinforce the behavior of following certain rules that contribute to the maintenance of relevant reinforcers for the ruling group and exclusion of Black individuals and other people of color. For those underrepresented groups, motivating operations can be manipulated and reinforcers can be provided only when their responses are deemed appropriate by the dominant group. Individual learning through discriminative training, equivalence class formation, transfer of functions, stimulus generalization, and function altering were also discussed. Patterns such as aggression, escape, and avoidance, were identified in the actions of racial aggressors. Finally, the victim’s reactions were also identified as escape, avoidance, or aggression of racial aggressors, but also as effects of processes such as learned helplessness, extinction after elimination of benefits, countercontrol, and respondent conditioning. Despite the lack of research in the field, behavior analysis has the power to elucidate some variables related to this theme, aiding, thus, evidence-based intervention proposals.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2022 · doi:10.1007/s40617-022-00696-7