When people hear me criticize behaviorism, they often assume I’ve never taken the time to understand it. They tell me to read B.F. Skinner. They recommend Israel Goldiamond’s Constructional Approach. They point me toward nonlinear contingency analysis and explain that ABA has changed. The implication is usually the same: If you understood modern behavior analysis, you wouldn’t criticize it.
The truth is that I have read it. I understand why many clinicians are excited about these developments. Constructional approaches are undeniably more humane than interventions centered solely on reducing behavior. Nonlinear models recognize that human behavior is far more complex than a simple stimulus followed by a response. Those are important advancements, and I don’t dismiss them.
Does the Constructional Approach Change the Science?
One of the most common responses to criticism of behavior analysis is that critics have not read Israel Goldiamond’s Constructional Approach. Goldiamond proposed a significant shift away from interventions focused primarily on reducing behavior. Instead of asking how to eliminate an unwanted behavior, he argued that clinicians should construct environments that build new, adaptive behavioral repertoires. This approach emphasized teaching skills and expanding opportunities rather than simply suppressing behaviors that others found undesirable.
From an ethical standpoint, this was an important advancement. Constructing adaptive skills is preferable to relying on punishment or attempting to extinguish behavior without providing an alternative. Goldiamond recognized that simply removing a behavior without replacing its function could leave an individual with fewer ways to successfully interact with their environment. In many ways, his work represented one of the more compassionate developments within behavior analysis.
However, the Constructional Approach did not replace the theoretical foundation of behavior analysis. It changed the direction of intervention without changing the underlying explanation of why behavior occurs.
The central mechanism remains the same: behavior changes because environmental contingencies are systematically arranged to increase the probability of desired behavioral repertoires. The intervention is still organized around reinforcement, stimulus control, motivating operations, and the functional relationships between behavior and the environment. The focus shifts from reducing one behavior to increasing another, but the explanatory model remains behavioral.
From a neuroscience perspective, this distinction is important because constructing new behaviors does not necessarily explain the biological processes generating those behaviors. Human behavior emerges from interactions among distributed neural networks responsible for sensory processing, executive functioning, autonomic regulation, motor planning, emotional processing, memory, and interoception. These systems continuously interact with one another before any observable behavior occurs.
For example, if an autistic child leaves a noisy classroom, the Constructional Approach may focus on teaching a replacement behavior, such as requesting a break or using an alternative communication strategy. That may improve the child’s ability to navigate the environment, and in many cases, it is certainly preferable to attempting to suppress escape behavior.
Neuroscience asks a different question.
Why did the child’s nervous system experience the environment as overwhelming in the first place?
Was the auditory cortex processing sensory information differently? Was autonomic arousal already elevated before the demand occurred? Was executive functioning compromised because of chronic cognitive load? Was interoception signaling fatigue or pain? Was predictive processing making the unpredictability of the classroom neurologically exhausting?
Those questions move beyond behavior itself and examine the physiological systems that generated the need to escape.
This is where my philosophical disagreement lies. The Constructional Approach changes what behavior analysts attempt to build, but it does not fundamentally change what they are explaining. The scientific unit of analysis remains observable behavior and its relationship to environmental contingencies. Contemporary neuroscience, by contrast, increasingly views behavior as the downstream consequence of dynamic brain-body interactions. Observable behavior is not the phenomenon requiring explanation; it is the outcome of underlying neurological and physiological processes.
As someone who was a nonspeaking autistic child, I find this distinction deeply personal. My repetitive movements, avoidance, and silence were never random behaviors waiting to be replaced with more socially acceptable ones. They were expressions of a nervous system trying to regulate itself in environments that often felt overwhelming. Teaching me new skills could certainly be helpful, but those skills alone would never explain why my brain was responding the way it was. Understanding the nervous system that produced my behavior was just as important as teaching me new ways to navigate the world.
For me, that is the fundamental limitation of the Constructional Approach. It represents a more humane application of behaviorism, but it does not move beyond behaviorism itself. It changes the intervention strategy while leaving the underlying scientific paradigm largely intact.
With all of that being said, reading behavior analysis never answered the question that has followed me since I was a child.
What was happening inside my brain while everyone else was focused on my behavior?
I was a nonspeaking autistic child. Long before I became an educator or studied neuroscience, I experienced the world through a nervous system that often felt overwhelmed by sounds, lights, unpredictability, and demands that other people couldn’t see. Adults saw behaviors. They saw silence, avoidance, distress, repetitive movement, and moments when I simply couldn’t do what was being asked of me.
I experienced something entirely different.
I wasn’t thinking about reinforcement schedules or behavioral contingencies. My body was trying to survive environments that my nervous system experienced very differently from the way the adults around me understood. My brain wasn’t choosing behavior. My brain was responding to sensory information, physiological stress, uncertainty, and cognitive overload in the only way it knew how.
Looking back as someone who now studies neuroscience, I realize that my childhood makes far more sense through the lens of biology than through the lens of behavior.
That realization changed everything.
One of the most significant differences between neuroscience and behavior analysis is where each field begins asking questions. Behavior analysis starts with observable behavior. It examines the relationship between antecedents, behaviors, and consequences to understand why behavior occurs. There is scientific value in observing behavior. Every discipline that works with humans pays attention to behavior because behavior communicates information.
But neuroscience asks what happened before the behavior became visible.
Before I covered my ears, millions of neurons had already fired. Before I refused a demand, my autonomic nervous system had already evaluated whether I felt safe enough to engage. Before I shut down, my sensory systems had already processed more information than my brain could comfortably organize. Before anyone observed my behavior, my brain had already spent seconds, minutes, or even hours attempting to regulate itself.
Behavior was simply the final product.
This distinction matters because behavior is not the cause of human functioning. It is the expression of human functioning.
Modern neuroscience increasingly understands behavior as an emergent property of interacting biological systems. Sensory processing, interoception, executive functioning, autonomic regulation, predictive processing, emotional networks, motor planning, and memory all interact continuously. None of these systems operate independently. They influence one another from moment to moment, shaping what eventually becomes observable behavior.
When I was overwhelmed as a child, my nervous system wasn’t making a behavioral decision.
It was adapting.
Research over the past several decades has fundamentally changed our understanding of the nervous system. We now know that chronic stress alters neural development. Trauma changes connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, influences hippocampal function, affects autonomic regulation, and reshapes the body’s physiological response to future stress. We know that sensory processing differences influence attention, learning, emotional regulation, and executive functioning. We know that interoception, the brain’s ability to interpret internal bodily signals, affects emotional awareness and self-regulation.
None of these discoveries were available when behaviorism first emerged.
That doesn’t make behavior analysis wrong.
It means neuroscience has expanded the conversation.
This is why I struggle when people tell me that modern ABA has solved these concerns through approaches like Goldiamond’s Constructional Approach. Constructional approaches certainly represent progress. Teaching skills is preferable to suppressing behavior. Building adaptive repertoires is more humane than focusing exclusively on reducing behaviors of concern.
But even the Constructional Approach continues to ask fundamentally behavioral questions.
How do we increase this behavior?
How do we strengthen this repertoire?
How do environmental contingencies shape future responding?
Those questions matter.
But they are different from the questions I believe matter most.
What is this child’s nervous system experiencing?
What sensory information is overwhelming them?
What physiological need has gone unmet?
How is chronic stress affecting executive functioning?
What developmental experiences shaped this response?
These questions do not reject behavior.
They simply recognize that behavior is downstream from the brain.
One of the most meaningful moments in my own journey happened when I stopped asking, “Why did I behave that way?” and started asking, “What was my nervous system trying to tell me?”
The answer wasn’t that I needed better reinforcement.
The answer was that I needed people who understood regulation before compliance.
As I became a teacher, I began seeing the same pattern in my students. The children who struggled the most were rarely choosing chaos. Their bodies were communicating something before their words ever could. Some were exhausted. Some were hungry. Some were carrying trauma into the classroom. Others were living with sensory systems that never seemed to stop receiving information. Their behavior looked remarkably different on the outside, but the common thread was almost always the nervous system.
The more neuroscience I studied, the less behavior alone seemed capable of explaining what I was seeing.
This is where lived experience becomes scientifically important.
Too often, lived experience is dismissed as anecdotal while quantitative data is treated as inherently superior. But every scientific discipline begins with observation. Researchers notice patterns before they test hypotheses. Physicians listen to patients before ordering laboratory tests. Psychologists conduct interviews before developing theories.
Autistic adults have been describing masking, sensory overload, burnout, chronic anxiety, shutdowns, and the long-term consequences of suppressing natural autistic behaviors for decades.
Neuroscience is increasingly validating many of those experiences.
That should make us pause.
It should make us wonder whether autistic lived experience has been identifying important neurological phenomena long before the research tools existed to measure them directly.
I don’t believe behavior analysis has nothing to contribute. It has contributed enormously to our understanding of learning. But learning science has changed. Brain imaging, developmental neuroscience, computational modeling, sensory science, and trauma research have expanded our understanding of human development beyond what behavior alone can explain.
Science grows by integrating new evidence, not defending old paradigms.
My criticism of behaviorism is ultimately a hopeful one. I don’t believe the future lies in becoming better at changing behavior. I believe the future lies in becoming better at understanding the nervous systems that produce behavior in the first place.
When I think about the little girl I used to be, the child who could not speak, whose body communicated long before her voice ever could, I don’t wonder how adults could have changed my behavior more effectively.
I wonder how different my life might have been if someone had looked past my behavior and asked a different question:
“What is her brain trying to tell us?”
Because behavior was never the whole story.
It never is.
