Being a radical behaviorist means, at any given moment, when trying to understand someone’s behavior, taking the causes [of XYZ] out of the organism — out of their brain or nervous system, out of the “disorder” the behavior supposedly indicates — and putting the causes in the environment, of which other humans and cultural systems are a part.

This is a complex task, as most of “the environment” goes unobserved, only reacted to, and we’ll never have access to all of someone else’s environmental variables (or even our own!).

It’s much easier to look for a static cause — often, a diagnosis, a dysfunction — than to try to imagine the total conditions from which someone is responding.

That’s why most people aren’t and can’t be radical behaviorists, I think. It requires you to let go of the need to identify a single cause for any given instance and just allow someone’s humanity to flow, by and through you, in accordance with their mostly unknown (but not unknowable) environment in motion.