Five natural scientists of behavior have contributed “short” (i.e., up to 40 page long) chapters to a book of autobiographies. This new book’s title is Less–Traveled Roads—Circumstances that Produced Natural Scientists of Behavior. Professor Thomas Critchfield, of Illinois State University in Normal, contributed the Foreword.

This book reports the circumstances that contributed to the repertoires, products, and outcomes of each author’s life. Such circumstances are really the contingencies (i.e., the functional relations between the mostly environmental independent–variable “causes” and the behavior dependent–variable “effects”) that led to the conditioning of the authors’ repertoires, and the products resulting from the repertoires, across each author’s lifespan. Thus these autobiographies stress the contingency—not agency—accounts for each author’s contributions in teaching, research, and service across their career. The five authors featured here are Stephen Ledoux, Michael Shuler, Lawrence Fraley, Zuilma Gabriela Sigurðardóttir, and Michael Clayton.

The value and drama of science also come across through these life stories, including the possibility of a new grammar, one that by design provides more support for science, especially natural behavior science. This support occurs by reducing reliance on the personal pronouns, especially “I.” In our culture such pronouns too easily imply inner agents purportedly responsible for behavior. These pronouns are best treated (i.e., reacted to) as verbal shortcuts for longer, inconvenient, but more accurate phrases like “DNA–based carbon–unit locus of contingency effects.” (Aren’t verbal shortcuts nice?)

Another volume of such autobiographies is possible. Are you a natural scientist of behavior (e.g., behavior analyst, behaviorologist, BCBA)? Are you interested in contributing? Contact these books’ editor, Stephen Ledoux, for details by writing him at 26 Timber Ridge Road, Los Alamos NM 87544.)

This 196–page, 2022 book (published by ABCs of Los Alamos, NM) is available, with a list price of $19, through “Print–On–Demand” at www.lulu.com (find it by entering the editor’s name).

The BOOKS page at www.behaviorology.org (the TIBI Website) features a detailed description of the book along with the book’s covers, Table of Contents, and Introduction (i.e., Chapter 1).

Whether interested in the science, its practitioners, its history, or all of these, check the book out. See the BOOKS page for details.