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The Futures of Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

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 Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice © 2018 American Psychological Association
2018, Vol. 18, No. 2, 124 –133 2372-9414/18/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bar0000100

The Futures of Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Peter R. Killeen
Arizona State University

For 50 years experimental analysts of behavior have been riding the crests of waves
raised by B. F. Skinner. His technical innovations and conceptual simplifications were
a powerful breath of fresh air, and the large effect sizes engineered with contingencies
of reinforcement gave its practitioners confidence in their methods. The goals of
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experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) meanwhile went unexamined, its antimen-

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

talistic philosophy untested, and the gap between laboratory and life inevitably wid-
ened. This gap can only be bridged by renewed conversations on the fundamentals of
our field, and new technologies to examine behavior that we have largely ignored.
Interpretative accounts—showing that reinforcement may have played an important
role in some complex or exceptional behavior—is no longer enough. To ensure a future
for EAB several things must happen. We must learn that data have little value until
embedded in a coherent narrative; and the best of those are called theories. The
biological EAB must reach levels up to biology/ethology/ecology; and levels down to
physiology/neuroscience. The psychological EAB must recognize the value of bringing
into our tool-box treatments of states such as affects and dispositions; operations such
as attention, rumination, goal-setting, and reframing; and craft a better understanding of
belief systems in general. The social EAB must strive to generalize basic laws
formulated in open-loop controlled laboratory settings to dynamic interactive closed-
loop processes with 2 or more interacting systems. To be successful these endeavors
require respect for other approaches to these phenomena, and collaborations with
scientists who know more about them than we yet do.

Keywords: future of behavior analysis, biological level, psychological level, systems

levels, emergent

Despite some apparent successes (e.g.,
Schlinger, 2010), predicting the “probable fu-
ture status of the experimental analysis of be-
havior” is risky business. Upon showing how to
predict something much simpler—the replica-
bility of an experimental effect—I was sternly
admonished by respected colleagues that pre-
dicting the future is impossible (Maraun & Ga-
briel, 2010; Miller, 2009). I just knew that
someone would say that; as they might have
predicted that I would disagree (Killeen, 2010,
2015a; Lecoutre & Killeen, 2010), but such
predictions went against their convictions. I am
amazed at how well Siri predicts the weather,
down to the hour when clouds will break for a
sunny stroll. This is not the retrodiction that
most researchers do, calling it prediction. With
this kind, you can leave the umbrella at home
and stay dry; not look back wet and regret: “I
just knew it was going to rain.” Siri was made
possible by massive data sets and deep learning
algorithms. Skinner also amassed data, from
which order could arise. We as a field, however,
have not yet deployed deep learning algorithms
on the cumulative and other records that en-
gorge our texts and journals; order arises, when
it does, piecemeal. Prediction is one of the twin
goals of EAB; but just why should it be? How
often and well do we do it? Chastened by Miller
and by Maraun and Gabriel, I shall put off to the
end any attempt at prediction, when I will have
had time to query Siri and come to terms with
her answer.

This article was published Online First February 1, 2018.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed
to Peter R. Killeen, Department of Psychology, Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1104. E-mail: killeen@asu.edu
124
Current Status
EAB has a data glut and a theory insuffi-
ciency. Algorithms and theories to process our
 THE FUTURES OF EAB
data are not features of EAB—EAB is not, after
all, a TAB. Google Scholarize skinner rein-
forcement learning (using no quotes) for the last
decade and you will get 17,000 hits. Change
skinner to sutton, and you get 19,000. Our em-
pirics has outpaced our science and even our
technology. Skinner end-ran delicate hypothe-
ses about behavior in straight alleys and T
mazes to generate robust performances that
needed no t tests to convince an audience:
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Something powerful was in hand. Nothing
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wrong with the quaint apparatuses of his for-
bears—they had more ecological validity than a
box— but they did not scale to assembly line
production of megabytes of data the way the
Skinner box did. Those megabytes fueled many
dissertations, mine among them. Behaviorism
had been waiting for a Henry Ford, and Fred
Skinner, born four years after the Model T, was
his name. Greenwald (2012) calculated that
more Nobel prizes have been awarded for tools,
inventions and methods than for discoveries:
Think MRI, cloud chamber, in vitro fertiliza-
tion, CCD sensor, PCR reactions, and so forth.
And this is consistent with citation statistics
(Van Noorden, Maher, & Nuzzo, 2014): “The
Nobel Prizes for Physics in 1992, 1994, 1995,
and 2002 were awarded for designs of apparatus
and methods to detect subatomic particles”
(Greenwald, 2012). Skinner, many of us be-
lieve, deserved a Nobel Prize for his appara-
tuses and methods that detect supra-atomic be-
havior, no less than for his clarity of vision.
Greenwald’s (2012) sentence went on, alas:
“Whose existence had been theorized but never
empirically observed . . . existing theory played
roles both in designing the particle detectors and
in guiding statistical analyses . . . , allowing
conclusions that the theorized particles had in-
deed been observed” (p. 103). Well, Henry
didn’t get a free trip to Stockholm, and neither
did Fred.
Skinner invented a great technology, one that
made buggy whips (straight alleys), and draft-
yokes (T mazes), obsolescent. But with it he
bequeathed a somewhat naive1 Baconian phi-
losophy of inductive science. Cumulation of
instances can lead us upward; or can just leave
a heap to stumble over (Forscher, 1963). “What
is the question” must always be the question, or
the answers remain factoids, piled atop other
factoids, as strange to strangers as an unbidden
weather report. In a brilliant analysis, Smith
125
(1992) showed how the instrumental/technolog-
ical emphasis of Bacon, a significant advance
over hands-off scholarship of the time, im-
pressed upon Skinner the importance of predic-
tion and control as the goals of his behavioral
science. Both are important pragmatic means of
validating hypotheses. But Skinner considered
them important absent hypotheses, which he
denigrated.
When an endeavor seems to be making prog-
ress, self-analysis takes back seat, if not trunk.
When it stalls (Robins, Gosling, & Craik,
1999), self-analysis moves up to the front, and
starts navigating by what Marr (2017) calls the
literature of survival. That is why we are here
ruminating about our future, isn’t it, pole-axed
by Poling’s (2010) ask? The crux of our diffi-
culties is that we have a good technology, but
with the important and valuable exceptions of
ministering to the developmentally disabled, in-
forming animal trainers (especially those who
train animals to undo some of the depredations
of technology, e.g., Poling, 2016); and the pleas
of a few observant neuroscientists (e.g.,
Krakauer, Ghazanfar, Gomez-Marin, MacIver,
& Poeppel, 2017), EAB hasn’t recently had as
large a market share as we think it deserves. The
market that does exist relies almost exclusively
on off-the-shelf 20th century EAB–when it pays
any attention to EAB at all, rather than just
crafting its own apps. Neither our theory nor our
technology has advanced much beyond our
birthright (Critchfield & Miller, 2017). Contin-
gencies of reinforcement are so powerful that
they are rediscovered daily, and most of the
discoverers have never heard of Skinner (Freed-
man, 2012). These outlanders have discovered
markers, timing, attention to the disposition of
their organism and the power of social rein-
forcement. Of course, we do it better than the
unwashed, because we have graduate degrees in
behavioral science. Translating our knowledge
of concurrent-chain schedules with interlocking
secondary links (my first project as a grad stu-
1
Bacon required the collection of facts to build toward
generalizations, and the testing of those generalizations by
negative instances where they may fail: “Bacon’s antipathy
to simple enumeration as the universal method of science
derived, first of all, from his preference for theories that deal
with interior physical causes, which are not immediately
observable” (Urbach, 1987, p. 30). For a deeper and more
informative comparison, see Smith (1992).
 126 KILLEEN
dent) into other domains requires translators;
and they must be skilled ones (e.g., Biglan,
2015; Schneider, 2012), for there to be any
chance that the audience will attend and appre-
ciate. But it might be better for some esoteric
projects such as my first one to never get trans-
lated (Poling, 2010).
Schedules of reinforcement are tools, not
toys; whereas we need to perfect them and
innovate new ones, it shows some lack of intel-
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lectual maturation if they remain our enduring
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object of study, rather than implements to take
on more interesting questions. One must always
beware Cassandras declaring the end of science
(Horgan, 2015); alarms like that were often
sounded just before revolutions gave the sci-
ence a new life. But revolutions are upsetting,
and it may be our applecart that gets upset. So
how do we ensure the continued ascen-
dance— or reascendance— of our ‘normal sci-
ence’ of behavior analysis, in particular EAB,
ere a paradigm shift, (or yet another), leaves it
in the dust? Or should we try to preempt, by
shifting our paradigm ourselves, so as to keep
some ownership of it? Let’s start by inspecting
what we are, the mirror we hold up to the world,
the name that symbolizes how we see ourselves
and what we do: EAB.
Experimental
An experiment is “a procedure carried out to
support, refute, or validate a hypothesis” (Ex-
periment, n.d.). One may manipulate variables
just to see what happens, but without at least an
implicit hypothesis, or an ensuing hypothesis,
we are likely to generate just one more datum
for the heap. We can always find at least one
article in each issue of the Journal of the Ex-
perimental Analysis of Behavior that satisfies
this definition of experimental. But we can al-
ways find more than one that does not. Indeed,
that is the case for many psychology journals
(Smedslund, 2002). Skinner held that we should
not test hypotheses; and accordingly, his later
career was based on hypotheses by different
names that typically went untested. The scien-
tific method is to ask a question of nature,
clarify the question, reduce it to manipulable
variables where possible, and test the implica-
tions of the hypothesis. This is how we create
the narratives supported by facts called theory.
The most powerful tests are experimental, but
many other types of tests are possible in situa-
tions where the relevant variables cannot be
manipulated (Cook & Campbell, 1979). If the
implications are born out, formulate more pre-
cise, or more general implications, and test
those. When predictions fail, reexamine the as-
pects of the hypothesis, or its implementation,
that might be at fault. This is good sport. Peirce
called it retroduction (Hartshorne & Weiss,
1931). It can start with different questions about
different aspects of nature. If we are going to
engage the game, it is reasonable to pick impor-
tant questions. The skill of identifying impor-
tant questions is nurtured by all great scientists,
but you do not have to be great to practice it.
Read their biographies to acquire some sense of
how this has been done; for a quick peek into
one approach, check the abstracts in Cialdini
and Mortensen, and Holth (Cialdini, 1980;
Holth, 2017; Mortensen & Cialdini, 2010).
Analysis
Analysis is “the process of breaking a com-
plex topic or substance into smaller parts in
order to gain a better understanding of it” (Anal-
ysis, n.d.). Is this really what we do? Sometimes
it is, although it is more common in applied
behavior analysis, where the researchers are
confronted with a complex repertoire and must
analyze it to determine its efficient causes (the
stimuli that occasion or elicit it), its final causes
(the stimuli that reinforce or punish it), and its
material causes (the state of the behaving or-
ganism). EABers more often synthesize: Add a
variable or change a variable to see what will
happen. Think Ferster and Skinner (1957). “Ef-
fects of” in the title of an article is a give-away:
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with such
research contributions, as they add to the cumu-
lus of knowledge; but they are generally not
analytical. Two big steps forward would be to
live up to our name by doing more experimen-
tation (testing organizing hypotheses) and more
analysis (contingent experiments testing a set of
alternative potential causes for the observed ef-
fect).
Behavior
Definition of the fundamental concept of a
discipline is not easy, and is typically provi-
sional: Definitions evolve. Skinner started with
behavior as “the movement of an organism
 THE FUTURES OF EAB
within a frame of reference.” But more gener-
ally, he defined behavior as “anything the or-
ganism is [observed to be] doing.” “In the con-
temporary analysis of behavior, the concept of
the operant is commonly invoked to describe
what organisms do” (Catania, 1973, p. 103).
There is a lot of latitude there, as appropriate;
although most research is conducted on a few
response types, often action patterns such as
pecking by pigeons, with their rate of emission
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being the fundamental datum (Skinner, 1950,
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1963): “The operant emerges as a correlation
between response classes and subsequent stim-
uli” (Catania, 1973, p. 114).
Cowie and Davison (2016) make an interest-
ing and strong case for correlation also, but
between response classes and prior stimuli.
This is an important liberating step, as much of
what we naturally see as obviously behavior is
not so obviously followed by a reinforcer. This
is true in the reports of ethologists (e.g., Tin-
bergen, 1961), and of social psychologists alike:
Some of the most effective control of human
behavior is accomplished by prompts and pre-
suasions (Cialdini, 2016), not consequences that
have never occurred, and may never occur.
Think heaven and hell. Moving beyond defining
our subject, behavior, in terms of the Law of
Effect may help to move us out of the local
optimum in which some of us may feel stuck
(Malone, 1978; Tonneau, 2007).
Future Status
Alternate Futures
As a new Ph.D. I had a vision of the task to
which I would dedicate my life: Develop an
accurate mathematical description of the effects
of schedules of reinforcement on behavior. Fifty
years later that quest continues (Bradshaw &
Killeen, 2012; Killeen, 2014b, 2015b; Killeen
& Jacobs, 2017; Killeen & Nevin, in press;
Killeen & Pellón, 2013)— but going more
slowly than the early version of me supposed it
would. Other behaviorists too numerous to
mention are also engaged in that project and
making better progress. Yet, is this a goal that I
would wish to bequeath to their— or to my—
students? What else is possible? As a branch of
biology, characterization of how discriminative
and reinforcing stimuli control behavior, en-
lightened by a behavior systems approach
127
(Killeen, 2014a; Timberlake, 1999), is an admi-
rable and achievable goal—its even partial
achievement a signal accomplishment (Catania,
2013). It is a conceivable future; but there are
others.
The biological science of behaviorism has
been helped at first, and hampered at last, by
Skinner’s leviathan of the operant. As many
have observed, the operant is not enough for a
science of behavior (Baum, 2012; Malone,
1978; Staddon, 2014; Timberlake, 2004; Ton-
neau, 2007). It was a huge step up, but it is time
for the next step. In biological behaviorism, that
will be a closer embeddedness in the ecology of
the organism, with more attention to the induc-
tion of behavior by releasing stimuli in conjunc-
tion with behavioral states, themselves primed
by motivational operations. But what about psy-
chological behaviorism?
The young Skinner worked in the laboratory
of a biologist, and it is diverting to imagine
what might have evolved had he taken a posi-
tion in biology, rather than in psychology de-
partments (Catania, 2014). But that was never to
be, given his goals for accomplishment in the
realm of psychology2 (Bjork, 1997; Wiener,
1996). Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957), in ges-
tation for 20 years, was published the same year
as Schedules of Reinforcement (Ferster & Skin-
ner, 1957), completed after a few years of in-
tense collaborative work. The latter marks the
high-point of Skinner the empiricist. The former
is the landmark venture of interpretation of
complex human behavior in terms of basic be-
havioral processes, endeavors of the kind that
occupied him during his last decades. The fu-
ture of such “psychological” behaviorism is less
certain, and thus perhaps more intriguing.
One development growing directly out of
Verbal Behavior is Relational Frame Theory
(S. C. Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001).
It is a vigorous subfield, with successful appli-
cations arising in clinical and educational psy-
chology (Barnes-Holmes, Kavanagh, & Mur-
phy, 2015). Another development is the
extension to extended sequences of behavior
2
In his last year, Skinner spoke of writing an article titled
“Why I Am Not and Never Have Been a Psychologist’”
(Wiener, 1996, p. 100). But the reasons concerned the
dominant methodology of cognitive psychology, not the
problems of seeing, thinking, and talking with which both
he and they grappled.
 128 KILLEEN
(Baum, 2016; Rachlin, 2014). Analysis of the
complex contingencies that naturally occur in
social settings is a scientific extension of Skin-
ner’s speculative Walden Two (Skinner, 1948/
1969). In its most hopeful and idealistic guise, it
is the “save the world through behaviorism” of
Malott (in press) and the editors and contribu-
tors to Behavior Analysis and Social Action. To
mine its more pragmatic (and more successful)
vein, page through the issues of Organizational
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Behavior Management and Behavior and Social
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Issues. Here we find a sustained effort to de-
velop the central Skinnerian construct of con-
tingency into kindred concepts operating in
much more complex environments, interlock-
ing-, meta- and macrocontingencies (e.g., Glenn
& Malott, 2004; L. J. Hayes & Houmanfar,
2004; Houmanfar & Rodrigues, 2006; Malott &
Glenn, 2006). Effective use of such contingen-
cies can be extremely powerful in complex or-
ganizations (e.g., Robertson & Pelaez, 2016),
although oftentimes the successes are in inter-
preting the performance of already successful
managers in behavioral terms (Malott, 2016),
rather than being instrumental in achieving that
success—another echo of the interpretive anal-
yses of Verbal Behavior.
The problem of scaling up EAB to handle
interactions in open environments, where con-
trol of relevant variables is much weaker than in
the laboratory, is a perennial challenge facing
all sciences. It is the problem of nomothetic
laboratory science venturing into the ideo-
graphic world (Falk, 1956; Palmer, 2010). In
nomothetic disciplines errors tend to average
out, and phenomena settle into stable patterns of
replicability— on the average. Laws and “for-
mulations” can be constructed. In ideographic
disciplines, deviations breed further deviations
as often as corrections (Donahoe & Burgos,
2005). Think of butterfly effects such as the
shooting of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria,
which led to the displacement of 70 million
Europeans and the death of 15 million. Inter-
locking contingencies? Of course. But how does
one get a systematic handle on those? “Reduc-
tion [to underlying laws] is of little use to the
area of investigation undergoing reduction un-
less the reduction formulation is able to predict
and bring within its explanatory compass other
phenomena associated with the area being re-
duced” (Falk, 1956, p. 62). That is, the reduc-
tion/interpretation must add value in terms of
simplification or prediction, rather than just par-
asitize existing structure. Interpretation is nec-
essary but not sufficient (Galizio, 1987): “sci-
ence is not judged on its capacity to interpret—
otherwise we would all be Freudians” (Ton-
neau, 2007, p. 140). François told a half-truth: It
is judged on that capacity: The phenomena must
not be inconsistent with a reductive/behavioral
account (Palmer, 1969/2017)— but it must do
much more, it must reduce the complexity of
theory (consilience/coherence) or increase its
predictive ability (Killeen, 2013). Consilience
may suffice: As Hoffmann (2003, p. 11) noted:
“Novel predictions played essentially no role in
the acceptance of the most important physical
theory of the 20th century, quantum mechanics.
Physicists quickly accepted that theory because
it provided a coherent deductive account of a
large body of known empirical facts.” Eventu-
ally, it also provided the most accurate quanti-
tative predictions of any theory. And prediction
may also suffice; but prediction is of two types:
Predictions made to test and improve models,
and predictions made for pragmatic purposes
(e.g., predicting the weather, climate change,
crime, terrorist attacks; Sarewitz & Pielke,
1999).
Although ability to predict behavior is one of
the twin goals that Skinner bequeathed to EAB,
we seldom question why, and we rarely do
either type of prediction. We seldom test mod-
els because few are strong enough to make
predictions. We often fit curves to known data,
as in the matching laws, but that is demonstrat-
ing conformity (a mathematical reinterpretation,
simply a more precise version of behavioral
reinterpretation), not ability to predict. We often
show (perhaps too often) that a phenomenon,
such as an FI scallop, can be replicated. Such
replicability is a strength of EAB. What it dem-
onstrates, however, is command of controlling
variables, not prediction to new scenarios. We
seldom aspire to make pragmatic predictions
(Skinner’s meaning of the term), as we seldom
have either the databases or familiarity with the
analytic tools. Those wishing to go there—and
to do so could be quite a good thing for behavior
analysis—should study where it is occurring,
such as in integrated earth sciences— or even in
Google ad placements. But this is no longer
EAB.
What formulations can EAB develop to im-
prove understanding, consilience, prediction
 THE FUTURES OF EAB
and control? Marr (1984b) reflected on Kantor’s
critique of EAB, in particular: “There still harks
the danger of a constrained scientific horizon
limiting observation and analysis to nonhuman
and reflex-derived behaviors” (Kantor, 1970,
101). Marr’s analysis of the reasons for this are
important to consider if attempting to predict
the future of EAB. While largely agreeing with
Kantor, Marr noted that his “world is seemingly
beyond the powers of a coherent, analytical,
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principled account” (p. 196). Such an account is
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the “formulation” that we require. Marr (1984b)
noted the existence of relevant analytic tools
that might be useful, “But such methods are
remote from both EAB and the unique [ideo-
graphic?] aspects of behavioral events empha-
sized by [Kantor]” (p. 196).
Emergence
A problem with reduction (to a behavioral
interpretation) is that it is always easier to go
down a level than it is to go up a level—to
induce a higher-level phenomenon from a lower
level one. Theories at a higher level will often
involve different variables, dimensions, and
laws. Physiology is reducible to chemistry but
not inducible from it. Chemistry is reducible to
quantum mechanics, but generally not inducible
from it. Statistical thermodynamics is reducible
to mechanics and thermodynamics, but not gen-
erally inducible from them. Marr bemoaned that
“The experimental analysis of behavior has
lagged far behind mainstream psychology, par-
ticularly cognitive psychology, in the study of
complex behavior—remembering, thinking, im-
aging, problem solving, and the like. Yet it is
the study of these kinds of behavior that will
provide the greatest justification of our contin-
ued existence in the community of behavioral
scientists” (Marr, 1984a, p. 353). Perhaps the
reason for this is that we have believed Skin-
ner’s argument that there is only one level for
us, and that is behavior, and in particular the
operant. Success in studying complex behavior
may require going up a level, measuring com-
plex behavior in dimensions other than re-
sponses per second or Newtons of force. What
might those measures and methods be?
Marr (1984a); Killeen (2001), and Palmer
(2010) suggest some. One that they do not men-
tion is simulation, which has worked in expli-
cating the nomothetic results of laboratory sci-
129
ence (e.g., Burgos & Murillo-Rodriguez, 2007;
Catania, 2005; McDowell, 2017). In a very in-
sightful analysis of the gap in theoretical devel-
opment caused by the difficulty of scaling up
basic (typically nonhuman animal) research to
complex human behavior, Ward and Houman-
far (2011) also suggest simulation; but in this
case, they mean recreation, typically in a labo-
ratory, of many of the complex variables be-
lieved to affect performance in a less controlled
setting. This delimiting of confounding vari-
ables (and presumably some of the positive
feedback processes that underlie ideographic
scenarios) is a promising approach to under-
standing unfettered behavior in natural environ-
ments. A similar suggestion, among many other
useful ones, was made by Bronfenbrenner
(1977) some time ago. It has much in common
with Cialdini’s “Full-cycle social psychology”
(e.g., Mortensen & Cialdini, 2010), which adds
the last return cycle of implementation of the
clarified “formulation” back into the natural
world. This is analysis-by-synthesis (Teitel-
baum & Pellis, 1992; Yuille & Kersten, 2006).
Conclusion
There are several futures for EAB, none mu-
tually exclusive. As practiced with nonhuman
animals, it continues to develop, and will flour-
ish insofar as it can engage and work along with
biologists, animal trainers, and other effective
colleagues such as Krakauer and associates
(2017). Behavioral pharmacology will continue
to make important translational contributions.
To be successful as a basic science, it must
continue to explore and compare novel methods
(e.g., Aparicio & Baum, 1997; Cunningham,
Kuhn, & Reilly, 2015; Peele & Baron, 1988;
Van Hemel, 1972), and along with them the
place of the context in the ecology of the or-
ganism.
To address human behavior, it must accept
the role of motivations, states, and dispositions,
and improve our facility with those (Dougher &
Hackbert, 2000; Killeen & Jacobs, 2017). EAB
has started doing this. Indeed, one of its most
popular recent lines of research is asking people
to choose between imagined future or immedi-
ate outcomes, all largely hypothetical. EAB has
provided a fresh understanding of the ancient
problem of voluntary action (Neuringer & Jen-
sen, 2010), and added new dimensions to ex-
 130 KILLEEN
perimentation itself (Roberts & Neuringer,
1998). In RFT it has carried the torch of Verbal
Behavior into new realms. Further progress will
require that we become more comfortable with
levels of analyses that require new vocabularies,
and new dependent variables measured along
new dimensions, ones not always inducible
from basic behavioral processes, even if always
reducible to those.
To address human behavior in open contexts,
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often interacting with other humans, requires a
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rethinking of what constitutes a scientific suc-
cess. More than a “behavioral reduction” is nec-
essary, but more is very difficult. It taxes the
abilities of a good engineer to predict the future
of simple coupled oscillators; even the best at-
mospheric scientist will do poorly in predicting
the trajectory of a falling leaf. Necessary tools
for the behaviorist will include system science
and complexity theory. Because large databases
are becoming increasingly available, deep
learning algorithms may afford practical predic-
tions (e.g., Walsh, Ribeiro, & Franklin, 2017),
even if the connections learned by those ma-
chines in making predictions remain as inscru-
table as the connections made in the brain.
Interdisciplinary collaboration will be invalu-
able: “A better understanding of variation and
selection will mean a more successful profes-
sion, but whether behavior analysis will be
called psychology is a matter for the future to
decide” (Skinner, 1990, p. 1210). That under-
standing is happening, through just such inter-
disciplinary teams (e.g., Hull, Langman, &
Glenn, 2001). It is my hope that the future will
decide to call us behavioral psychologists, as we
move to a leading role on that stage.
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Received June 13, 2017
Revision received September 21, 2017
Accepted September 22, 2017 䡲