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Actor and musician Jared Leto once said, “You know you’re famous when there’s rumors of you being gay.” That’s a specific instance of a general phenomenon: Only once you’ve made a splash do people start trying to control the narrative about you. When B.F. Skinner was a lowly experimental psychologist, for instance, nobody bothered to call him an existential Orwellian threat or to suggest that he drove a daughter insane via aircrib “torture.” That stuff came only after he was a bona fide public figure, and it makes sense why: Nobody gets attention for editorializing about obscure topics or individuals.
Humor is one kind of editorial attention, and people bother to make jokes only about individuals and happenings that listeners know. For example, there are countless jokes about Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln. Not so much about mostly-forgotten Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski.
By the way, you can, if it makes you feel better about the present topic, undertake a behavioral analysis of humor, but I’m more aligned with E.B. White, who supposedly said, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process” (for a somewhat contrasting opinion, see this previous post). For present purposes it’s enough to say that humor is a marker of the attention that its target has earned.
I got curious about what humor might tell us about the attention earned by behavior analysis. I mean, on a daily basis satire web sites like The Onion take jabs at public figures like Donald Trump or at ubiquitous phenomena like the social media. If behavior analysis and its subject matter are kind of a big deal, as we would hope, then folks will bother to satirize it. Regardless of whether they’re laughing with us or at us, laughter means they noticed us.
So, I sampled a variety of text- and video-based sites by searching for entries relating to “positive reinforcement.” You can check out my results below, but I think you’ll agree that most are disappointing. Some have nothing to do with reinforcement while others get core facts quite wrong. A few of them are actually funny, but mostly not the ones that get reinforcement right. Laughs are a bit more plentiful, and earned, if you seek out items relating to learning broadly defined, but overall the conclusion in unavoidable: Not a lot of folks are laughing with or at us, which suggests that behavior analysis remains fairly invisible on the societal stage. We’ll know we have claimed a place on that big stage when there are more smart, apt bits like the famous Big Bang Theory segment on positive reinforcement listed below.
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