BA200 Unit 2 Radical Behaviorism Paper Example

When a Seven-Year-Old Says She Is Scared: A BA200 Unit 2 Radical Behaviorism Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA200: Conceptual Foundations of Applied Behavior Analysis

Unit 2 Radical Behaviorism Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the clinic and the child are composite; the sources cited are real.

A Question From a Session

Four afternoons a week I am a behavior technician at a Grand Junction clinic. Lila, a seven-year-old I see four afternoons a week, stopped at the door of the group room last month, gripped the frame and said, "I'm scared." She would not go in. My first thought was that she was afraid, and that her fear was keeping her out of the room.

That thought is natural, and my coursework has taught me why a behavior analyst would question it. Not because Lila's fear is unreal, but because explaining her behavior by her fear stops the analysis too soon. This paper explains radical behaviorism, the philosophy behind that view, and applies it to Lila.

Two Kinds of Behaviorism

The word behaviorism covers two very different positions. Methodological behaviorism holds that psychology should study only what can be publicly observed and agreed upon by more than one observer. It does not necessarily deny that thoughts and feelings exist, but it sets them aside as outside the reach of science. Watson's early behaviorism and much mid-century psychology took this approach.

Radical behaviorism, Skinner's philosophy, takes the opposite step. In his analysis of psychological terms, Skinner (1945) argued that private events, such as a toothache or a feeling of fear, belong to the same natural world as public behavior. They happen inside the skin, where only one person can observe them, but they are still behavior or stimuli, subject to the same laws. A science of behavior should therefore include them. What it should not do is treat them as causes that originate in a separate mind.

Radical behaviorism does not ignore Lila's fear; it refuses to let the fear be the end of the explanation.

Skinner later developed the argument at book length, insisting that the feelings people report are real and important, but that they are products of the person's history and current environment rather than independent causes of action (Skinner, 1974). When we say a child stays out of a room because she is afraid, we name two things the environment has produced, the feeling and the staying out, and then use one to explain the other.

Explanatory Fictions and Theories

Skinner (1950) was also skeptical of theories that explain behavior by events at another level of description, whether in the mind, the nervous system or a conceptual model, when those events are themselves inferred from the behavior they are meant to explain. He argued that research could proceed by examining the functional relations between behavior and environmental variables directly, without such theories.

The criticism applies to everyday explanations in practice. If I say Lila avoids the room because she is anxious, and I know she is anxious only because she avoids the room, my explanation is circular. It gives the behavior a name and treats the name as a cause.

Pragmatism

Radical behaviorism also has a distinctive view of truth. Baum (2017) describes behavior analysis as rooted in pragmatism: a statement or explanation is judged not by whether it corresponds to some hidden reality, but by whether it is useful, whether it allows people to predict and influence behavior effectively. From that perspective, the question is not whether Lila is really afraid, but which description of the situation lets me help her.

Back to Lila

An explanation in terms of fear gave me nothing to do except reassure her, which I had done, and which had not worked. A radical behaviorist analysis asks what happened before and after. When my supervisor and I reviewed two weeks of data, a pattern appeared. Lila stopped at the door on afternoons when the group room was loud, especially when a particular peer was playing a drum game. When she stopped and said she was scared, I usually sat with her in the quiet hallway and read a book, which she likes.

That analysis treats her report of fear as behavior, a verbal response to a private and public situation, and treats the noise as part of the environment that occasions it. It also identifies a consequence that may be strengthening the pattern: time with me in a quiet hallway. None of this dismisses her fear. The noise may well produce real physical arousal that she calls fear. But the analysis points to things that can be changed: the noise level, the timing of her entry, the consequences of stopping at the door, and the skills she has for asking for a break.

My supervisor's plan did several of those things. The drum game moved to another room. Lila could enter before the group arrived. She learned to hand me a break card that earned two minutes of quiet in the hallway after she joined the group for a short time, rather than instead of joining. Within three weeks she was entering the room on most days, and she still told me when something felt scary.

A Common Objection

A classmate asked whether this approach is cold, whether it turns a frightened child into a set of variables. The objection deserves an answer. Radical behaviorism does describe Lila in terms of her history and environment, but that description is what allowed us to change the room instead of asking her to be braver. A mentalistic account, in which fear lives inside her and must be overcome, places the burden on the child. The behavioral account places it on the adults who control the setting. In Lila's case, the more scientific explanation was also the kinder one.

What the Philosophy Changes

Radical behaviorism changed three things about how I approached Lila. It kept me from treating her fear as a wall I could only reassure her about. It sent me to the data to find the environmental conditions and consequences involved. And it gave me a test for my own explanations: whether they suggested something useful to do. It did not make me care less about how she felt. If anything, taking her words seriously as behavior meant listening to when and where she said them.

Conclusion

Radical behaviorism is often described as the view that feelings do not matter. Skinner's own writing shows the opposite: private events are part of the subject matter, but they are explained rather than used as explanations. For a technician standing beside a child who says she is scared, that philosophy leads away from circular explanations and toward the environment, where help can actually be given.

References

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

Skinner, B. F. (1945). The operational analysis of psychological terms. Psychological Review, 52(5), 270-277. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0062535

Skinner, B. F. (1950). Are theories of learning necessary? Psychological Review, 57(4), 193-216. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054367

Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. Knopf.