On herding sheep and climbing sand dunes: We gotta' keep saying it (but listening too).

Abstract

Cultural Change and Our Impatience for It Probably most people who strive for major changes in society or at least in their special field, are naive about how fast and easily change can be wrought. I recall that in the 1960s Ogden Lindsey was telling special education teachers at conferences that within 20 years all of special education would be behavioral. Has that come true? Well, no. Although there are probably very few special education teachers who have essentially no knowledge of behavioral techniques, the majority appear to make very limited use of a very few techniques; and even fewer have much understanding of behaviorism as a philosophy or science. Consider also this quote from M. F. Meyer in 1933: Why introduce into science an unneeded term such as when there are already scientific terms for everything we have to describe? ... I predict: the has virtually passed out of our scientific psychology today; the emotion is bound to do the same. In 1950, American psychologists will smile at both of these terms as curiosities of the past. This quote was published in a major psychology journal. He was predicting that in a mere 17 years the concept of would disappear; yet it is now 2000 and the concept has certainly not disappeared from either basic or applied psychology. I think we are all naive about how long it takes to change the thinking or action of most large populations. For example, toward the end of his career, Skinner (1987) seemed to be discouraged because psychology was not changing radically as a result of his very cogent writings about how best to conduct its science. He saw the ascendance of cognitivism and decried its negative effects on education (Skinner, 1984, 1990). He questioned whether human society--even humankind as a species--would be able to survive if we did not get the right track quickly and develop a science that provided useful answers to the severe problems caused by human behavior, such as air and water pollution, overpopulation, and war (Skinner, 1990b). It is indeed discouraging that the science of psychology seems so misguided. The same phenomenon that Skinner saw in education--with perspectives dominating and preventing the development of a truly useful understanding of how behavior works, an understanding that leads naturally to effective interventions--is evident in a field that even began as behavioral, though not behavior analytic. That field is behavior therapy. It has become increasingly over the last 25 years (Hawkins, et al., 1992). This is reflected in the fact that the organization in the United States that most represents this field--the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT)--added a byline to the name of its journal, Behavior Therapy, adding An International Journal Devoted to the Application of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences to Clinical Problems. The critical word here is cognitive, and the byline was intended to reflect the existing fact that the journal publishes articles from widely discrepant conceptual and diverse methodologial viewpoints (Craighead, 1990, p. 1). In addition, in 1994 AABT began publication of an additional journal, entitled Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, in which the term cognitive is even primary. Two Major Impediments to Changing Crucial Cultural Practices Our Minority Status The first impediment is obvious: behavior analysts are a microscopic minority of the billions of people on earth. Realistically, we should not expect to change even the other behavioral sciences extensively within five or ten decades; and changing the practices of the numerous cultures throughout the world should be expected to take dozens of decades. It would appear that we must accept an evolutionary approach, not expect a revolutionary, rapid-change approach. Our Language I believe that another major reason why behavioral science has such limited impact on the practices of human cultures is that all behavioral scientists--including behavior analysts--come to their task with a host of preconceptions about how behavior works. …