behavioranalysishistory / Intellectual Ancestries
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Intellectual Ancestries

 

 

The Past editors of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and The Behavior Analyst were invited to provide brief information on their intellectual ancestors. Below are the responses we received.

 

 Charles Catania

"My history includes both the Keller (and Schoenfeld) and Skinner lineages.  I took Keller's introductory psychology course at Columbia (using the Keller and Schoenfeld textbook) and then Schoenfeld's experimental psych sequence (one text of which was Skinner's "Behavior of Organisms."  I took both BA and MA degrees at Columbia, and then became a graduate student and later a post doc at Harvard, where I was a student of Skinner's and later ran his pigeon lab.

 

Given their close association in the Keller & Schoenfeld book and the fact that most of those at Columbia took course work with Keller but actually did research with Schoenfeld, I think it would be unfortunate

to omit Schoenfeld from your ancestry table.  I loved Fred Keller'introductory course and he was a marvelous teacher, but I owe my greatest intellectual debt to Nat Schoenfeld."

 

 

 

Sam Deitz

"As a graduate student, I studied under Henry Pennypacker - not sure of his lineage.

 

As a professor in Georgia, I met with and became friends with Fred Keller while he was in Aiken SC. 

We presented together at ABA and I hosted a Skinner-Keller dinner at ABA. "

 

 

 

 

  Edmund Fantino

"I had contact with Skinner as a graduate student at Harvard (9/61-5/64). I took a lecture course he gave on The Technology of Teaching in spring, 1962. He also presided over (I think) three weeks of our proseminar for

first-year graduate students. There we primarily discussed his book Verbal Behavior (which we read). One of the meetings was at his home. In addition he sometimes attended our weekly "Pigeon Lab" meetings, organized

primarily by Richard Herrnstein. Finally, he was my examiner for fluency in speaking French. My accent was so horrific he quickly grimaced and said "Stop, stop, I'll pass you but stop".

 

In another sense of ancestry: Dick Herrnstein was my primary advisor and he in turn had been Skinner's student.

 

JEAB had a section a few years back on memories of the Pigeon Lab at Harvard."

 

 

 

Wayne Fisher

"I don't know of any such linkages between myself and either Skinner or KellerMy dissertation chair was C. Chrisman Wilson, who is a social learning theorist (like Bandura). 

 

 I became a radical behavior analyst despite my training, rather than as a result of it. 

I did postdoctoral fellowship at the Kennedy Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was supervised by John Parrish, Terry Page, and Mike Cataldo."

 

 

 

Scott Geller 

"My only genealogy connection to Skinner is through my experience as a student of Nate Azrin and Ted Ayllon. These two scholars turned my attention to Behavior Analysis when I was a student at SIU in Carbondale.

 

I documented this influence in JABA editorials when I started as editor in 1989 and gave

up my editorship in 1992."

 

 

 

Leonard Green

"My ancestry is simple to trace, and very direct: I completed my graduate work with Howard Rachlin who did his graduate degree with Richard Herrnstein, who did his, in turn, with B.F. Skinner."

 

 

 

 Brian Iwata

"It sounds like an interesting project, and I'm honored to give information about my lineage. 

have a problem, however, and anyone tracing back to Jack Michael will have the same problem. 

That is, he was a mutant in that he simply read Science and human behavior."

 

 

 

 Andy Lattal

"Maybe this will be helpful to you. My undergraduate advisor (University of Alabama, B.S., 1964) was Steve Kendall, who was a student of Benjamin Wyckoff at Emory University.

 

I believe (but have never checked this directly) that Wyckoff was a student of Skinner's at Indiana University.

Steve Kendall also was my graduate advisor (Ph.D. University of Alabama, 1969) for the first three years of my graduate study, but he left Alabama during my third year and I completed my degree with someone

else, who was a student of Marcus Waller (I don't know who Waller worked with, could be Skinner, I am just not sure).

 

Nonetheless, it was Kendall who had the greatest effect on my intellectual development."

 

 

 

 Jay Moore

"In 1968-1969, I took a course in the history of psychology from Fred Keller as part of the master's degree program at Western Michigan University.

 

I was a graduate student at UC-San Diego from 1972 to 1975.  While there, I took courses from George Reynolds, Ben Williams, and Edmund Fantino.  The latter was my doctoral adviser.  All three of them

received their PhDs from Harvard. 

 

The adviser-student relationships were fairly loose in the Harvard Dept, from what I understand, but Dick 

Herrnstein was the doctoral adviser for Fantino and Williams, and I believe also for Reynolds.  Skinner was Herrnstein's adviser." 

 

 

 

Edward K. Morris

I was turned on to BA at Denison University (1966-1970) through a PSYC 104 course that included a rat lab, the Holland and Skinner text, and the first volume of Ulrich, Stachnik, and Mabry. The course was, I think, team-taught course by younger faculty. Interestingly, I doubt I would have taken it except that my girlfriend took it before me, and I was intrigued by the "science" part of psychology she informally described.

 

At Denison, I was most influenced by two senior faculty --Parker Lichtenstein and Irv Wolf. They were, I am pretty sure, J.R. Kantor  students out of Indiana Univesity. I don't know if Skinner was at Indiana at the time, but I think so. Bijou may have been there at the time, too. They knew Bijou, which is why I went to the University of

Illinois for graduate school with him (1970-1975). Bijou, though, had been a Kenneth Spence student at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, I think; Spence himself was Clark Hull's most famous student.

 

The connection between Bijou and Skinner came later through a 1960-1961 or so sabbatical Bijou took with Skinner and others in Boston. I do not know of any formal Keller connection in this, but of course it was all

one big family for a while. Bijou set up an environment at the University of Washington in the late 1950s-early 1960s in which BaerWolf, and Risley flourished, along with Lovaas, Sherman, and many others. When I completed by doctorate at Illinois, I took my position at Kansas where Baer, Wolf, and Risley had institutionally founded applied behavior analysis (i.e., JABA).

 

Another important professional influence during graduate school was William H. Redd, who was I think a Jay

Birnbrauer student out of North Carolina in about 1973. Birnbrauer may have been one of Bijou's students at Washington."

 

 

 Tony Nevin

"What a great idea!  I'm happy to review my history with Keller and Skinner.

 

I went to Columbia in 1959 to study color vision with Clarence Graham, but because I had never studied any psychology (having trained as an engineer) Keller, then department chair, required me to take a summer course in introductory psychology which he taught with K&S (1950) as the text. I was excited by the ideas in the book and admired his warm teaching style.  

 

Keller consolidated his influence the following year in a special lab course that he offered for 3 or 4 graduate students -- essentially a graduate version of the famous introductory rat lab that Keller and Schoenfeld taught to beginning undergraduates.  It was great fun to put the rats through their paces. 

Because of these courses, plus availability of a research assistantship on an NIH grant with Keller, Cumming, and Berryman as co-PIs, I switched to experimental analysis of behavior after 2 years of graduate study and research on color vision. 

 

I also took Keller's History of Psych course (where we disagreed about the significance of T. H. Huxley's epiphenomenon theory of consciousness) and participated in his informal seminar on teaching methods, out of which came "Goodbye teacher."  (I never used PSI so I guess he really didn't have much impact on that part of my work!)

 

In 1966, when I was teaching at Swarthmore, Skinner offered me a fellowship to work on an annotated bibliography of behavioral research.  The money fell through but I went to Harvard anyway, 1966-67, with money from my own NIMH grant.  I participated in the weekly "pigeon meetings" and had occasional discussions with Skinner in his office or over lunch.  We talked a lot about education and social issues, probably more than about research, and when I wound up at UNH I asked him to speak there on "Why we are not acting to save

our world."  It was, I think, his first presentation along these lines, and it got me to think, write, and teach about issues of war and peace from a behavioral perspective.  I remain inspired by the final paragraph of K&S (1950) that I read in 1959.

 

Also, my research career has been powerfully influenced by Herrnstein's quantitative approach to the analysis of behavior.  He was a Skinner Ph.D. so is part of the lineage."

 

 

 

Richard Shull

"Graduate School : Attended U. of Maryland 1964-65; Worked primarily with Stan Pliskoff

Took a valuable and influential course taught by Lew Gollub, who got his degree from Harvard in the late

1950s and was probably directly influenced by Skinner.

 

Arizona State University (1965-69; Ph. D. 1969)

Went with Stan Pliskoff to Arizona State University.

 

Fred Keller was at ASU during much of that period, but I had almost no contact with him then;

he was not teaching any classes (except for being involved with PSI for the Introductory undergraduate course).

After Stan Pliskoff and Aaron Brownstein left ASU, J. Gilmour Sherman became chair of my dissertation committee.

Gil got his Ph. D. from Columbia in the late 1950s and worked with Keller after that on PSI in Brazil and at ASU.

In addition to Pliskoff, Brownstein, and Sherman, the ASU faculty members who most influenced my thinking were:

Joel Greenspoon, John Falk, Jack Michael, and Thom Verhave (more in the history of psychology than in behavior analysis per se).

I'm not sure if Joel overlapped with Skinner at Indiana. Thom Verhave got his Ph. D. from Columbia in the late 1950s.

 

I've been on the faculty at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro since 1969.

 

I used Skinner's Science and Human Behavior as a text for a course that I taught in the fall of 1969. That was the first time that I actually read S&HB carefully, and I have no doubt that going through the book that way was the single most important experience in converting me to a Skinnerian view of psychology (although my graduate-school experiences no doubt helped prepare me to be deeply affected by S&HB). I had a similar, but now confirming, experience when I first taught a graduate seminar, probably around 1983, based on Skinner's Verbal Behavior.

 

I came to appreciate Keller & Schoenfeld's Principles of..... reading it mainly on my own and, in sections, with graduate students here at UNCG.

 

I feel very fortunate to have been able to interact with Fred Keller occasionally after he moved to Chapel Hill, NC, in the early 1980s."

 

 

 

Dave Wacker  

Here is my lineage, and please feel free to ask me to clarify.

Relative to formal training:

My advisor at Arizona State University of Lee Meyerson and his advisor was Ernest Hilgard at Stanford.  I am not sure how that brings up to Skinner or Keller...

 

After I joined the faculty at Iowa, I submitted a manuscript to AJMR and the action editor was Don Baer, who I believe was in Japan at the time. 

 

Over the course of about a year, I slowly revised it based on Don's suggestions, and it was published. 

More importantly, Don sent me a hand written note(I wished that I had saved it!), inviting me to meet him at APA and go to some talks with him. 

One of the talks was by Skinner, and after the talk, Don introduced me to him.  This time at APA was one of the major turning points in my career. "