Behaviour Analysis and Contemporary Psychology

Enthusiasm was the rule among the American psychologists who founded the Society of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior a quarter of a century ago. The permanent flow of information from researchers in the laboratory to practitioners, and vice versa, is needed if applied behaviour analysis is to develop as something different from the numerous kinds of more or less fanciful treatment methods flourishing in present-day psychology. With respect to applied analysis of behaviour, the European psychology map exhibits an interesting feature. The laboratory procedures originally designed by B. F. Skinner and further developed by his followers are an unquestionable contribution to scientific psychology. Piaget’s and Skinner’s theories have a number of basic points in common, in spite of the fact that the great European epistemologist and the leading figure of American radical behaviourism made little or no reference to each other in all their prodigious writings.