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 Ogden Richardson Lindsley (1922-2004)

Ogden R. Lindsley was born on August 11th, 1922 in Providence, Rhode Island. Ogden grew up in New England.

The War Years

For Lindsley, World War 2 would prove a defining experience on his way to becoming a scientist, psychologist, and educational leader. Not long after America became involved in the Second World War, Ogden joined the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) in 1942. He became a flight engineer-gunner, rising to Sergeant, on B-24 bombers in the 15th Air Force, 98th Bomb Group. Later in the war, while on one bombing run, to bomb the axis-controlled oil refineries at Ploesti, Ogden's plane was shot down. Lindsley recalls hearing his plane's captain shout "bail out!" and these would be the last words he would hear from that captain, or so he would know for many years.

Parachuting down into enemy territory, Ogden was captured and became a prisoner of war. He spent the final months of the war inside German POW camps, facing the vicissitudes of a disintegrating nazi empire. This included forced marches westward through one of Europe's coldest and worst winters on record, as the Soviet Red Army advanced along the collapsing Eastern Front. Finally, at one point, late in the war, Ogden managed to escape. The crucible of World War 2, however, would, on the one hand give Ogden the skills, knowledge, and outlook of an engineer, and on the other, provide a high standard for personal courage.

The Free Operant Research Years

Returning to the United States, and following an honorable discharge from the USAAF, Ogden attended Brown University. There, he received an A.B. degree, with highest honors, in Psychology in 1948. That same year he joined the American Psychology Association. Staying on at Brown, two years later he earned a Sc.M. in Experimental Psychology. In the early 1950's, however, Og would make a decision that would forever change the path of his career. By an odd confluence of circumstances, he ended up enrolling at Harvard University in its Ph.D. program in Psychology in 1951. Working as a Teaching Fellow, he helped teach a course titled Natural Science 114. This was B.F. Skinner's course, the lecture notes from which later became Skinner's highly influential book Science and Human Behavior, published in 1953. Skinner became Lindsley's doctoral advisor. Ogden received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1957.

As a student of Skinner's, Lindsley encountered the free operant, and saw the power of free operant conditioning and rate of response. Within a couple of years Ogden took operant conditioning to the applied world for the analysis of human behavior. In 1953 Lindsley established the first human operant laboratory at Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts. There, he analyzed experimentally the behaviors of persons diagnosed with schizophrenia. This research confirmed the power of rate of response as the most sensitive, and powerful, measure of behavior. Also, during his tenure at "Met State" Lindsley coined the term "Behavior Therapy," the first person to do so (as Og notes, this can be verified from an entry of the same name in the Boston telephone directory of that year).

From 1953 until 1965, Lindsley accepted a series of appointments with Harvard Medical School. During that time he occupied himself with writing research grants and contracts to fund the "Behavioral Research Laboratory." When not seeking funding, he would run experiments on free operant conditioning. One series of experiments concerned "conjugate schedules of reinforcement." In these schedules, the intensity of a continuously available reinforcing stimulus depends on the rate of response. Unlike other schedules that imposed either a response ratio requirement, or a response interval requirement, these schedules were "freer" - they depended on the person's rate of response. Moreover, instead of producing a discrete reinforcer, responding increased the amplitude of one that was always present. This research held enormous implications for understanding preference, as well as even finding out what sorts of stimuli are reinforcing for individuals. Lindsley published a series of articles on conjugate schedules, dispersing these articles in what he called "field publications." For instance, one prominent article appeared in 1962 in the Journal of Advertising Research, with a clear demonstration of the reinforcing power of both television programs and the commericals, all behavior captured on cumulative response recorders. Alas, despite these many "field publications," the field of behavior analysis has yet to pursue further investigation of conjugate schedules and their continuous variables.

In 1957 Og helped establish the new Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, also known by its initials, JEAB. A founding member of the new Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, he served on JEAB's editorial board from 1957 to 1967. Lindsley and other behaviorists developed this journal precisely because behavioral research, in the tradition established by Skinner - single subject research designs using cumulative response recorders and rate of response in study of operant behavior - were not getting published in mainstream Psychology journals.

In 1964 Lindsley published a paper titled "Direct Measurement and Prosthesis of Retarded Behavior" in the Journal of Education. According to many, this paper marked the beginning of what would be called Precision Teaching.

However, in between helping to found JEAB, conducting research on conjugate schedules and other problems in operant behavior, Lindsley spent much time writing grants. He came to the conclusion that grant-writing detracted from his scientific research, and by 1965 decided to change his research focus from the human operant lab to applied educational research.

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