ABSTRACT
When little "behavior modifiers" grow up, confer their own benefits, and spawn their own little behavior modifiers, they become disabused of the myth. For public purposes, behavior modifiers of the 1960s usually described their activities as logically inevitable corollaries of theorems or principles of learning and of ongoing discoveries about how they applied to disordered human behavior. The early growth of behavior modification as a professional specialty was largly polemical and political, not theoretical, and most of its scientific hoopla evolved to serve the polemical needs of the people who made it up. The study of learning for behavior therapists, in fact, was always more for the purpose of metaphor, paradigm, and analogy than for strict guidance about how to operate or about what it all means. Behavior disorders are more like chronic ailments, where medical treatment generally aims at the symptoms only. The control of diabetes is not treatment of symptoms, but their prevention.
