Abstract
This article introduces a special section of Perspectives on Behavior Science on teaching the history of behavior analysis. Although behavior is distinctive, behavior analysis is diverse, and the history of behavior analysis is deep, teaching the field’s history often is not. The special section offers means for remedying this. The introduction has three sections. First, it relates the genesis of the special section: the 2018 meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis International and, before that, the 2015 meeting of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Second, it addresses the purposes—reasons and rationales—for teaching history, especially the history of behavior analysis. And third, it offers a prologue for teaching the field’s history based on a review of what is taught or not in recent textbooks and handbooks on the field’s basic and applied research and their conceptual foundations. In its conclusion, the article previews the section’s other articles: (1) three exemplars on how history can be embedded in courses on the field’s foregoing three subdisciplines; (2) an exemplar of teaching history in a stand-alone course on the field’s history overall; (3) a discussion that addresses how to improve instruction in these courses through narrative methods; and (4) a conclusion about the present and future of teaching the field’s history (e.g., giving the history of behavior analysis away).
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In psychology, the distinction between the long past and short history was originally made by Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909). He wrote: “Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short” (Ebbinghaus, 1908, p. 3). E. G. Boring (1886–1968) made it famous as: “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history” (see Boring, 1929, p. vii).
Observer was J. R. Kantor.
Textbooks that include both applied behavior analysis and the experimental analysis of behavior were not reviewed. The only one in my library was O’Donohue (1998). Its introduction includes no history.
Only two recent textbooks and handbooks in my library address behavior analysis more generally: Leslie (2002) and Madden (2009). Leslie (2002) includes an eight-page section on the field’s history in his introduction. It comprises 57% of that chapter and 3% of the text’s enumerated pages. In his prospectus, Madden included a chapter on the history of behavior analysis and secured an author to write it, but it was not submitted.
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Morris, E.K. Introduction to Teaching the History of Behavior Analysis: Past, Purpose, and Prologue. Perspect Behav Sci 45, 697–710 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-022-00356-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-022-00356-9