The history and development of applied behavioral analysis in the treatment of autism: a critical perspective
Creators: name: Roscigno, Robin
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: Rising Autism diagnosis rates have prompted numerous awareness campaigns, treatment programs, social-emotional learning initiatives, research institutes, etc. Developing analogously, the Neurodiversity movement—an activist-led social justice movement focused on equity and justice for neurodivergent people—has presented compelling critiques of the ways neurodivergent children are educated and treated in therapeutic spaces. Activists’ scathing critiques of ‘best practices’ in autism treatment have prompted a bitter public feud (played out in op-eds, policy hearings, social media, etc.) between themselves and parents/professionals because parents/professionals have overwhelmingly focused on cure and rehabilitation—a goal that autistic activists reject. The most vitriolic behavior centers around the use of Applied Behavior Analysis (i.e., applied operant conditioning) as a treatment for Autism. Despite years of parent activism fighting for insurance coverage for ABA therapy, autistic activists (many of whom have experienced ABA therapy as children) continue to regard ABA as ‘torture,’ ‘Autistic conversion therapy,’ and ‘abuse’ due to both the practices of the field and the onto-epistemological assumptions that underlie Autism treatment in general. However, most attempts to curb the use of more violent interventions (i.e., the use of aversives like skin shocking) have been unsuccessful. This dissertation answers the question of ‘why’ several decades of activism disparaging the use of ABA as a treatment for autism have hardly even slowed the expansive growth of the ABA industry. I demonstrate how both ‘sides’ of the Autism Culture Wars' continued reliance on identity politics (#actuallyautistic vs Autism Moms) pins the problem on their adversary’s refusal to empathize, which allows the real perpetrator—the autism intervention industry— to pursue profit over the interests of autistic people, parents, and professionals. My work intervenes by sidestepping moral, identitarian argumentation in favor of a nuanced approach more equipped to analyze the development of an autism industrial complex. This dissertation provides a historical account of the rise of behaviorism in the United States post World War Two. While many scholars and activists have argued that the field of ABA has inflicted harm upon neurodivergent children, there are very few accounts of how ABA became the preeminent therapy for autism. My dissertation utilizes archival research from the B.F. Skinner Papers at Harvard University and textual analysis of the first thirty years of publications in stand-alone behaviorists journals The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JAEB) and The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA). This dissertation explores the sociopolitical arrangements that facilitated the rise of behaviorism in experimental psychology, education, and social services. I contextualize behaviorism within the project of modernity and demonstrate how behaviorism’s legacy as one of the most dominant schools of psychological thought in the 20th century is due in part to the business acumen of early figures like Skinner. I argue Skinner and the early behaviorists were able to exploit the anxieties of the white middle class regarding otherness, social deviance, disability, and racial integration to elicit the support of universities, government agencies, private equity, and a large swath of the public, and demonstrate how these logics persist in the present.