The Selective Renaissance of the Experimental Analysis of Human Behavior

Abstract

Two recent articles (Dougherty, Nedelmann, & Alfred, 1993; Hyten & Reilly, 1992) have favorably appraised the growth and health of the experimental analysis of human behavior as a whole. Within the last decade alone, there has been a more than threefold increase in the percentage of human operant papers appearing in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. In the present paper, a more molecular analysis is used, and some concerns are raised about the overall health of the field. The analysis included a determination of the rate at which new authors have appeared, how several areas of research have grown, and a contrast between the proportion of papers appearing in each of several areas of research during the last two decades. Two primary concerns are raised in this paper: (a) The recent growth within the field has been in only three select research areas (general schedule control, reinforcement, and stimulus control), and (b) there is an increasing disparity between the number of papers published in the few areas of research receiving the most attention and the number of papers published in the other areas of research receiving the least attention. Although the experimental analysis of human behavior has made considerable progress in the mere number of publications, these publications have been somewhat limited in scope.