Sidney W. Bijou
Introduction
Sidney William Bijou (12 November 1908 – 11 June 2009) was an American developmental psychologist who did more than anyone to build a behaviour-analytic account of child development. Trained as a Hull–Spence learning theorist rather than as a Skinnerian, he was recruited to Indiana University by B. F. Skinner in 1946, went on to direct the Institute of Child Development at the University of Washington, and there assembled the group that produced the first systematic application of behaviour analysis to autism. He co-founded the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 1968 and spent a century-long life moving between universities, establishing training programmes wherever he went. His approach — encouraging desired behaviour through reinforcement, withdrawing attention from problem behaviour, using time-out rather than punishment — became the operating procedure of applied behaviour analysis.
Early Life and Education
Bijou was born in the Arlington neighbourhood of Baltimore to parents who had emigrated from France in 1901, and moved with his family to Brooklyn at the age of ten. He enrolled at Lehigh University on a football scholarship to study engineering, found neither football nor engineering to his liking, and transferred to the University of Florida, where he took a degree in business administration in 1933. Returning to New York, he married Janet Tobias and entered Columbia University's master's programme in psychology, completing the degree in 1937 with work on a nonverbal test of children's intelligence.
His first position was at the State Hospital and Mental Hygiene Clinic in Farmhurst, Delaware, where he and Joseph Jastak developed the Wide Range Achievement Test, a brief measure of reading, spelling, and arithmetic that remains in use in revised form today. In 1939 he applied to the doctoral programme at the University of Iowa intending to work with Kurt Lewin, only to find that Lewin was based at Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station; he took Lewin's courses but completed his PhD in 1941 under Kenneth Spence with research on experimental neurosis in rats. He emerged, in his own account, a Hull–Spence psychologist.
Academic and Professional Career
Bijou's next post was at the Wayne County Training School in Northville, Michigan, interrupted by service in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War, in which he eventually directed the Convalescent Branch for the Surgeon General. In 1946 Skinner recruited him to Indiana University as an assistant professor and director of clinical training, where he audited courses by Skinner and by the field-theoretic behaviourist J. R. Kantor. Offered the directorship of the University of Washington's Institute of Child Development in 1948, he moved to Seattle and spent the next seventeen years, until 1965, transforming it.
The transformation was as much a conversion as a relocation. Bijou found the Hull–Spence methods he had been trained in unreliable, and turned to direct operant research with children. With Donald Baer he built a theory of development out of Skinner's methods and Kantor's system, secured sustained National Institute of Mental Health funding, and assembled a group that included Montrose Wolf, Todd Risley, Jay Birnbrauer, and Hayden Mees. On a sabbatical at Harvard he surveyed programmes for children with intellectual disabilities, found them wanting, and returned determined to do better; with Birnbrauer he established a demonstration classroom at the Rainier State School studying programmed instruction and classroom management. By the mid-1960s he had made Washington the leading centre in the country for the study of child behaviour.
After Washington he moved to the University of Illinois, where he founded the Child Behavior Laboratory and a federally funded graduate training programme, then to the University of Arizona from 1975 to 1993 and the University of Nevada, Reno from 1993 to 2001, establishing comparable programmes at each. He died in Santa Barbara in 2009, a month short of his hundred-and-first birthday.
Major Contributions to Psychology
A Behavioural Theory of Development
Bijou and Baer proposed that development should be explained by changes in the contingencies acting on a child rather than by the unfolding of internal stages. Where stage theories posit qualitative reorganisations driven by maturation, their account treats developmental change as the cumulative product of reinforcement histories, with the child's interaction with the physical and social environment doing all the explanatory work. The theory set itself explicitly against mentalistic constructs and, later, against the cognitive theories that were displacing behaviourism across developmental psychology. Its positive programme was to show that the principles demonstrated in the operant laboratory could generate testable predictions about ordinary children in ordinary settings.
Operant Methods with Children
Bijou's group carried out pioneering basic operant research with children, and his applied work established a template: define the target behaviour, arrange consequences, measure continuously, and let the data decide. In practice this meant rewarding desired behaviour with praise, physical warmth, and small tangible reinforcers; withdrawing attention from problem behaviour; and separating a defiant child from a group activity — time-out — on the reasoning that removal from the reinforcing context is itself the consequence and that further sanctions add nothing. Time-out from positive reinforcement received its first documented human experimental use in his institute's work.
The First Behavioural Intervention in Autism
The case that made the approach famous involved a boy known in the literature as Dicky, referred to Wolf, Risley, and Mees because he would not wear the glasses he needed to avoid losing his sight. The team shaped glasses-wearing, reduced self-injury and tantrums, and went on to teach language and social skills; Dicky eventually graduated from high school and supported himself in the community. Published in 1964, the study was the first demonstration in the professional literature that intensive behavioural intervention could produce substantial, clinically significant outcomes for a child with severe disabilities, at a time when institutionalisation was the expected trajectory. Its influence radiated outward: Ole Ivar Lovaas and others adapted and extended the procedures at UCLA, producing what became the dominant early-intervention model for autism.
Institution Building
In 1968, with Baer, Risley, James Sherman, and Wolf, Bijou founded the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, giving the field a peer-reviewed venue whose premise — that experimental analysis and practical application belong in the same publication — remains unusual. Combined with the training programmes he built at four universities, this is arguably his most durable contribution: he created the infrastructure that let a set of techniques become a profession.
Major Publications
- Child Development: The Basic Stage of Early Childhood (1976), a statement of the behavioural account of the earliest developmental period.
- Behavior Analysis of Child Development (with Donald M. Baer; revised edition 1993), the fullest presentation of the theory he and Baer built.
- The Exceptional Child (1971), on conditioned learning and teaching with children who have intellectual disabilities.
- New Directions in Behavior Development (with Emilio Ribes, 1996) and Behavior Modification: Contributions to Education (with Emilio Ribes-Inesta), extending the framework into later work.
- "Application of operant conditioning procedures to the behaviour problems of an autistic child" (Wolf, Risley & Mees, 1964), the study conducted in Bijou's institute that launched applied behaviour analysis in autism.
Impact and Legacy
Bijou's students and their students carried behaviour analysis into special education, developmental disabilities services, and early intervention, and the procedures his group standardised — direct observation, single-subject designs, reinforcement-based teaching, time-out — are now ordinary practice. The Dicky case, and the demonstration classrooms that followed it, changed what families and clinicians believed was possible for children with autism.
The same case is also where the most serious criticism attaches. The intervention included extended periods of seclusion as a consequence for problem behaviour, and behaviour analysts themselves now single out that element as the part of the work that has aged worst. The goals were chosen by adults — wear your glasses, stop throwing them — and the stronger version of the objection, pressed by autistic self-advocates and by critics within psychology, is that the model treats compliance with adult-defined norms as the outcome to be produced, that it can reward masking, and that it measures success by whether behaviour becomes less troublesome to others rather than by whether the person's own life improves. Defenders reply that the alternative at the time was institutionalisation, that Dicky's life was demonstrably better by any standard, and that the field has since developed alternatives to punishment and seclusion — a progression the early work made possible rather than prevented.
The theoretical criticism is separate and, in academic terms, more decisive. Bijou and Baer's programme rejected stage theories, cognition, and biology as explanatory, and developmental psychology went in the opposite direction: the cognitive turn of the 1960s and 1970s, and later the integration of developmental neuroscience and attachment research, left behaviour-analytic developmental theory largely outside the mainstream. His framework is now cited more for its applied products than as a live account of how children change, and the generalisability of single-subject designs — the methodological core of the tradition he built — remains contested by researchers who regard randomised group designs as the stronger warrant for policy. Bijou himself had made the analogous judgement once before, abandoning the Hull–Spence methods he was trained in when he found they did not hold up, and that willingness to discard a framework is the part of his example his critics most often credit.
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References
- Bijou, S. W., & Baer, D. M. (1961). Child Development: A Systematic and Empirical Theory. Appleton-Century-Crofts.