misinformation in the wild (2-min) Just stumbled onto a video that I wish everyone would watch! In it, Robert Sapolsky, a big-name neuroscientist, horrendously misrepresents behaviorism—but his talking points are juxtaposed with B.F. Skinner addressing each of those points, decades prior!!

Sapolsky is supposedly an intellectual (…neuroscience, right?), but I can’t take him seriously because his understanding of behaviorism sounds like he’s reciting from an undergraduate psych textbook that went from Pavlov to Watson to Skinner— as if that’s all there was of behaviorism, as if they were connected or at all equal! And he’s downright disrespectful to one of psychology’s greatest humanitarians and the most influential psychologist of the 20th century, according to the American Psychological Association!

Behaviorism and Behavior Analysis often get a bad rep. It’s because…well, a lot of reasons, many of which center on the fact that it takes concerted effort and feedback to truly understand behaviorism, and people start jumping in with “yeah but” before we can get a word out. The good we have done is scattered but broad and impactful. Yet, the bulk of it is now taking fire, from multiple directions.

What doesn’t help are textbooks, media, and “experts”, who should know better, blatantly misrepresenting behaviorism — and, in Sapolsky’s case, genuinely ripping off Skinner’s ideas (!) and claiming intellectual novelty.

The science that explains behavioral phenomena in terms of selection is being selected against, in many ways.

Lots of us are sharing to educate, in different ways. Me, I write memoir, poetry, fiction—gently scratching the surface of behaviorism in Everyday Behaviorist. But, I also have a publication called Behavior Curious. It has about 20 subscribers. That’s where I’ve try to address some of the misconceptions, outright, but… Sapolsky has probably reached thousands or millions. it’s discouraging when people like this are out there, for years, misrepresenting behavior science to the masses. I’m grateful you’re here, reading this. I usually have to expose bare skin, or dress it up in fiction or metaphor, to get an ear.

A driving force behind sharing any of my writing at all is to counter misinformation like this, one reader at a time. I hope you one day encounter someone like Sapolsky and are able to say, “I think you’re misinformed. You should meet my friend Jennifer, who has a broader community...”

If you are Behavior Curious, please come in, stay a while. It’s eclectic but it’s real.

To Sapolsky I’d say, Behaviorism is not behaviorism is not behaviorism—and if you don’t know what that means, maybe you shouldn’t be talking about it at all, except to say, “it’s more complicated than I understand.” No shame in admitting your limits and learning new things.