The Experimental Analysis of Halloween

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Wanna know how to tell if you have
a successful science of behavior?

Here’s a test. Pick any random context featuring behavior, and see if your science has something to say about it. And I’m not talking about free-form interpretation (i.e., what behavior analysts like to call a “conceptual analysis”). No, I mean good old peer-reviewed primary empirical studies, i.e., data you can sink your teeth into.

Or maybe I should say “sink your fangs into,” because to make my point I’ve chosen, as a random behavioral context, Halloween (aka All Hallows Eve), that odd collection of rituals and superstitions that resurfaces each year on or around October 31, depending on your location.

If you’re not from someplace that observes Halloween (see Note 1), I won’t explain the holiday in detail (you can get the run-down here),

Note 1

Some places that celebrate Halloween include: the U.S., Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Ireland, Dominican Republic, France, Greece, India, Italy, Hong Kong, Poland, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Poland, Sweden, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates. A number of other nations blend Halloween with other holidays.

All you really need to know is that Halloween has a spooky vibe and (in the U.S. at least) is represented by a number of fear-inducing symbols and motifs like those shown below.

For my acid test of our science of behavior, I ask…

…What does our science have to say about those 12 topics shown above? You might imagine that’s a facetious question, a shameless click-grab to promote traffic to the good old ABAI blog site. But actually I’m dead (intentional Halloween pun! I’m hilarious!) serious.

At the end of this post, you’ll find selective bibliographies on research related to each of the 12 topics. Sure, in some cases I’ve stretched a little to find relevant studies, and yeah, I might have included one or two tongue-in-cheek references. Also, in my enthusiasm to compile the lists I let a few review/discussion type articles slip in, so it’s not all straight-up empirical reports. But otherwise the lists are 100% on the level.

And, by the way, most of them are far from comprehensive, having wrapped up because I got tired of looking rather than because I stopped finding sources. I could have included a ton more stuff.

And so what? Well, As I see it, there are two lessons to be derived from the lists.

LESSON 1: Yay for our team!

Given the apparently silliness of my test, it’s scary how well the science holds up [though see Note 2].

Note 2

The one classic Halloween theme on which I couldn’t find any behavior science was witches/witchcraft, except for one curious book that equated behavioral programs in correctional institutions, somehow, with witch burnings (and I swear that I am not making that up), and some near-miss sources involving magic, like these:

Flora, S. R. (2000). Praise’s magic reinforcement ratio: Five to one gets the job done. The Behavior Analyst Today, 1(4), 64-69.

Miguel, C. F. (2017). The generalization of mands. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 33(2), 191-204.

Anyway, students, if you’re looking to make your mark with a novel thesis or dissertation topic, here’s your shot. You’re welcome!

I’m not saying that the science directly examines folk suppositions about Halloween, like whether blood-guzzling undead really lurk in the shadows, because if we did that, well, maybe we wouldn’t be a science any more. But for a random selection of behaviors and organisms and catch phrases, yeah, we have a fair amount to say.

And, to be clear, I didn’t even grab the lowest-hanging fruit. Our science has contributed to countless studies on how to treat fear and avoidance of things like those shown above, but to most people that’s so obvious that I didn’t bother to create a list. Doing so would have expanded this post by at least an order of magnitude.

The “we” seem to be everywhere should not really surprise. As I mentioned in a previous post, some years ago Cognitive Psychologist and President of the American Psychological Society Henry Roediger wrote that “behaviorism won.” To some observers, he said, it may seem as if behavioral psychology has faded into obscurity in this cognitive-crazy era, but that’s mainly because certain aspects of a behavioral perspective have succeeded so well that they are now part of the zeitgeist of contemporary infrastructure of psychological science. Because behavioral methods influence those of every credible scientific effort to study behavior, the influence tends to get taken for granted. Hints f that pervasive influence are all over the bibliographies shared here.

Lesson 2: Don’t pat yourself on the back just yet!

If you skim the bibliographies attentively, maybe you’ll pick up on the second important lesson. Did you notice that the vast majority of the sources listed were in journals you’ve never thought to crack open (or didn’t know existed)? Did you see a lot of authors you’ve never heard of? Perhaps behaviorally-adjacent research questions you hadn’t ever thought to ask?

And did it strike you that many of the investigations are inherently interdisciplinary in nature?

Those definitely were my reactions, and with them came a humbling — no, call it frightening — realization. If I’m unaware of vast literatures with clear relevance to behavior… if I’m not familiar with journals in which there’s clear behavior-science (or at least behavior-science-adjacent) action… and if I’m not participating in free-ranging interdisciplinary conversations about behavior… can I really call myself a behavior analyst?

And this leads me to propose that when you call yourself a behavior analyst, you first lean into two extremely broad characteristics, things that should define us even preliminary to what Skinner said about the experimental analysis of behavior and what Baer-Wolf-Risley said about applied behavior analysis“

  • We may specialize in some topical domain, but what we know about behavior should be highly general, and therefore relevant to just about ANY topic that might pop up (even one relevant to Halloween. Or St. Patrick’s Day. Or National Transfer Money To Your Daughter Day).
  • We should curious about anything and everything that happens with behavior and/or helps to make behavior make sense.

And herein lies the curse of “behaviorism won.” The science of behavior may already look vast to you, for instance:

I used to think this was a lot.

But it’s waaaay bigger than that, and it’s incumbent on each and everyone one of us who strives to earn the title “behavior analyst” to keep up.

As Roediger noted, a behavioral approach now influences research of most types in some way, and in many research areas a behavioral viewpoint has taken on a life of its ow. For instance, there are killer behavior analysts in behavioral pharmacology and behavioral economics and behavioral neuroscience who you’ve likely never heard of. Those scientists, like the authors of many of the papers in the bibliographies below, have never been to a behavior analysis conference or peeked into a behavior analysis journal. And they certainly don’t know that you exist. But they’re extending the understanding of behavior in important ways.

Which begs this question:

If the study of behavior has become so diffuse
and scattered that its parts no longer interact,
is it really one science?

It’s not now, but I say it CAN be, IF there is glue to hold all of the parts together, and I believe the adhesive should be us. Who better to evaluate and clarify how all of the varied expressions of behavior science fit together, how the parts inform a whole, than we who are Skinner’s most direct descendants and have, presumably, the firmest grasp on his conceptual system?

Yes, that is easy to propose, but not so easy to implement, given the vast amount of stuff out there that requires integrating. No one individual can read and integrate everything [see Note 3].

Note 3

About integrating: Whoever does this must have a knack for separating the wheat from the chaff. Because many domains in which behavior science has had an impact are interdisciplinary, you’ll some work that just doesn’t hold up on careful inspection. You’ll also find seemingly strange terms and concepts and a lot of different types of research design, and be tempted to reject the work in which those appear. Behavior Analysis Purists like to dismiss anything that’s this “impure,” meaning not done exactly as we would do it, and that’s a shame. Amidst the unfamiliar vocabulary and methodology you’ll find many interesting and replicable findings out there that can be incorporated into a thoroughgoing account of behavior… if you go to the trouble of learning about them and digesting what they really tell us. By ignoring this stuff we miss important opportunities to test the generality of our framework and, to be quite honest, to earn credibility in the mainstream. To scientists out there who know they are onto something we look foolish for being ignorant of their findings while proclaiming that we have THE science of behavior.

In separating wheat from chaff in work not conducted by inner-circle behavior analysts, you have to be able to distinguish among the following three things, all of which exist in quantity outside of our journals:

  • Useful: Work that validates the theoretical framework we’ve already put into place (even if the researchers didn’t intend their work as a test of our ideas, or even if they don’t see the correct connection)
  • Useful: Work that points toward concepts or phenomena not currently emphasized in our framework
  • Not useful: Work that’s claimed to be relevant to our framework, but probably isn’t. For instance, it makes unjustified conceptual leaps (e.g., calling something operant learning that isn’t) or draws bogus conclusions from flawed experiments.

Like all discriminations, mastering this one requires practice with lots of exemplars, so there’s no time like the present to start working on your breadth.

To illustrate how what I’m calling for is beyond the reach of any individual, I will share a Sisyphean tale of terror, a real-life Twilight Zone episode, from my grad school days. I swear I am not making this up. When I arrived to begin my program, I met a student, let’s call her Jane Bierce, who was in her 11th year of graduate study. When I asked why her pursuit of a degree was taking so long,, she said, “My dissertation proposal is almost ready to go! But every time I think I’m finished, new journal issues come out and I have to update the literature review.” When I graduated four years later, Jane Bierce still had not proposed (insert Rod Serling outro commentary here). Yes, it’s every grad student’s nightmare, even scarier than black cats and evil clowns: the unending dissertation (cue sinister music, fade to black).

But there’s an alternative to everyone-reading-everything: crowdsourcing. We can all make a contribution by seeking out, and casually keeping up with, one or two areas of study that maybe don’t get a lot of attention in our main journals and our training programs. And whenever the occasion arises in our interactions with other behavior analysts, we can share what we’ve learned. I’ve written elsewhere about the value to individuals and to a discipline of intellectual breadth (see my “Connections” series of posts, in which I assert that the more things you know, the more likely you are to know something pertinent to some new problem). If we’re all just a tiny bit more broadly educated, the discipline becomes richer.

AND, if we do this, opportunities arise to make connections with all of those folks out there who are doing research from which we can learn. We have things to teach them, too, but they probably won’t seek us out, so the onus falls to us. We already do a bit of reaching across boundaries — the B.F. Skinner Lectures at the ABAI Convention are one of my favorite examples of bringing outsiders in to stretch our conception os what’s “behavioral” — but the 12 bibliographies (actually 13, counting a bonus section) show us that so much more is possible.

The result can be a unified science of behavior science that is widely distributed, rather than segregated into numerous little fiefdoms. And that, my friends, should it ever come to pass, would be quite a treat.

A Selective Bibliography of
“Halloween Behavior Analysis“

Within each section, items are listed in no particular order.

Bats

Black Cats

OK, NOT BLACK PER SE, BUT DEFINITELY CATS.
LOTS AND LOTS OF CATS. THORNDIKE WOULD BE PLEASED.

Clowns

Ghosts

“Monsters”

SEE ALSO

Owls

Ravens (and Crows)

Slashers

Snakes

Spiders

Vampires

Zombies

Bonus 13th Topic: Trick or Treat

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