Written by Nansi Tran Fontaine; Edited by Sofia Abuin
What I wish I had understood about entering a new verbal community in behavior analysis.
What Happened
Coming from developmental, behavioral neuroscience, and cognitive focused training to behavior analysis, I was not exactly met with a welcome wagon. The verbal community of my undergraduate explained behavior by pointing to thoughts, traits, diagnoses, personality, motivation, the brain, or some other internal cause. That language had worked for me before. I could write well enough. I could earn the grades. I could participate in class and sound like I understood psychology. Then, I entered the school of behavior analysis and found that reinforcement was available under different contingencies.
Despite rigorous studying, SAFMEDS, and practice tests on basic concepts, principles, assessments, and experimental design, I still received corrective feedback for the way I spoke about behavior. That feedback felt harsh at first. I remember sharing ideas and almost immediately hearing some version of: “That’s mentalistic,” “That’s teleological,” or “What are the observable variables?” It was frustrating because I did not feel like I was doing poorly. I was completing the work, I was getting the grades, but I felt like someone from outside the field of behavior analysis.
What I Learned
I had entered a new verbal community
Descriptions of behavior needed to be observable, measurable, objective, and conceptually systematic to contact reinforcement. Explanations that relied on thoughts, traits, diagnoses, or internal causes were more likely to contact correction or extinction.
My old explanatory repertoire stopped working
Looking back, I understand the feedback differently now. The issue wasn’t that I didn’t belong. The issue was how I was conceptualizing behavior. I was still locating causes in places behavior analysts are trained to question. I was explaining behavior by appealing to hypothetical constructs, internal agents, or future outcomes as if those things caused behavior. I might have said someone acted because they “wanted attention,” “lacked motivation,” “wanted control,” “was anxious,” or “knew better.” Those phrases can feel explanatory, but they often stop the analysis before it can begin.
How Skinner Helped Me Make The Shift
Skinner’s “Why I Am Not a Cognitive Psychologist” helped me understand why this mattered. Skinner argued that the variables of which human behavior is a function are found in the environment, including evolutionary history, the shaping and maintenance of a behavioral repertoire, and the current occasion for responding (Skinner, 1977). His criticism was not that internal events do not exist. It was that explanations can replace environmental relations with internal surrogates that are often treated as the causes of behavior. And that was the shift I had been struggling to make.
I had to replace labels with functional questions
Instead of saying the learner refused because they were noncompliant, I had to ask:
- What response class am I observing?
- What’s the function of the behavior?
- What antecedent conditions were present?
- What consequences have followed similar responses in the past?
- What alternative responses have contacted reinforcement?
Instead of saying a person stored a skill and needed to retrieve it, I had to think about the conditions under which that behavior had occurred in the past and whether the current environmental contingencies occasioned and reinforced its occurrence.
There is something difficult about losing familiar explanations. In everyday language, we talk as if love, choice, preference, personality, and motivation are things inside people that make behavior happen. Behavior analysis asks us to treat those words more carefully. That does not have to mean love is meaningless or private events are fake. It means those words do not end the analysis. They are not magical causes. They are behavior, histories, contexts, relations, and labels to be handled with precision and accuracy.
Having the words was not the same as using them under the right conditions
That level of precision can feel cold at first. Over time, I began to experience it differently. If behavior is caused by fixed inner traits that cannot be reached, then change can feel limited. But if behavior is a function of environmental variables, reinforcement histories, motivating operations, discriminative stimuli, and available response options, then change is possible. We may not control every relevant variable, and we should be careful not to pretend that we do. But we can often arrange better conditions for behavior to occur, contact reinforcement, and become more fluent. That changed the way I approached my own learning.
Behavior did not always occur under the conditions where I wanted it to occur. In the classroom, especially early on, I still sounded mentalistic. Certain academic conditions—like receiving a low grade, being corrected in front of others, or comparing my responses to my classmates’ responses—seemed to occasion a return to older ways of speaking. That was frustrating because it made my performance look weaker than my actual study history suggested.
Meanwhile, when I talked to people outside the field, I sometimes found myself speaking technically. That experience helped me understand stimulus control in a more personal way. It was not enough for the response to exist somewhere in my repertoire. I needed it to occur under the conditions where behavior-analytic language mattered most.
My Language Was Shaped By Differential Consequences
When I drifted back into mentalistic explanations, my behavior contacted correction, and sometimes that correction was aversive. In other words, my language was being shaped by differential consequences. Behavior-analytic descriptions contacted one set of consequences, while mentalistic explanations contacted another.
Correction without support can suppress responding
That does not mean punishment and extinction should be romanticized. Corrective feedback can suppress responding if it is too frequent, too vague, or not paired with clear opportunities to improve. That happened for me, too.
Fluency did not generalize across all conditions
I still do not think it would be honest to say I can “officially” speak behavior analytically whenever I need to. There are still conditions where the repertoire is weaker than I want it to be. In casual conversations, I may explain a concept clearly. When I am reading alone, I may understand the article. When I am talking to someone outside the field, I may even sound fluent. But under evaluative conditions—in class, during supervision, during feedback, or when I am comparing my responses to people who sound more fluent—the old verbal behavior can show back up.
Self-doubt is behavior, not an explanation
Laypeople might call that imposter syndrome. I am trying to see it from a behavior-analytic perspective. The self-doubt is real, but it is not an explanation. It is part of the behavior stream. It occurs under certain antecedent conditions and has its own history of reinforcement and punishment. The thought “I do not belong here” may feel like evidence, but it is also verbal behavior. If I treat it as a fact, it can occasion avoidance, silence, overexplaining, or a return to familiar mentalistic language. That distinction matters to me. I am not an imposter because my behavior-analytic repertoire is still developing. I am a learner whose verbal behavior is not yet fluent across all relevant conditions. That is a different analysis, and it gives me something to do.
Better questions replaced familiar explanations
I still catch myself saying things that sound explanatory but are really placeholders. I still have to translate my first response into something more observable, functional, and useful. I still feel the pull of old language because it is everywhere: casual conversation, social media, clinical language, school systems, and many areas of psychology. But I am more confident now. Not because I can explain everything. I cannot. I am more confident because I have better questions:
- What behavior am I talking about?
- Under what conditions does it occur?
- What has followed it before?
- What response could be more effective?
- What would need to change for that response to occur more often?
Better questions changed how I respond to people
These questions make me slower to blame people. They make me more careful with labels. They make me less satisfied with explanations that sound deep but do not help me predict or influence behavior. They have also made me more compassionate because the analysis keeps returning me to histories and contexts rather than defective people.
That is what I wish I had understood earlier.
What Future Students Can Do
Rehearse behavior-analytic language out loud
One strategy that helped me was reading behavior-analytic articles out loud. Sometimes I read them almost like a script. I would pretend I was a behavior-analytic professor explaining the concept to someone else. That might sound silly, but it worked. I was rehearsing the language. I was practicing the verbal behavior I wanted to emit later in class.
Practice in the environments where the language matters
I had to arrange opportunities to speak behavior analytically in the environments where that repertoire mattered most. When I used the terms more precisely and objectively, that behavior contacted reinforcement.
Arrange your own contingencies
That helped me see coursework differently. I could stop waiting for the natural environment to reinforce the new repertoire consistently. It probably would not. Outside behavior-analytic spaces, technical language may contact confusion, disagreement, or social punishment. Even inside the field, early attempts may contact more correction than praise. So, I had to arrange some of my own contingencies.
For current students, that may be one of the most important lessons: do not rely on motivation alone. Arrange your environment. Take baseline data on your study behavior. Notice where responding stops. Identify where ratio strain shows up. Ask how much corrective feedback you can contact before avoidance starts increasing. Track what ratio of corrective feedback to positive feedback helps you keep engaging. Identify which academic behaviors are high probability for you and which are low probability. Then use high-probability responses to build momentum before completing low-probability tasks, or use the Premack principle by making a preferred activity contingent on completing a less preferred academic response.
Prepare for schedule thinning
Continuous reinforcement can be useful when a new skill is being acquired. Maybe that is what some of us need during the first semester of a program. But like all things, it does not last. The natural environment will rarely provide dense, immediate reinforcement forever. At some point, the schedule begins thinning. The question is not whether that is fair. The question is: how do I prepare for it?
Rehearse under the conditions where the repertoire needs to occur
I can arrange more practice opportunities. I can seek feedback from people who reinforce approximations, not just final products. I can rehearse under conditions that look more like the environments where I want the behavior to occur. I can notice when comparison, correction, or low grades begin to function as establishing operations for avoidance. So no, I am not finished learning to speak behavior. But that does not mean I am pretending. It means the repertoire is still being shaped.
Closing & Takeaways
Corrective feedback meant shaping, not failure
The corrective feedback did not mean I was incapable of learning behavior analysis. It meant I was learning it. My old explanations were contacting correction, weak reinforcement, or extinction, and new responses were being shaped. I was not just memorizing vocabulary. My behavior was being shaped into a different way of observing, speaking, and responding.
For students entering this verbal community
For students who are coming from cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, education, counseling, or everyday explanations of behavior, this transition may feel rough. You may feel like everyone else is speaking a language you should have already known. You may feel corrected more than encouraged. You may wonder whether you belong.
You probably do.
Belonging to this field does not mean your first explanations will survive contact with behavior-analytic feedback in the settings where technical language matters most. They might not. Mine did not. What changed was not just my terminology. It was my tolerance for correction, my ability to arrange reinforcement for difficult learning, and my willingness to let go of explanations that felt familiar but did not carry the analysis far enough.
Learning to speak behavior is hard. It is technical. It can feel socially awkward. It may even make everyday conversations harder for a while. But it gives you something valuable: a way to ask better questions about behavior, including your own. And when you can ask better questions, you can arrange better contingencies. You can build stronger repertoires. You can respond with more precision, more solutions, less blame, and fewer thought-terminating explanations. That matters for you. And it will matter for the people you support.
References:
Skinner, B. F. (1977). Why I am not a cognitive psychologist. Behaviorism, 5(2), 1–10.
Nansi is a graduate student at Florida Institute of Technology pursuing master’s degrees in Applied Behavior Analysis and Organizational Behavior Management. She previously earned bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Child Development and Learning from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she also completed pre-health coursework. Her training has been shaped by mentorship from David A. Wilder, Ph.D., BCBA-D; Kaitlynn M. Gokey, Ph.D., BCBA-D; Katie Nicholson, Ph.D., BCBA-D; Jonathan K. Fernand, Ph.D., BCBA-D; Andressa Sleiman, Ph.D., BCBA-D; and Andrew J. Houvouras IV, M.A., BCBA. Her interests span applied, organizational, and experimental behavior analysis, including verbal behavior, rule-governed behavior, training and development, leadership, organizational culture, psychological safety, biological interrelations, and the experimental analysis of behavior. She is currently focused on completing her capstone project and concentrated supervised fieldwork with industrial-organizational psychology electives.