Someone contacted me to ask about reposting "Autism is Not Behavioral" on their blog.

I went to the blog.

Top post was in praise of planned ignoring in an ABA context.

I said no.

Being ignored is a hard experience for humans. You register the experience in the same part of the brain as physical pain, and experiments with a 3-player computer game of "catch" show that even being briefly ignored by someone who doesn't matter to you has consequences.

In fact, though I haven't tried it, some reports suggest that the pain of ostracism is so like physical pain that Tylenol can soothe it.

The first stage of the ostracism process is the act of ignoring.

The second stage of the ostracism process often includes major efforts to win back attention.

The third stage involves giving up, becoming less social and more aggressive.

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2011/110510WilliamsOstracism.html

A campaign of planned ignoring, or "the silent treatment," in non-behaviorist contexts, is generally recognised as a form of abuse.

Behaviorists tend to treat it as the default state, with attention being "earned" by "desirable" acts. But ignoring inflicts pain.

As with other "reinforcers," attention as a reward only works if you restrict access to it. That's why programs have historically asked parents to take things away from children that they love -- so the children will be motivated to do things they don't want to do, to get them.

But attention, like food, is a fundamental human need.

And there is a reason that food deprivation is considered a powerful aversive, even though food deprivation programs are supposed to offer enough calories to survive for "free."

And ignoring, like physical violence, is painful.

There is a reason why inflicting pain is considered a powerful aversive.

You remember stage 2 of the ostracism process is trying to get attention? That is what ABA people call an "extinction burst." Stage 3 is "extinction." You stop trying.

The weak evidence base for ABA does include that planned ignoring works: it results in extinction.

But all those consequences of the ostracism process that psychologists have demonstrated? ABA people don't collect data on that. Feeling rejected, absorbing the message that you don't matter and aren't loved, reduced self-esteem ... all those things are "mentalistic."

In ABA, mentalistic phenomena don't matter. Only behavior matters. Did the person stop doing whatever? Okay, success.

Even behaviors that are correlated with ostracism, like withdrawal, aggression, and suicide, they don't get measured so they don't count as failure.

For one thing, they don't necessarily occur right away. If they do, they are classed as part of the extinction burst. For another, they are attributed to autism or whatever the underlying disability is ... to an inherent defect in the person. For a third, nobody looks for them.

And then there is the fact that the targets of ABA, mostly kids, mostly autistic or with other intellectual and developmental disabilities, are dehumanized to an overwhelming degree. Most people would no longer say what ABA-er Ivar Lovaas said ...

"[Y]ou start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a child in the physical sense -- they have hair, a nose and a mouth -- but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is ...

... to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person."

But when we talk of there being only four functions of behavior and claim autistics do not feel pain like others, even when we talk of over/underreaction instead...

...of just saying that autistics perceive things differently, when we constantly define autistics in terms of how they are not like typical people, we set up a standard of neurotypical humanity and position neurodivergent autistics as not really human.

And if a group of people aren't really human, don't have thoughts and feelings and perceptions and positions and *reasons* like everyone else, then we can do things to them that wouldn't be okay with anyone else.

Kids and people with I/DD pose exceptions to the usual rules.

Now, of course all of us get ignored all the time. The shop assistant is talking to another customer, our friend is reading and doesn't want to be disturbed, etc. We cope.

What's different with planned ignoring in ABA is that it is a system of denying access to a human need and inflicting pain that is adopted by most or all of the people the person has strong relationships with, in an attempt to control them.

That's abuse.

You can normalize it for mommy and daddy all you like, call it a science and pretend that means it is morally neutral (science can be horrifically abusive plus the standard of evidence in ABA is sub-scientific), use technical terms like "extinction" rather than "hopelessness" ...

... call it a "therapy" and bill their insurance. Whatever.

It's still abuse. But if the parents are well-enough groomed to accept it -- and most are -- it can be done right under their noses.

So no, if you are pushing planned ignoring, I am not giving you permission to use my work.

Thanks for listening.