Where have all the behaviorists gone?

The authors looked at how behavior analysts talk about behavior. They saw people slipping into mental words like "wants" or "thinks."

The paper is a wake-up call. It says we must train ourselves to speak in observable terms only.

The field was drifting. Clinicians used mind words instead of behavior words. The writers said this weakens our science.

They urged teachers to drill new staff on pure Skinnerian talk. Reward clear talk. Correct fuzzy talk.

Pear et al. (1984) picked up the same worry four years later. They defended the operant-respondent line while data pushed against it. Both papers guard the borders of our language.

Craig (2023) kept the guard duty alive. Forty-three years on, he defends momentum theory against messy data. The job never ends: keep concepts clean.

Johnson (2022) shows the fight moved to ethics. He wants Rekers & Lovaas (1974) retracted for harmful language. The 1980 paper’s plea for verbal control now shapes what we teach and cite.

Your words shape your interventions. Say "attention-maintained" instead of "he acts out for attention." Model this for RBTs. Catch yourself every time you say "frustrated" and swap it for the actual trigger and response. Clean talk keeps our field sharp and our clients safe.