by John Donvan
His enemies found it a challenge to ignore him or debate him. He smiled big, thought deeply, worked hard, and was entertainingly reckless in the language he used to dismiss anyone who questioned his research methods or findings. Once, at a dinner meeting, feeling challenged yet again by people he thought did not understand his work, he lifted his salad bowl for everyone to see, then announced: “There are more brains in this salad than in the people seated at this table.”
At times, he was candid to a fault, as with the description he gave to an interviewer from Psychology Today about the kids he was working with. “They are little monsters,” Lovaas said. “They have hair, a nose and a mouth—but they are not people in the psychological sense….It is a test for psychology,” he declared.
It was always the “test” that thrilled him, and the possibilities of what the science he practiced could produce. In his seventies, he would boast to Robert Ito of Los Angeles Magazine: “If I had gotten Hitler here at UCLA at the age of four or five, I could have raised him to be a nice person. A humanitarian!” Audacious, visionary, and somewhat offensive, it was classic Lovaas. Because while he was clearly joking, he also meant it. Lovaas believed deeply in the science he was practicing—a science whose claimed principles of human psychology were observable, confirmable, measurable, and reliably, relentlessly repeatable. To him, it was the antithesis of interpreting dreams or trying to divine meaning from inkblots. Lovaas’s science built upon decades of work from long before his time, from labs around the world. But this science didn’t discover its original working principles about the minds of people in human subjects. Instead, the major discoveries all came from experiments run on pigeons, cats, and dogs.
Not everyone liked hearing it, but what worked for animals worked for people too.
19
“SCREAMS, SLAPS, AND LOVE”
In the spring of 1965, readers of LIFE who picked up the May 7 issue and flipped past the cover story about actor John Wayne’s rebound from lung cancer found themselves gazing at a series of disturbing photographs. The pictures showed several young boys and girls, none older than nine, undergoing what looked like an onslaught of abuse. One boy is seen in tears, his picture snapped the very instant an adult’s open hand is smacking his cheek. Another girl is photographed just as a jolt of electricity is sent burning through her body. Throughout the photo spread, middle-aged men in neckties appear to be controlling this mad-seeming scenario taking place in a laboratory at UCLA. The accompanying text explains in large type what the readers are looking at: “A surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental cripples.”
LIFE had discovered Lovaas—and the controversy that surrounded the science he believed in.
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REINFORCEMENT AND PUNISHMENT. For two decades, finding the moral balance between the two would be the defining controversy of Lovaas’s work with children who had autism. Often misunderstood, these terms, as used by behaviorists, were names for specific clinical and analytical tools, which had been derived from experiments on rats, mice, and pigeons.
Reinforcements worked like a reward. If they were delivered immediately following a desired behavior, they clearly encouraged the repetition of that behavior. A food pellet delivered to a pigeon stepping on a lever, for example, reinforced that behavior. It encouraged more steps on the lever by that bird in the future.
Punishment worked in nearly the opposite way. When delivered immediately following a behavior, it discouraged repetition of that behavior. Most often, punishment was “aversive,” or unpleasant to experience, like a jolt of electricity. When shocked, rats tended to cease whatever behavior they had just been engaged in. If, over time, the same behavior was repeatedly followed by more shocks, they began to avoid that behavior altogether. They had “learned,” through aversive experience, not to behave that way anymore. At least for a while.
Over many decades and in many labs, practitioners of this kind of psychology had painstakingly extracted the core principles of how interactions with the environment determine the behavior of virtually all organisms. Reinforcement and punishment, and other terms like stimulus, response, shaping, operant conditioning, negative reinforcement, and extinction, were the vocabulary of this science, in which study subjects learn from the environment what to do and what not to do, in order to be “rewarded” or avoid being “punished.” Experimenters, meanwhile, had been perfecting their ability to control the environment of rewards and punishments in order to manipulate behavior.
This was the science of behaviorism.
Behaviorism was born, as most high-schoolers know, with an accidental observation about some dogs in Russia at the start of the twentieth century. Ivan Pavlov, a physiologist, was investigating the canine digestive system and its reflexes when he set out to measure the rate at which a dog releases saliva when food touches their tongues. He built a contraption out of a slender rubber hose, hooked up at one end to a surgically implanted tube extruding from his lab dogs’ saliva glands. At the other end, a measuring beaker stood ready to collect the saliva. To get things going, Pavlov placed a fixed amount of meat powder into each animal’s mouth. Saliva then flowed, giving Pavlov a readout on how much the dogs produced in a given period of time.
But a problem cropped up. After following this procedure for a few days, Pavlov noticed that the dogs were getting ahead of the experiment. They began salivating before they got a taste of the meat powder. In fact, they started drooling the instant Pavlov’s assistants entered the room wearing lab coats. This was ruinous to the digestion study. It threw off all the measurements.
Then Pavlov had the flash of insight that would write him and his dogs into history. His canines, he realized, had learned from their environment. The dogs were responding not to the natural stimulus of food on the tongue but to previously neutral sights—lab assistants in white coats—they now associated with the taste of the meat powder. This would come to be called a conditioned response.
Pavlov devoted years to understanding this phenomenon and created other experiments to test ways the dogs’ digestive responses could be manipulated by other stimuli, like the ringing of a bell. In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for charting the course of digestion. But in his prizewinner’s lecture, Pavlov sounded more excited about his forays into the psychological realm. His discovery of some of the laws governing how the environment could be manipulated to control the behavior of dogs had, he felt, important implications for people too. Concluding his lecture, he celebrated the fact that, in his lifetime, scientists—himself included—were making new discoveries about “our psychical constitution, the mechanism of which was and is wrapped in darkness.”
In the years following Pavlov’s Nobel Prize, perhaps the most revolutionary of behaviorism’s propositions was the idea that animal and human psychology had a great deal in common. In 1913, in a speech that came to be called “The Behaviorist Manifesto,” American John Watson, destined to be hailed the “father of behaviorism,” pulled no punches. “The behaviorist,” he pronounced, “recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.” This stand was as daring in its implications, and as insulting to notions of human uniqueness, as Darwin’s theory of evolution.
But there was, in the eyes of behaviorism’s critics, another, more subtle slander committed by the discipline. It projected all life experience onto a mechanistic framework, where people appeared as windup toys, all psychic gears and on-off switches, ruled by patterns of stimulus-and-response that were easily manipulated and entirely predictable. This vision seemed to rob humans of all sorts of dimensions critical to other philosophical schemes. Like free will. Or the unconscious. Or having a soul. But those things, if they existed, could not be seen or measured. Behaviorism was only interested in what was visible and recordable. Observation and data collection were its fundamentals.
For the naysayers, perhaps the most unsettling and frustrating thing about behaviorism was that it worked. It was an astounding thing to se
e the great Harvard behaviorist B. F. Skinner demonstrate his ability to get a pigeon to make a 360-degree turn, using reinforcing food rewards, with only ninety seconds of conditioning. Of course, long before Skinner, conditioning was practiced by lion tamers, snake charmers, and cowboys, though they never called it that. It was also practiced by drill sergeants, school principals, and parents, who knew by instinct or experience that rewards and punishments can be extraordinarily powerful ways to shape a desired behavior in another person. To some degree, Skinner was simply dealing in common wisdom.
But led by Skinner, laboratory scientists produced thousands of studies that turned common wisdom into something quantifiable, with experiments that could be replicated. And out of these labs poured applications that put the science at the service of human need. Behavioral treatments were created for addictions and phobias. Behavioral approaches were developed for maintaining discipline in classrooms and for reinforcing learning. And behavioral methods were used by Lovaas to get children with autism to behave in ways that made them look and act less autistic.
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LOVAAS IS SOMETIMES mistakenly credited with having invented applied behavior analysis, or ABA, but in fact it was largely the work of a group of psychologists working at the University of Washington in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sidney Bijou, for example, is one of the earliest researchers to test the use of ABA with children with disabilities. Bijou had worked under Skinner before becoming the director of the university’s Institute of Child Development in 1948. Collaborating with Don Baer, another leader in the field—who had earned his PhD studying behavior in kittens—Bijou was a creative, hands-on researcher. Between 1957 and 1960, he was known to drive around Seattle hauling a laboratory stuffed inside a mobile home, visiting nursery schools whose kids had “volunteered” for some of his studies. His traveling lab was a fully functioning behaviorist test center, with chairs, recording gear, a one-way mirror, and a tabletop contraption of his own design with flashing blue lights and levers. The device popped out trinkets when levers were pushed in response to the lights, which he could program however he wanted. Traveling with his own lab had the advantage of creating a consistent environment for the work, even as he studied groups of kids all over the city. Eventually, he opened a nursery-school-as-laboratory on the University of Washington campus, and the mobile home was retired.
In July 1962, Bijou was contacted by Jerman Rose, the psychiatrist who ran the children’s ward at the nearby Western State Hospital, a mental institution. Trained in psychoanalysis, Rose urgently sought Bijou’s help with an especially troubled little boy whom no amount of psychoanalysis seemed to help. Bijou delegated the case to two University of Washington behavior analysts. One, Todd Risley, was a graduate student in the psychology department. The other, Montrose Wolf, was an assistant research professor. The boy was a three-year-old named Richard. Known to all as “Dicky,” he had autism.
The “Dicky study,” which appeared in the journal Behavior Research and Therapy in 1964, represents the first indisputably life-changing use of applied behavior analysis to instill beneficial behaviors in a child with autism while eliminating behaviors that were not only disruptive to learning but physically harmful. If it hadn’t been for Wolf and his team, Dicky would have gone blind before he was five.
Dicky’s severe autistic behaviors, which had become evident around nine months, made him disconnected, self-destructive, and increasingly difficult to handle. He had memorized TV commercials and could recite them verbatim for hours, but otherwise he could not use language in any normal way. He could not stand to be touched anywhere on his head. His tantrums were a few notches beyond terrifying, as he would turn on himself with such violence that, afterward, his mother said, “he was a mess, all black and blue and bleeding.” In addition to all this, he had difficulty seeing. Around the same time as his autism symptoms began, cataracts began growing in both his eyes. At the age of two, he underwent a series of operations to remove them, but ultimately the doctors had been left with no choice but to take out all the tissue that serves to focus the eye naturally. Dicky would never be able to see clearly without prescription lenses.
But when he was given eyeglasses, he refused to wear them. This was especially worrisome because Dicky’s ophthalmologist had warned his parents that if he went too long without corrective lenses, his retinas would lose their function permanently. Already, most of a year had passed since the operation. Nothing his parents said could get Dicky to cooperate. The typical strategies parents resort to were useless with Dicky. They could not explain the situation to him in understandable terms, nor could they bribe him or threaten punishment. All of those approaches required two-way communication and a situational understanding that Dicky didn’t seem to possess.
Wolf and Risley pursued a “behavior analytical” approach. They started by observing how Dicky interacted with his mother and attendants at the state hospital. They witnessed his tantrums, which were nearly nonstop despite constant efforts by adults to calm him down. Obviously, this problem needed to be addressed before they could even start to work on the eyeglasses matter.
Inspired by two recent studies that had nothing to do with autism, they pursued a program of mild punishment and “extinction” designed to eliminate Dicky’s tantrums. In the first of those studies, researchers at the University of Washington had succeeded in changing the behavior of several difficult-to-handle nursery-school children—in ways that could be enumerated and graphed—by instructing their teachers to ignore them completely whenever they displayed certain “undesirable” behaviors (which included excessive crying, isolated play, and uncontrolled self-scratching). As a result of this withdrawal of teacher attention, the undesirable behaviors quickly underwent “extinction” and were rapidly eliminated.
Conversely, when the children switched to more appropriate behaviors—cooperative play, for example—they immediately began to receive attention again from their teachers. This attention proved to be reinforcing, and these more appropriate behaviors quickly increased in frequency. “Attention” did not just mean the teachers praised the children. It was subtler than that. Moving closer to them, smiling at them, and offering to help them all counted as attention. What today is seen as conventional parenting wisdom was in fact a breakthrough discovery made at the UW labs in 1962. Previously, the powerful reinforcing effect on a child of attention from an adult had not been appreciated.
Knowing this, the team watching Dicky quickly formed the hypothesis that the attention he attracted during tantrums might be reinforcing them, even causing them to happen more often. Indeed, the hospital staff had orders to try to soothe Dicky whenever he became upset. His mother, understandably, had the same impulse. But what most people would call maternal instinct—or love—looked to the behavior analysts like the source of the problem. Dicky’s mother was rewarding him for blowing up, though that was never her intention.
The other study Wolf and Risley drew upon had pigeons as its subjects, and its most interesting discovery was something of an accident. The researcher in that study did not want his pigeons pecking at the food-releasing levers in the intervals between experiments. He found that, if he shut off the lights in the space the pigeons occupied, putting them in darkness, they stopped the unwanted pecking behavior. He began using this method regularly, calling it a “time out.” It was the same “time out” that was destined to become a widely adopted disciplinary tool used by parents and teachers across the United States—few of whom realized that the method had started in a behaviorist’s lab, and then traveled, by word of mouth, probably by way of teachers’ courses taught by psychologists with some behavioral training. In 1963, however, it was new, and only pigeon-tested. When Wolf and Risley decided to try using it as a “mild punishment” to discourage Dicky’s tantrums, it was probably the first scientifically controlled use of the technique with a person.
As instructed by the behavior analysts, the hospital staff and Dicky’s parents began to res
pond in a new way when Dicky began to act up. The adults nearby remained calm and paid him not the slightest attention, other than taking him immediately by the hand and, in a perfunctory way, leading him to a designated “time-out” room. Without fuss, without talk, without hugs, the door was closed, and Dicky was left alone in the room for a period of ten minutes.
The results were dramatic. Denied adult attention, the boy became progressively better at calming himself down during each successive time out. Over weeks, this required less and less time, and his tantrums became less and less violent. After two and a half months, Dicky was no longer scratching or slapping his face at all when he blew up. Eventually, his outbursts dwindled to so few in number that they ceased to be the defining factor in his interaction with others.
Now the two psychologists could attack the main challenge: getting eyeglasses on a three-year-old who hated anybody, or anything, touching his head. For this, Wolf and Risley turned to a classic behaviorist technique known as shaping. They began by getting Dicky used to the idea of simply being near eyeglasses. They placed several pairs of frames around the room, without lenses in them, and gave him a reward whenever he moved in the direction of any of them—even when the movement was clearly random. In time, this brought him closer and closer to the frames, to the point where he was reaching out and touching them. Whenever this happened, he was rewarded again—and then again when he brought them near his face. The researchers tried to keep him hungry, so that the reinforcers they were using—bits of candy and fruit at one point, breakfast in small bites at another—would motivate him. But after several days, it appeared that these reinforcers were losing their appeal. Progress slowed.
Then, late one morning, after Dicky was deliberately denied breakfast, Wolf and Risley showed up with ice cream. That changed everything. Dicky apparently loved ice cream, because soon he was letting the glasses be placed on his head and allowing them to be set more and more snugly onto the bridge of his nose, and even over and around his ears. He had a little trouble with the last part, tending to wrap them under his ears, but that was resolved over several sessions, with yet more ice cream.