ABSTRACT
When little “behavior modifiers” sit at their professional daddies’ knees and ask, “Where did I come from?” they are usually told a story about the “principles of learning” that spawned them, the evil clinicians who left them to perish on a hillside, and the kindly shepherd doctors who found them, raised them as their own, and eventually restored them to their rightful position as the benefactors of behavior. When they grow up, confer their own benefits, and spawn their own little behavior modifiers, they became disabused of the myth. But not entirely—there remains, at the very least, a tradition of deferring to the principles of learning as the ultimate source of all good modifications and a parallel ritual of knocking psychoanalysts, Rogerians, existentialists, and general psychiatrists who have not yet mastered or endorsed the jargon of respondents, operants, and reinforcements.
