Thank you for this ‘Reality Check’ post. I use inverted commas because it’s the title of a post.

I’m autistic. I’ve been given tons of grief about not hating ABA: it seems that I’m supposed to hate it purely because I’m autistic. But I’m also a psychologist — I deal with evidence and science. One person in Wordpress actually accused me of doing a ‘no true Scotsman’ thing when I was talking about what was happening in behaviour analytic practice in the 1960s and what happens now (this by a chemist who would have been mortally offended, had I turned round to her and told her something equally ridiculous about chemistry … ); I have no idea what a chemistry graduate student might be thinking that she could tell a guy with a master’s degree in educational & developmental psychology about psychology, but I guess that being autistic is no protection from becoming a ‘snowflake’.

And yet: “In fact, some of Lovaas’ approach from that time has for many years been considered inappropriate and are no longer in use in modern ABA.”

Meaning that I was not wrong: your article already vindicates me there.

I got it in the neck for promoting a method of torture that gave people PTSD. I noticed your response to the comment above regarding individual peope’s traumatic experiences and how such cases should be dealt with and what that should mean for an entire field of practice one an individual practitioner engages in practice that has lead to that sort of outcome. But, like you say — that is a matter do be dealt with my the practitioner, then cliant and/or his/her representative. It is not evidence to support the demolition of an entire field of practice.

I’ve had the classic ‘it is treating the child like a dog!’ thing thrown at me. To be honest, that one creases me: I have to deal with those when sitting on the loo because otherwise I’ll laugh too much for the safety of my underwear. The problem I have with that one is that it reflects a basic science literacy deficit: physically, of course, a child and a dog are different. They look different. They smell different. They eat different things and, of course, you do different activities with them. But when you take it down to the physiological level (which is the level at which the brain works), they are almost exactly the same. The same physiology enables the neurons to work, and the same metabolic pathways enable them to live. At the anatomical level, the same parts of the brain do the same jobs in terms of housing the various functional bits of tissue that mediate perceptions of things from sensory input and then enable an efferent response. So, the idea that we should use a scientifically valid method for teaching dogs and then abandon that altogether for a child, because the child is not a dog … oh boy … that’s the bit where the Ozzian linguistics starts to become a high probability event.

Regarding the ‘Ah — that makes sense — BUT …’ thing: those sort of people are best left alone and given no response. Think: you explain something to them, and they concede the point but then they offer another — often irrelevant — point afterwards. All that this to is a repetitive cycle of ‘ah, yes, but …’ -> explanation -> ‘ah, yes, but …’ in which the act of giving the explanation becomes the R+ for the ‘ah, yes, but …’ behaviour. That stuff is usually best left to extinction.

But here’s the biggest laugh I get: the people on the spectrum who engage in this ‘you have to hate this stuff because you’re autistic or we will make you an outcast’ … well, the whole joke’s right there, isn’t it? They’re doing ABA!

If I say ‘okay, I’ll hate this stuff because you say I should’, and they say ‘okay, we will not make you an outcast’ … I’m engaging in behaviour X which is immediately followed by R+, such that R+(X) — which is to say that R+ acting on X — results in an increase of the frequency of X, and social approval is clearly contingent upon me engaging in X.

That is a process that has been validated in the applied behaviour analytic paradigm: they are actually doing the thing they claim to hate!

If they truly understood ABA as many of them claim they do, why are they making social approbation contingent upon acceding to their demand for compliance?

Thank you for your blog.