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Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist
In the Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist Show, Dr. Paul “Paulie” Gavoni looks at common issues or phenomena in our personal and professional lives, gives you his thoughts, sometimes rants about it, and provides you with practical solutions rooted in the science of human behavior.
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Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist
Transforming Lives Through Behavioral Science: Kendall Rindick Samuel on Empowerment and Innovation
Ever wondered how behavioral science can change lives? Join us as we sit down with the insightful Kendall Rindick Samuel, a dedicated behavior analyst who transitioned from an aspiring school counselor to a pioneer in the field of behavioral science. Kendall shares her captivating journey, fueled by a high school psychology class that sparked a deep passion for operant and classical conditioning. Throughout our discussion, she reveals her inspiring work with children with autism and intellectual disabilities, and her ambitious dream to expand the application of behavior analysis.
Behavioral science can seem daunting, but Kendall and I tackle the challenge of making it accessible to everyone. We explore the necessity of translating complex concepts into everyday language, taking cues from popular books like James Clear's "Atomic Habits." Our conversation also unpacks how understanding fundamental behavioral principles can enhance emotional intelligence, emphasizing the power of clear, relatable communication. We uncover a gap in resources that simplify these concepts and discuss the importance of bridging that divide to share the benefits of behavioral science with a broader audience.
Check out her book Talk Behavior to Me: The Routledge Dictionary of the Top 150 Behavior Analytic Terms and Translations. This book teaches readers how to not only understand behavior analysis concepts and principles in layman's terms, but it helps translate the highly complex language behavior analysts use to be more palatable for non-behavior analytic audiences. Find Kendall on TikTok and Instagram @the.behavior.influencer. You can also contact her through email: thebehaviorinfluencer@gmail.com. Her book will be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Routledge Publishing's website.
Be sure to subscribe to Dr. Paulie's Heart & Science YouTube channel for a variety of content related to behavior science and bringing out the best in yourself and others.
Welcome to the Thoughts and Rants of a Behavior Scientist show hosted by Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, dr Pauly. Okay, welcome back to the Thoughts and Rants of a Behavior Scientist podcast. I'm your host, dr Pauly, and I am here with behavior analyst Kendall Rindick Samuel. How are you doing, kendall?
Speaker 1:Doing. Great Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's my pleasure. You know Kendall's doing some cool stuff out there we're going to talk about. She's actually recently written a book and I know it's going to be out later this month. Depending on when you hear this podcast, it's September 30th, right now, 2024. But it's called Talk Behavior to Me, the Routledge Dictionary of the Top 150 Behavior Analytic Terms and Translations and I breezed it. I'm like, oh, this seems pretty cool, man. I think probably if I was either studying for my behavior analytic test or afterwards I need to dig back in and find some stuff out. Or maybe if I was a consumer and I want to know some stuff, it seems like it'd be a helpful guide. So I want to hear more about it. Seems like it'd be a helpful guide. So I want to hear more about that in a little bit. But welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into behavior analysis.
Speaker 1:For sure. So I feel like I got into it, just like everybody else does. We all fall into it. In high school, I took a psychology class, and we got to the part about operant and classical conditioning and dissecting all the different operants, and I remember the day I told myself this is great, this is a thing I'm the best at. There is no job for this, though. This is like stuff that people do in a lab, and I don't think anybody does this.
Speaker 1:Well, fast forward to my junior year of college.
Speaker 1:I thought I was going to be a school counselor, coach softball in high school and kind of leave it at that, and my professor came to us and said hey, we're starting a new master's program.
Speaker 1:It's in behavior analysis, analysis and it's all the stuff that you learn about Pavlov and operant and classical conditioning, and my brain about exploded, because that was like oh, there is something that I could do with what I love in psychology. So I immediately changed my whole journey of what I wanted to do, went to the office that day and said, all right, I'm going to do this new master's program, and I loved it. I went into it, did really well in school, and then I practiced in autism and intellectual disabilities for almost seven years, and I loved all the kids that I worked with and the families. It was great. I've always had this really deep passion, though, for trying to see, like, where the field can go and how to make it bigger, so I've been applying it to sports for a really long time. I have always just thought it was a really cool science and I want to get it in front of as many people as possible.
Speaker 2:So it's the baddest MF in science in the world, isn't it?
Speaker 1:It really is, oh my gosh, and it's like this superpower when you, when you're able to practice it, you're like whoa, I know, I know how to help people learn and motivate them to do things, things that people like go to their grave wishing they knew we were the experts on how to do this and it's-.
Speaker 2:Pause on that for a second because when you were speaking, it reminded me I remember the first time that I would, and same thing, I was in a psychology class and I really liked the psychology. It was super cool guy. I even remember his name, dr musgrove. Uh, many, many years ago in the 90s, I remember they were going through the different theories of learning right and, uh, you know, and different psychological theories, and they came across behavior analysis. I remember like, well, that sounds interesting, the humanistic approach and this and that and the other. I'm like, and they got the behavior analysis. The way they framed it it was like, well, you know, essentially they framed it as like carrots and whips, you know, and it turned me right off to it, right, I'm like, well, that's some bullshit. You know the way they explained it, because they just don't understand it well enough and, like you said at the beginning, like most of us, we stumble into it. Right, but that is because and I and I see that you are also, by the way we share some common values coaching and dissemination, right. Um, we've done a piss poor job of disseminating the science, meaning making it. Yeah, terrible job, because if people understood it, like you just said, like when you were like holy shit, there's a way. To me, it's the science of helping you know, it's the science of helping you know, it's a science of learning. It's like we can help people to better help themselves and others through the science of behavior, which is my mission in life. You know, I see a world that, you know, leverages behavior analysis to do the world's a better place because of behavior analysis. But not everybody feels that way. It's not their fault, right? That is just an outcome, an outcome of us, and I think one of the things that has been. This is just my personal opinion. You might feel differently or others, but I think that in our desire to make our science relevant in early years, there were some mistakes made in terms of dissemination. Now, who could? 2020 hindsight, you know, is that when I say 2020? Yeah, I forget how the saying goes, anyways, something like that, right?
Speaker 2:So when you start using words like manipulation and control, that's the type of language you need to use in the laboratory, certainly, um, but when you say there's not freedom of choice, you know, uh, there's like you know there's. It is. It turns people off. You know, they think about that and it's not that we understand what that means behavior analytically, but people like, well, screw this man, I make my own decisions, you know, like I I think for myself and and so I think we didn't do a great job.
Speaker 2:First pairing people about the all great that should have been like and check this out. Did you know that, like because of your environment, your history, like you start to see things through this lens, you know, and so your perspective and therefore your behavior end up being shaped by this, and really it's like it's the environment that then, is controlling. You know your behavior. When we say control, it means like, remember, you're doing things to get things from the environment and get away from so they wouldn't know in the frame it back then, but I think we were searching for and we should have been legitimacy in the science field of doing that. It's just that we need Skinner didn't have people say, like us, right, to help connect that type of language and like what I'm assuming is in your book with what people would realize in the real world through good stories et cetera. What do you think about all that?
Speaker 1:Oh, a hundred percent. The other day I was preparing for a supervision session with one of my supervisees and I was looking through like the goals of behavior analysis and even the wording with that like prediction control, all these things. I was like prediction control, all these, all these things. I was like, oh God, we, yes, like that that works in a lab, that works, that language works amongst behavior analysts. Second, you use that with somebody who doesn't practice behavior analysis. They're like okay, that sounds kind of scary yeah, like peace out.
Speaker 1:I'm probably going to stay clear of you and that's that's how I feel like it is and it has been. When you kind of tell somebody I'm a behavior analyst, either they're intrigued and like tell me more, or they're like all right, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2:I've worked with you before. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that comes from the language that we use. So we need to just brand it differently of what we do and see how that goes. And although I haven't done research on all the stuff that I wrote about in my book, I have had many, many positive interactions with people using the language that's in my book and other behavior professionals. How to speak basically to anyone who is not in our field about what we do to ultimately help the science grow, because we've never had a resource like that before. Nothing has ever been developed. You know, lindley a while ago came up with about 50 terms or something like that that he had translated a little bit in one of his papers that he wrote and it's great, but like nothing really came from that. We've always described what we do in more jargon and it's like oh no.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think and we'll talk about your book and it's important to talk about now so the book does translate right? Yes, the book translates OK. This is an important point because you know Stephen Hayes right from Contextual Behavior Science, he advocated for these what he calls mid-level terms, and I believe in this right. We need to have terms that are accessible to the general public. It's one of the issues with mentalism is that they use all sorts of crazy terms and people like what the hell does that mean? Nobody knows. It's like hiding on these terms and that's why I love about radical behaviorism that it brings it down to parsimony, right, we keep everything parsimonious and I don't think, in fact, I one of the issues I have would say, like relational frame theory, which I know very little about, an act which I love, a lot of the issues I have would say, like relational frame theory, which I know very little about, an act which I love a lot of, the act principles, right, I don't love the terms that are being used. I don't like terms like psychological flexibility. I think it starts to confuse things. I just need people to know that they need to initiate behavior, even under, you know, aversive stimuli or something like that, or conversion conditions, something that when they don't feel good when they're speaking to colleagues, which I actually don't like that language spoken to me at all. I just because I'm always thinking about how it looks in the real world. So come back to the point though, because I can see that your book could be very useful in universities, and here's why that we need.
Speaker 2:We are so focused on getting people to translate a situation behavior analytically. We need to teach them to to them, to translate it to the common person, so they should be able to take a scenario, explain it, behavior analytically, what's going on and then take a behavior analytic description of that scenario and explain it in layperson terms, right, and the why. So when you can do that now, you are in a position where we can help people to really understand some things, and this is really the key to in a position where we can help people to really understand some things. And this is really the key to disseminating, because when we help people to behave well enough and long enough using the science, help them produce valued outcomes like I want more of the science. They don't need to understand the technical jargon on it, they just need to understand some basic principles of behavior, but our behavior analysts need to be able to translate both ways.
Speaker 1:Yes, 100% but a behavior analyst need to be able to translate both ways. Yes, 100%. And a perfect example of that is James Clear, who is not a behavior analyst, but he wrote the book Atomic Habits and people are obsessed with that book. It is on Apple Books. It's like a top five or top 10 audio book. It's one of the most downloaded books ever on Apple. I'm sure it's like that on any of the other book apps that are out there and I see it. It's at eye level at most bookstores too, and even all my friends and family. Oh, this is great. We should learn more about this stuff. That's what I do for a living that whole science you want to hear something cool about that.
Speaker 2:I was just listening to, uh, my good friend david roth and dr david palmer they were unpacking. So on the bf skinner foundation they have, like right now, five episodes out and they're unpacking, uh, verbal behavior. It's called dialogues on verbal behavior. It's a great story about how skinner came up with it and helping people understand it. So I anybody listen to this really should go listen to, give, give a listen to that. I'll. I'll make sure I drop the link in the show note. But skinner does initially describe atomic behaviors, right, he brings the term atomic and he uses a few times I'm like, oh shit, this is pretty cool, right. And he used it a few times and like, oh shit, this is pretty cool, right, and they unpacked that a little bit. So there's that connection there, right back to, you know, the old, good old Skinner man. Is that cool?
Speaker 1:I love it. I didn't know that, but.
Speaker 2:I didn't know it either, until I heard him talk about it.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. It's it's these little habits that build on each other, and you can make one even bigger and chain all these things together. And again, james cleared is such a good job at describing all of this, and not once does he use a lot of the terms that we typically use, and if he does, he describes what it is. That's what we always have to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I imagine those atomic behaviors, I mean they would probably fall under what we would call pivotal behaviors, behavioral cusp. You know like these are so important. I'm sure we could refine it even more, if you know, if he was a behavior analyst. Just think of that, that little bit of nuanced perspective. You know, like I'm actually writing another book called Behavioral Intelligence with my buddy, adam Ventura soon to be Dr Adam Ventura but it's taking the concept of emotional intelligence right and putting it, filtering it through a behavioral lens.
Speaker 2:It's like and I love the idea of emotional intelligence, I think it's a beautiful idea but like to really be emotionally intelligent because it's about you know, just, not just about what you're thinking and doing, but how you engage with people. Right, you need to understand why behavior occurs and why it doesn't occur. Right, you need to understand some fundamental principles about behavior. That's the only way you could really achieve the highest level of emotional intelligence. Because if you're a leader and you want people to do something, you're being sensitive, empathetic with them. You're understanding, you know blah, blah, blah, but they're still not performing. You're getting frustrated and you know you don't want to sit there and try to. Focusing on your emotions isn't going to work. You need to understand why they're not doing it so you can engage in the right behavior in the right way. You need to understand why they're not behaving to some sort of standard. So, anyways, I didn't mean to divert on that, it just got me to think about it.
Speaker 1:No, I loved it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's pretty cool, right? Well, because again we're thinking in the same language. Taken these terms, I went down to it's like. It's like this cool dictionary that gives you the terms, explains very simply what it is. And then what I like most about it is that you've unpacked them into examples where they can see what it looks like in real life, right? So come back to like what was the, what was the purpose of it? I think we probably kind of people can you know it was implicit in our discussions, but why? Why did you do it? What was the big problem that you're seeing out there?
Speaker 1:So the biggest issue was I again I saw a lot of there were two. So I saw a lot of resources that were created that were meant to simplify all of the information, like basic concepts and principles of ABA for students, or even just to go back and reference to later on that we're taking all of our concepts and principles and explaining them in a very confusing way with more jargon, and we were being given these in school and I was like I understand it, but most of the people around me don't, like a lot of the other students don't, and I even had a hard time with with some of these terms. So I was like, okay, like this needs to be watered down even more. Um, for, like, especially first year students. And then I saw an even bigger issue and it was like enraging me when I was telling people what I was going to school for.
Speaker 1:And then, when I became a BCBA, when I told people what I did, they had no idea what I did and I realized some of the reason was because we as BCBAs and all the other behavior professionals out there, we have a very hard time describing to people what it is that we do, even in like the parent trainings and meetings with colleagues, other trainings we were doing. I had a presentation that I did for a doctor's office. A guy who's been practicing for forever and has been referring people to different ABA clinics and stuff had like 0.5% knowledge of what it was that we did. He thought we just gave Skittles to people all the time and I was like I know I know.
Speaker 1:So we need to. We got to. We got to do something about this because I see the way we speak and it's not. It's not good, it doesn't make sense to anybody else. So somebody has to do something about this and I ended up going to ABAI back in 2021.
Speaker 1:And I went to the last talk of the night, on Saturday night, which was like one of the last days of all the CEUs that were being offered, and I saw it was about dissemination and I was like what? This is what I like to do, because I'm a content creator on TikTok and Instagram for ABA. This could be good. And I watched Dr Kimberly Marshall, who speaks out of, or teaches out of, university of Oregon, and she said the same thing. She did research on language that we use in ABA with parents and other stakeholders who are not behavior analysts, and she showed that it is better to use basic language with them to help them with, to increase treatment, integrity and all these different things. So I walked out of there and I was like, oh my God, I need to write a book about this, I need to make something to help people, because there isn't anything out there. And that was it.
Speaker 2:Man, my experience has been so similar to it. I get down to wondering what is the root cause, right? What's the function? Why are they speaking this way? And there's a couple of reasons I wonder. I'd like to hear what you thought about it.
Speaker 2:But one of the reasons, I think, people don't know it well enough, right, I think if you know it well enough, you can speak it simply enough to other people, right, to explain what it looks like in real terms. So I think that's a big issue, and I think that in our effort to frame things through our lens, we start using that language because of our discomfort with it. Because when I say us, I'm talking about people who don't understand it well enough. Well, that's a reinforcer, but you don't have to use that word to them. They don't. First of all, they don't know the difference between a reinforcer and a reward, right, they don't. They're saying I'm reinforcing and it's not working because just don't think our higher education is doing a good enough job of helping us to generalize this stuff.
Speaker 2:I have a solution for that, by the way. I mean, one of the solutions is going to be part of what you just did there, right? So that's really good giving people, you know they would have to choose, like, what's the right thing to say here, what shouldn't you say? You know, to discriminate that stuff, I think you need simulations, right. So there's a way to make, like analog simulations, but you can always use, like, uh, computerized uh, you know you can do through simple asrs, but you can use, uh, you know, fun stuff like virtual reality or gamification or whatever, and like, you know, what do you want to say here? You know, and they pick the jargon one like the parent just walked out on, you know they don't want any of your services, uh, but so they can learn through natural consequences of it.
Speaker 2:And you can generalize these concepts across settings, because that's the other thing is that people are only using it with a learner. I call it behavioral myopia, where we forget about using the science outside of working with learners, people with disabilities, where the science is everywhere. So they should be able to understand the concept of, you know, behavior, of reinforcement, right, understand what the procedure looks like, understand how it generalizes to a different setting. What's it look like in business, in the home, in sports, right? The things that we've done? Right, because all the principles are the same. It's why I love writing about it, man. I can go back and just change the nouns, everything is the same.
Speaker 2:You know it's great.
Speaker 1:It's the best is the same. You know it's. It's great, it's the best, I agree, and that that was another one of the motives behind the book was because there were also not that many resources that I was finding where people could apply their knowledge to these other subspecialties within the science. And even I I talked with BCBAs before where they were like no, this is what we do. We only work with individuals who have disabilities and autism. I'm like hold on, we can apply this to anybody. People are already using this. They just don't realize it. They're using it in marketing, they're using it in just general trainings, they're using it to decrease drive.
Speaker 2:They're talking about atomic habits. They're talking about some decrease. You know they're talking about an atomic habits. They're talking about some of the basic principles in emotional intelligence, but they're not again, because they don't understand the nuance of the science. You know they're missing. There are gaps in here with those things. And so I think that, rather than turning our nose up to those concepts, like I've done with stuff like leadership, I'm like, hey, it's great, a bunch of leadership theories out there. With stuff like leadership, I'm like, hey, it's a great bunch of leadership theories out there.
Speaker 2:I have a book called Positional Authority and Leadership, servant Leadership, transformational Leadership, authentic Leadership, et cetera, et cetera. I'm like these are all great, I really like those. Let's put them on our behavior analytics lens. Let's look at what grounds them, because the science is the DNA of these things, where there's a different path to a these obstacles very clearly, when you're able to assess, problem solve, make decisions and take actions that are effective through this very practical behavior analytic lens. And so, rather than again turn our nose up to these things, put them under like grit growth mindset, you know, great, I love this stuff. I get what they mean. What does that mean behaviorally? So we can be specific and precise with how we approach these things.
Speaker 1:Totally, 100% agree yeah.
Speaker 2:We are so similar. So, in the perfect world right, where would be your greatest hope for how this book is going to impact the field and then beyond?
Speaker 1:beyond.
Speaker 1:So, more immediately, I would like to see it being used in school so any of the educational institutions that have masters of you know ABA programs, bachelor programs, certificate programs to teach students how to first understand these concepts in a more basic way and then helping them be able to translate the language for non-behavior analytic audiences when they do start working with them.
Speaker 1:And having it being used at fieldwork sites and having fieldwork supervisors use it to teach their supervisees how to then speak to stakeholders Later on down the line. I would like for this to motivate people, because there are so many different examples in there from every subspecialty that I could find in behavior analysis on how to practice the science. I would like for this to motivate BCBAs future BCBAs to push out of our typical areas of practice and start to grow the field, because we can do so much good. We can help so many people exactly how we are. We're doing wonderful work with all the clients that we have, but there are so many more people that we can touch and really work on their socially significant behaviors as individuals and groups and all that. So I truly hope that it helps grow the field and have it as big and have a most positive impact as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was thinking about where it would come in the core sequence, right. So I started to have some ideas. I'm just free flowing with this stuff and then I just thought, you know, what would be ideal is something like this that it would like there would be. It would have to be sequenced, right. So what are the key things? I, because I could see it being valuable to rbts, you know, I mean so some simple things, because it helps them to learn what these concepts are, not just translating. Oh, this makes sense, right, uh. But then so it's kind of like paired with maybe like I don't know a task list or something like that in terms of term, what you learn, because I can also see there's going to be things that are more sophisticated that you really wouldn't be learning until you're up, like you know, later, maybe your graduate level, and maybe there's some sort of assessment at the end of everything where it says, okay, here's the scenarios, what are you going to do with this stuff? Right, so these are the simulations where you know they've got to actually practice what they learned to make sure they can translate this stuff back and forth. Uh, so I could see like great value at all those different levels.
Speaker 2:Um, well, this seems like I'm excited for this to come out for the field. Uh, I'm excited to see how it has some sort of impact and, uh, you know what? What comes of it? Um, because I think, fundamentally, you know, we need, we need some of these more practical things that just translate this stuff to the real world for people. We have to understand it well enough before we can help other people well enough. So it seems like this starts to give people, you know, just gets their foot in the door with it. I think, you know it opens the door for them to even think this way, which I think is important.
Speaker 1:Right, I agree, I agree.
Speaker 2:When is this coming out?
Speaker 1:October 22nd, so we got a few weeks.
Speaker 2:You know, and I think I'm, and that's okay, the people can hear this on it. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to launch this, you know, maybe the week before. I think we had talked about this a while back, yeah, or maybe a few days before. That would be cool If somebody wanted to get in touch with you. First of all, I know you have like your social media. Maybe you have emails. What's the best way for people to follow you on social media? What's the best way if they have a question about of you, of the book when that time comes out, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm on TikTok and Instagram and I post very regularly, so people can find me at thebehaviorinfluencer on both TikTok and Instagram, and then I'm super responsive on my email. My email is thebehaviorinfluencer at gmailcom.
Speaker 2:Cool, and you can send that to me in whatever bio you want. I'll make sure that I put it in the show notes and description so people can just go right down there and link right to it. So, man, it's been great to have you on here. Any last words for anybody that's listening.
Speaker 1:No, I'm just so excited to see where the field goes I mean, it's growing all the time. But I got to say the best piece of advice I can give anybody if we have behavior analysts, other behavior professionals listening or just anybody who's interested in psychology if you're trying to decide what you're trying to do in life or you're trying to make a decision on what next to do, just do something you love, because I've never been happier in my life than writing this book and doing what I'm doing now, and I hope everybody is able to feel that in their life than writing this book and doing what I'm doing now, and I hope everybody is able to feel that in their life.
Speaker 2:I love that so much. Kendall, I'm actually have a course coming up I don't remember what the name of it is that Dr Nick Green and I are doing. It's about that how to find your niche using behavior analysis, and I believe you have to find your values, find your passion first and make it your niche, and then there's can. You can probably look back and figure out how you got there. That's for another conversation, but I so it's so rare to see people in their why. It sounds like you're in your, why, I'm in my, why All this stuff I love doing, I love talking to you, I love writing the books, I love training and the coaching and all that stuff, and because it's all in service of my mission of, you know, helping people better help themselves and others through the science of human behavior. So it sounds like we're on a similar mission here.
Speaker 1:Yep, I love it yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, kendall Thanks. Thanks for coming on, okay, it was wonderful.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
