THE ANALYSIS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN CONTEXT

Authors

  • Murray Sidman Walter Reed Army Institute of Research

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18542/rebac.v1i2.783

Abstract

Does the name of this special interest group, “The Experimental Analysis of Human Behavior,” imply that those who analyze the behavior of human animals must organize themselves apart from those who analyze the behavior of nonhuman animals? Is the use of nonhumans in experiments really not relevant to the analysis of the behavior of humans? If so, then something must have changed. Many differences exist, of course, between the behavior of humans and nonhumans – humans, for example, cannot fly under their own power — but have we really isolated differences in principle, differences that require separate organizations for the study of each? I will try to indicate why I believe this is a serious concern, where the concern comes from, and what, perhaps, might be done to maintain what was once a flourishing bidirectional relation between research with humans and nonhumans, in both basic and applied research. Key Words: human behavioral research, nonhuman behavioral research.

Author Biography

Murray Sidman, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research

Dr. Sidman received a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1952 and went on to make contributions of enormous significance to the field of behavior analysis. He has held positions as a Research Psychologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the E.K. Shriver Center for Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, where he served as director of the Behavioral Sciences Department. Dr. Sidman has taught countless students at Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, University of Nevada, Northeastern University, and Johns Hopkins University. His influence is international, as Dr. Sidman has held academic appointments at the University of São Paulo in Brasil, Keio University in Tokyo, Japan and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

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Published

2016-04-11

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 2 (2005)

Section

Theoretical Articles

License

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