The forgotten journal that beat JABA

It’s difficult to pin down the beginning of behaviorism, because the recorded history of people is concerned with their own (and perhaps more importantly, other people’s) behavior. It makes sense to start with Skinner, who was publishing about operant behavior (incidentally a phrase he coined) as early as 1938, and who is undoubtedly the father of “radical behaviorism”. Further back in time, John Watson could be posited as the father of behaviorism, considering he was staking that claim in 1913 (or…perhaps Dewey, or Titchener, or Thorndike). But work with human subjects was not typical, and some regard the first American human operant research as Fuller, 1949. Not surprisingly, this predates the publication of JEAB in 1958 and the publication of JABA in 1968 – a journal has to have a base of literature to publish, after all.

It’s well understood that Skinner drew on the work of Darwin and Pavlov in developing his own theories. When Fuller published his experiment, his only citations were Russian, reflecting the obvious Pavlovian influence over the nascent field. Cited in turn by Fuller was a fascinating figure in this case, Gregory Razran, a Russian-American émigré who was able to carefully report on the apparently wide-ranging Russian translational lab work on human subjects in the 1930s (with the earliest recorded human conditioning experiments taking place around 1907, though Razran criticizes both the methods and the data collection). In a summary of Razran’s reporting, Fleming (1933) writes:

Razran reported the work of 4 labs, suggesting that this type of work received official support from Russia. We can assume state-sanctioned support, because a progenitor of Razran named Emmanuil Enchmen, whose 1913 treatise on behaviorism bears some similarity to Watson’s work, had his ideas officially suppressed due to their political implications. Despite directly inspiring behaviorism, Russia sabotaged the domestic version. Indeed it is nearly impossible in 2024 to find Enchmen’s work, in any form, beyond second hand reports. Instead, in an obvious but retrospectively hilarious case of hero worship, 2 of the 4 Soviet labs were mostly focused on conditioning of human salivary response.

While there were fits and starts, the publication of the two major English-language journals, JEAB and JABA, are firmly established as landmarks. But JABA was late to the party. 

“Devoted to applications of behavior analysis” – the concept of the elevator pitch, the 1-2 sentence summary, is captured here. It uses the fewest words possible and still conveys meaning. Compare this to the first issue of JABA a mere 6 years later:

Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Just take out a bunch of words:

The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis is primarily for the original publication of reports of experimental research involving applications of the analysis of behavior to problems of social importance.

The description of JABA could be improved, sure. But in a strange bit of irony, here is the title of that ground-breaking 1962 journal:

Not “mathematics,” but mathetics, a casualty of autocorrect and spellcheck (in fact, the host URL reads “mathematics”). In an inversion of JABA, the tagline is superior but the title is unwieldy. The word mathetics is an invention of an obscure 16th century philosopher and adopted wholeheartedly by journal creator and brilliant OBM figure Tom Gilbert. Gilbert used the term mathetics to refer to his personal brand of learning instruction, but also a journal which included his articles on mathetics but was not strictly for articles about mathetics (??). The first two issues of The Journal of Mathetics are available online. In the first issue, there are 4 articles, with a 5th delayed. That 5th article did, in fact, appear in the next issue as promised, but accompanied only by a second article from Gilbert regarding mathetics. And those two issues appear to have ended the run of The Journal of Mathetics. 

Was the journal simply launched too early; did it fold from a lack of publishable material? Was the name confusing? Well, considering that Gilbert repurposed an obscure term and had a specific (though difficult to understand) definition, I lean toward the second possibility. If you were aware of mathetics – that is, Tom Gilbert’s system of curriculum design, etc. – you would have to assume that the journal was focused solely on mathetics; if you were not aware of mathetics, you would have to assume that the journal was about some foreign topic beyond your expertise. Would you submit your behavior-analytic manuscript to The Journal of Quopt?

Still, the journal itself was ahead of its time. Gilbert, in the first issue editorial, stakes 3 main positions for the future of the journal: 

Point 1 and 3 are rather uncontroversial for the time; in JABA these points are reflected in Baer, Wolf, and Risley’s 7 dimensions. Study of individuals, as well as control over their behavior (as opposed to description or prediction), were established from the outset. But “complete freedom”? Gilbert continues:

There is a progressive tone that is appealing to an absence of coercion, and a recognition that behavior is a function of its environment. The articles in the 1st issue of JABA certainly reflect that philosophy implicitly, with each article featuring some manipulation of the environment. Perhaps at this point there was an assumption that this would always be the case, being so foundational to the work of Skinner. But looking forward from 1962, with the rise of behavior modification, it’s easy to conclude that the most damaging detours in the science are those that rely on coercion and fail to center the environment as the locus of human behavior.

Ultimately, what can we make of The Journal of Mathetics? The fact that it was first in a narrow category makes it a piece of trivia, but it’s not like anyone is winning Jeopardy! with it. Mathetics itself, outlined in the first two issues, is a fascinating topic to arise out of the instructional design-crazy 60s. It’s an effective, interesting way to approach instruction. Information on it is somewhat rare, though there are some contemporary examples. 

It was not widely adopted, or wildly successful by almost any measure, and the original source material is not extensive. Looking back at some of the sources cited in this article, it’s easy to see how valuable information can evaporate.