Matthew Israel Interviewed by Jennifer Gonnerman

JG: Where were the houses?

MI: One was in South End in Boston, one was in Arlington.

JG: And they just flopped?

MI: Well, they had all the problems of a marriage without the satisfactions people have in marriage. All the problems of living together.

JG: How many people were in them?

MI: The first had six or seven people; the second had five. The first had a three-year-old girl who had these terrible behaviors. Screaming. She was very spoiled. Her mother was a Freudian. She was an unwed mother, but she gave me the chance to do training with her child.

JG: What did that entail?

MI: Well, the first thing was that she had to stop this; she was very wild and screaming. I had started a group called the Association of Social Design—people who wanted to work toward building a behavioral community—and at a party she would walk around with a toy broom and whack people over the head.

JG: This was the Association of Social Design?

MI: Yeah, we'd have a meeting once every eight days, invite people, try to get people interested in a utopian community; that was when behavioral modification was beginning to. . .the first journals were in the '60s, and I remember at one point she would be screaming and I would retreat to my own room, and she'd be trying to pull away and get into my room, and I'd have to hold the door on one side to keep her from disturbing me while I tried to talk to someone.

When she was screaming one day, I asked her mother if I could try a few behavioral procedures, and her mother said, "Okay." I would reward her when she was quiet and not screaming, but that alone didn't seem to work sufficient. One day I found myself alone in the house with her and she started to barge into my room when I was trying to work or something, and maybe she was screaming or whatever; I found myself putting her in her room and saying, "There's no screaming. Time-out for you." Time-out was a procedure that was being used in a lot of papers and literature. The idea was that you took away the opportunity for reward—it was time-out from reinforcement.

And she kept screaming, and that was annoying. And now she's trying to come out of the room and I'm a 40-year-old, in my late 30s, holding the door on one side and this little 3-year-old is on the other side, and I thought, "This is ridiculous." I went into her room. I gave her a snap on her cheek, and said, "There's no screaming when you're in time-out."

JG: What is this, like a. . .

MI: A punishment. It's a snap on the cheek with the finger; it was either a snap or a slap, I'm not sure which. And I went outside again and I would measure how long she was quiet. And I noticed: I did this a couple of times, and she would stop her crying. And I would take walks with her—that was a source of a lot of reward—and it got to the point where she was so well-mannered that if I sat across the table from her and she started to do something inappropriate, I could just shake my head at her like this, and she would…Instead of being an annoyance, she became a charming addition, a charming individual to the house.

And I'd teach her how to play by herself. I'd say, "If you can play by yourself for a while"—I'd set a timer—and I'd say, "If you can play by yourself for two minutes, we'll do something fun." It was the same basic behavioral techniques. It was general property. It wasn't something I invented; it was obvious principles. So that was kind of an eye-opener to see how effective this was. Skinner's work was mostly with pigeons and rats, and he speculated that the same basic principles would work with human organisms as well. And only in the '60s, '70s, and '80s did people start to actually do research with humans, at first with psychotic and retarded people, then with more normal, unimpaired individuals.

JG: What was this little girl's name?

MI: Andrea.

JG: And what ever happened to Andrea?

MI: I don't know. I would like to know.

JG: So she was in some ways your first pupil. I don't know if pupil's the word.

MI: Yes, that's right, and there was a couple that joined the house that summer, largely because they found her so
charming. She could be a sweet, charming little girl.

JG: How often would you have to slap her on the face?

MI: It was just a couple times. I think I didn't use a slap. If I used it the first time, then I went to just a cheek snap. I would give her instructions to just follow directions. I'd say, "Andrea, we're going to learn to follow directions." I'd give her directions that weren't necessarily meaningful things. I'd say, "Touch the doorknob, please." If she did, I'd pick her up and reward her extravagantly. If she refused, I might give her a snap on the cheek.

Skinner had not really been a proponent of punishment. His Walden Two was a world where reward was used so skillfully that you didn't need to ever punish. And he said of punishment that it works temporarily but in the long run it has—he related a lot of the problems people had to punishment early in life. That was the theme of the Freudian approach also.

Anyway, to skip forward a little bit, in the late '60s I decided perhaps—these two communal houses were in '67 and '68—and I decided maybe a better way was to start a school, because a school will provide jobs for the members of the community. And that's how I got into starting a school.

Once the school got started—it started in the homes of two students in Providence, Rhode Island—once the school got started, I think the first couple of employees…I insisted they had to be people interested in Walden Two.

JG: The first couple employees?

MI: Yeah. And then I found that I didn't want to compromise the quality of the school by making that requirement. And I also found as the next three or four years went by that I was getting such satisfaction out of running the school that the potential satisfactions of the utopian community were less important to me. I was sort of getting satisfaction out of real life, for the first time really, so the dream of the utopian community kind of faded away and I worked on developing the school. But little elements of the school, in some respects, still has similar elements of Walden Two.

JG: Were there any elements in particular?

MI: Well, Walden Two had a…there was a woman described—there are a lot of elements, really, if I think about it—there was a woman who went around the community with a clipboard just asking the members—there's only 1,000 people in the community, and she would ask people if they're satisfied with things and if they had any problems. 'Cause the idea of the government community is that you wanted to have a community where people are getting their needs met, things are working smoothly.

We have a discussion board for our staff—it's online—which does the same thing. In fact, the practicing employees are required to make some entries.

JG: So you don't need someone with a clipboard anymore?

MI: Yeah, we don't need the clipboard. Another example would be, yesterday we talked about the "programmed opportunities." In Walden Two, he described some training and self-management, with little children, and one example of the training would be they would have to sit in front of bowls of hot, steaming cereal when they were hungry and not eat it. Or there was another where they would hang lollipops around their neck and coat them with white sugar so if they lick them they could tell. These were essentially little programmed opportunities that were hopefully intended to build resistance, tolerance to frustration, ability to defer gratification for a period of time.