Before “evidence-based practice” became a professional mantra, it was a survival strategy for a field that needed proof it was scientific. In behavior analysis, that proof took the shape of the functional analysis—an experiment so tightly designed it could be run anywhere, even in a classroom. Many BCBA-D doctoral dissertations show how a method built for clinical control began masquerading as pedagogy.
The phrase gold standard sounds empirical, but it’s really ceremonial. It doesn’t describe accuracy; it describes belonging. To call the functional analysis a gold standard is to claim that all valid knowledge must pass through its procedures. The classroom becomes an annex of the laboratory. Toys, worksheets, and interactions are rearranged into variables; children into data points. The success of the assessment is measured by its ability to produce control, not comprehension. The adult’s authority is preserved through the appearance of neutrality: the clipboard, the stopwatch, the quiet tally of compliance. What looks like science doubles as governance.
The gold standard, then, is not a test of truth but a ritual of continuity. Each replication, each correlation, renews the field’s authority by proving that its tools still yield predictable order. The classroom’s disorder—its noise, emotion, and surprise—is what gives the method something to correct. Without disruption, there would be nothing left to measure.
Misbehaviorism reads that repetition as a kind of institutional heartbeat. It doesn’t ask whether the behavior plan “worked,” but what working means when the outcome is obedience. In this view, the real function of the functional analysis is not to explain behavior but to reproduce belief: that human unpredictability can always be charted, timed, and brought back under control.
And that is how the gold standard became the mirror in which a science recognizes itself.
Misbehaviorism .com 