The 70s — Applied Work Takes Flight
The 1970s were odd and wonderful. And I don’t just say that because I was born in the early 1970s. Some were reaping the benefits of the hard fights of the 1960s. Others’ fights were just beginning. There was a lot of polyester and velour and shag carpeting. If it was over the top, it was just right. At the beginning of the 1970s, we danced to the musical stylings of the Carpenters, but by the end of the decade we were in our platform shoes doing Disco.
Laws, Protests and Shenanigans
In the early 1970s, we saw many laws that protected peoples’ rights enacted. The most famous, and polarizing, of these was Roe v. Wade in 1973. It was now legal for a woman to have an abortion. Even though much of that legislation was overturned in 2022, it was a game changer.
Not long after that, some suspicious activity at the Watergate Hotel in DC turned the nation upside-down. To paraphrase Arlo Guthrie from “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree Revisited”, turns out President Richard Nixon was fond of making secret recordings in the White House. These secret recordings, along with some less than ethical methods of getting information, led to his resignation in 1974. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether he was a crook or not. He was also not that fond of John Lennon’s anti-war activism, but that is another story for another day.
Speaking of anti-war activism, we are in the thick of the Vietnam War. Many people associate Vietnam with the 1960s, but in truth the war lasted until 1975. And as long as there was a war, there were anti-war protests. Kent State University was the scene of one of those protests. The details of what exactly happened are still being debated. What we do know is that over the course of a few days, the protest devolved into a riot, and the Ohio National Guard arrived. Rather than de-escalating the situation, they escalated it. Eventually, 4 were shot dead and 9 others were wounded.
Disability Rights and Legal Protections
The spirit of rebellion is alive and well in the 1970s, and the disability community was beginning to organize and protest. In 1977, the late Judy Huemann and her colleagues organized a famous sit-in designed to force the Federal Government to enforce legal protections written into law 4 years before (more on those later). It is important to note that protesters with disabilities often faced more significant risks than their peers, because many of the protestors relied on others to make sure they were safe (e.g., did not get pressure sores or run out of oxygen). They relied mostly on each other for support and creative solutions, but had help from organizations such as churches and even the Black Panther Party. If you get a chance, check out the Drunk History episode on Judy Huemann. It does not disappoint.
The laws that we take for granted today were passed in part due to litigation that occurred in the 1970s. PARC v. PA argued that it was discrimination to exclude a student from school because they were deemed to be “uneducable or untrainable.” This landmark case laid the way for what we now know to be Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs. Mills v. DC expanded protections to include students with disabilities other than mental retardation (now known as intellectual disability), such as behavioral disorders or hyperactivity. Because of this ruling, schools cannot claim that services cannot be provided because funds are not available. The message to schools was “figure it out.” Or as Tim Gunn used to say on Project Runway, “make it work.”
In 1975, the Education for all Handicapped Children Act was signed into law. This is when the familiar protections of special education were mandated. At the crux of the EHA was the right of children with disabilities to a Free Appropriate Public Education in the Least Restrictive Environment. Special Education was no longer nice to have, it was mandatory. And that’s right, it’s only 50 years old.
A little story about how these new laws were received by some of the public. States had 4 years to get into compliance with the EHA. 1979 also happened to be when I entered kindergarten. There was a classroom of kids with behavior disorders across the hall, and my Mom strictly forbade me to talk to them. She told me they would stab me with scissors (for real). In their infinite wisdom, the special education teachers invited each class to have a co-lesson with the students in this self-contained classroom. Imagine my terror when the lesson was cutting. I actually pulled one of the teachers aside and asked if it was safe. They were confused at first and then assured me I would be fine. To this day I don’t know if my Mom was told to knock it off or not, but I am pretty confident she was.
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But I’m so excited about EHA that I’m getting ahead of myself. There was another very important law that was enacted well before EHA — the Rehab Act of 1973. You are most likely familiar with Section 504 of the Rehab Act. That section requires any entity receiving federal funds to by physically accessible. But the law was much bigger than that. For example, the Rehab Act is the reason we had TTY back in the day for Deaf people and Closed Captioning. It also established Vocational Rehabilitation programs for adults and prohibited employers from discriminating against indviduals with disabilities. Enforcement was a little lax in the beginning and this is why Judy Huemann and her posse protested in Washington in 1977. History says they were pretty much successful in their quest.
Are you ever going to get to Behavior Analysis?
Thanks for being patient. There was a lot to cover and I didn’t even scratch the surface. But here we are, ready to talk behavior analysis.
So many cool things happened in the 1970s. It was a golden time to be a behavior analyst. Research was prolific in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. In 1974, the Association for Behavior Analysis (ABA — Now the Association for Behavior Analysis International or ABAI) was founded in Michigan. The 50 year celebration in Philadelphia in May of 2024 was really cool. It was so cool I used the word cool four times in one paragraph.
The field of Organizational Behavior Management began with the first company founded by the also late Aubrey Daniels, who died right before this story was published. This company is still going strong and serves companies looking to increase workplace productivity, decrease accidents, and in general improve behavior in the corporate setting. Check out the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, first published in 1977, to see what people in OBM do. If you supervise or manage people, I highly recommend that you read Dr. Daniels’s classic Bringing out the Best in People.
Now we finally get to Lovaas. Took me long enough, right? I know, but there was so much to say, and Lovaas was only one of many behavior analysts expanding the reach of the science. O. Ivar Lovaas expanded on the work he did in the late 1960s to create a program of teaching that he called discrete trial teaching. Essentially he set up a series of three-term contingencies (stimulus-response-reinforcers) and standardized error correction. More seasoned practitioners may remember the “no-no-prompt” technique where therapists allowed two tries before prompting the learner. Lovaas and colleagues were also the first to involve and train parents to use behavioral interventions. The goal for many was to keep people out of the institutions we talked about in the 1960s such as Pennhurst.
Speaking of institutions, the sad truth is that institutions were still fully functioning in the 1970s, and people still believed that autism was a form of childhood schizophrenia. In 1972, Bruno Bettleheim published The Empty Fortress, which suggested that children descended into autism because of faulty attachments. Especially harmful were faulty attachments to cold and unfeeling mothers. Autism and related disorders, in Bettleheim’s view, were a defense mechanism, protecting the child from a cold, cruel world. It is important to note that this viewpoint was on the decline given recent evidence that autistic children could, in fact, learn and socialize under the right circumstances. But it was still a thing. In writing this story, I stumbled upon a website that chronicles the history of autism out of the University of Oregon. Worth a look when you get a chance. Recently, there has been a renaissance of attachment and autism, even though the evidence to support autism and attachment is inconclusive at best.
Many of the techniques we think of as commonplace — prompt hierarchies, programming for generalization, so forth — have their origins in the 1970s. The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis was alive, well, and research was prolific. Applied data collection methods were being refined, as were single-subject research design protocols.
While this was the golden age of behavior analysis, we did not yet have all the technologies available to address problem behavior that we do today. A lot of studies looked at aversives and punishment techniques. Interventions were largely classified by topography rather than function. The idea of functions of behavior being paramount and the classic 4 functions of behavior don’t come until much later, although the foundations for them are being laid in the 1970s and Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence data dates back to 1968.
Sometimes, we hear that more naturalistic behavior analysis methods for people with autism are the invention of 21st Century behavior analysts. People who say this, however, are usually unaware of the contributions of people like Bob and Lynn Koegel and Hart and Risley. They are widely credited with the discovery of Incidental Teaching methods with a variety of populations. In Incidental Teaching, the therapist follows the learner’s lead and uses current interests to set up opportunities for communication and socialization. Some more modern behavior analysts may know this as Natural Environment Teaching, but that builds upon the Incidental Teaching research. Later on, the Koegels would expand on Incidental Teaching to create Pivotal Response Training. But that was later.
I also probably should say there is a parallel teaching method in Speech Language Pathology called Joint Action Routines that also uses many of the same procedures. However, this work did not emerge until the early 1980s. Here I am, getting ahead of myself again. But if you want a preview, here you go.
You’re probably wondering when I get to the big criticism of Applied Behavior Analysis — research into conversion of LGBTQ+ individuals. Yes, that has its roots in the 1970s. Not to worry, I’m not going to gloss over it. In fact, I think it’s so important it’s getting its own story. It’ll take me longer to write and may end up somewhere other than here, but it will happen. So stay tuned.
