BA200 Unit 10 Future of Behavior Analysis Paper Example

From Walden Two to a Clinic Staff Meeting: A BA200 Unit 10 Future of Behavior Analysis Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA200: Conceptual Foundations of Applied Behavior Analysis

Unit 10 Future of Behavior Analysis Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the clinic and its staff are composite; the novel, articles and books cited are real.

A Utopia Written by a Scientist

In 1948, Skinner published Walden Two, a novel about a community of about a thousand people designed according to behavioral principles (Skinner, 1948). In Walden Two, children are raised communally, work is distributed by a credit system that rewards unpleasant jobs with fewer hours, competition is discouraged, and practices are tested and revised experimentally. A visiting professor, skeptical at first, is gradually won over. The book's central claim is that a culture can be deliberately designed to produce happiness, cooperation and creativity, using the same science that explains how individual behavior is shaped.

Reading the novel after two years of delivering therapy sessions, I found it both inspiring and unsettling. Inspiring because it imagines behavior analysis solving problems far larger than one child's biting. Unsettling because Frazier, its founder, decides what the community values, and the residents' freedom to choose different values is never quite tested.

From Individuals to Groups

Skinner's later work argued that groups keep or drop practices according to what those practices produce for them, just as individual behavior is selected by consequences for the person (Skinner, 1981). Glenn (1988) developed that idea into the concept of the metacontingency, a relation between the interlocking behavior of several people, which together produce an outcome, and the consequences that the outcome receives from the wider environment. In a metacontingency, it is not one person's behavior that is selected, but a pattern of coordinated behavior that produces something the larger system values.

Our clinic offers a small example. Two years ago, after a child was injured during a transition between rooms, the staff developed a transition protocol: a two-minute warning, a visual schedule, a designated adult walking with each child and a reinforcer on arrival. No single person's behavior makes the protocol work; it depends on the coordinated behavior of technicians, the front desk and supervisors. The outcome, fewer injuries and smoother transitions, earns consequences from outside the clinic: fewer incident reports, satisfied families and a better review from the state licensing inspector. Of the five staff who designed the protocol, only one still works at the clinic, yet the practice continues.

The transition protocol outlived the people who designed it because the clinic, not any one technician, was being selected by its results.

What the Novel Gets Wrong

Walden Two has dated in ways worth naming. Its community is small, homogeneous and isolated, which makes design easier than in any real society. Its experiments are described but never shown failing, so readers do not see how a designed culture corrects its mistakes. And the novel treats disagreement mainly as a sign that a person has not yet understood the system. Real attempts to build communities on the book's principles, such as Twin Oaks in Virginia, kept some practices, like the labor credit system, and scaled back others, such as fully communal child rearing, as members found them hard to sustain. In the language of selection, the practices that survived were the ones that worked for the people living with them, not the ones the novel recommended.

That history is reassuring rather than discouraging. It suggests that a culture designed with behavioral principles can learn, if it measures its results and listens to its members, which is the same lesson a clinic learns when a treatment plan is revised after the data come in.

Directions for the Field

Baer et al. (1987) reminded the field two decades after its founding that applied behavior analysis has to keep working on problems that matter to people and prove itself where those people live. Looking forward, three directions seem likely.

The first is expansion. Behavior analysis is already applied well beyond autism, in organizational management, health behavior, education, safety and sustainability. Baum (2017) argues that a science of behavior that includes cultural evolution can contribute to understanding large social problems, from public health to climate change, because those problems are problems of human behavior and cultural practice.

The second is a stronger attention to culture and values. Walden Two's weakness, a designer who chooses the community's values, is a warning the field has taken more seriously in recent years. Calls for culturally responsive practice, for goals set with clients rather than for them and for the inclusion of autistic people's perspectives all ask the same question: whose values does the science serve?

The third is professional maturity. As the field grows, its practitioners need training not only in procedures but in judgment, ethics and the philosophy behind the work. Technicians like me deliver most of the hours of service; the field's future depends on whether we understand why we do what we do.

A Technician's View of the Future

What would Walden Two look like if it were redesigned today? I think it would keep Skinner's best insight, that environments can be arranged to bring out cooperation and creativity, and drop his assumption that a planner knows best. In my clinic, the practices that have lasted, from the break card to the transition protocol to the new session note template, are ones that made the work better for children and staff alike, and several began with a technician's or a parent's suggestion. That pattern suggests that cultural design works best when the people living in the culture help design it.

Questions I Will Carry

Three questions from this course will stay with me after it ends. When I suggest a change to a child's plan, whose values does it serve, the child's, the family's or the clinic's convenience? When a practice spreads among staff, has anyone checked whether it works, or did it spread because it was easy? And when I imagine a better clinic, as Skinner imagined a better society, have I asked the children and families what better would mean to them? None of these questions has a final answer, but asking them is part of what a conceptually grounded practitioner does.

Conclusion

Skinner's novel imagined behavior analysis designing a whole culture, and Glenn's metacontingencies explain how coordinated practices are selected by their results. The field's future lies in extending that science to larger problems while learning the lesson the novel only half learned: that the people whose behavior is being shaped should help decide what it is shaped toward. In one clinic, the practices that last are the ones that everyone involved helped to build.

References

Baer, D. M., Wolf, M. M., & Risley, T. R. (1987). Some still-current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 20(4), 313-327. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1987.20-313

Baum, W. M. (2017). Understanding behaviorism: Behavior, culture, and evolution (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Glenn, S. S. (1988). Contingencies and metacontingencies: Toward a synthesis of behavior analysis and cultural materialism. The Behavior Analyst, 11(2), 161-179. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392470

Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden two. Macmillan.

Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences. Science, 213(4507), 501-504. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7244649