About the Author

After completing the usual four years of high school at St. Pius X Seminary (in Galt, CA) the author, Dr. Stephen Ledoux (pronounced “la–dew”) graduated in June, 1968, and then attended St. Patrick’s College seminary (in Mountain View, CA) for two years. He began his professional activities in the early 1970s when he taught behaviorology to high school sophomores and seniors at St. Pius X in spring, 1972.

Dr. Ledoux earned his BA and MA degrees, in 1972 and 1973 respectively, at California State University, Sacramento. At various times he has taught courses in behaviorology, education, English, and psychology, all (except English) at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. After several years of full–time university teaching, he returned to full–time study and earned his Ph.D. from Western Michigan University in 1982 in The Experimental Analysis of Behavior (TEAB). He says that, in part, the Ph.D. seemed necessary, because his California MA degree was signed by “Ronald Reagan” and “James Bond”…

Prof. Ledoux has accepted several full–time appointments both at home and abroad:

• For four years, 1975–1978, he taught in Australia, starting as a “Tutor” (a full–time graduate assistant/lecturer) at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.
• He then accepted a tenure–track appointment as a “Lecturer” (an assistant professor) at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education near Melbourne in Victoria, Australia.
• He also taught in China, first in 1979 (at Xi’an Jiaotong University where he was their first foreign English teacher).
• Then he again taught in China in 1990–1991 (at Xi’an Foreign Languages University) accompanying his spouse who was the actual faculty–exchange professor. 
• And in 1982 he began teaching at the Canton campus of the State University of New York (SUNY) from which, after 33 years, he retired with Emeritus status in 2015.

Over the last several decades, Dr. Ledoux prepared numerous publications and presentations, and remained involved in many other ways in professional work. For example, with colleague Dr. Carl Cheney, of Utah State University, Logan, he worked extensively in the early 1980s with the concept and function of the Aircrib (A.K.A. the “baby tender”), an invention of the late Prof. B. F. Skinner. Prof. Ledoux’s 1987 book with Prof. Cheney, Grandps Fred’s Baby Tender, Or Why and How We Built Our Aircribs, is a free download, with color photos, at www.behaviorology.org.

For several decades Dr. Ledoux has been very involved with the movement formally establishing the independence of the natural science of behaviorology (from the psychology work units where behaviorology’s natural scientists were not welcome by psychologists, who are not natural scientists):

• His activities included a three–year term (1988–1991) as the first elected president of The International Behaviorology Association.
• In 1997 he published two books, Origins and Components of Behaviorology (which went into its second edition in 2002 and its third edition in 2015).
• And, with his spouse, Dr. Nelly Case (a now retired professor of the Crane School of Music at SUNY–Potsdam) as the primary author, he published a book about the year they taught in China, with their then five–year–old son, entitled The Panda and Monkey King Christmas—A Family’s Year in China. Many books have followed these.

In 1998 Prof. Ledoux was elected Chair of the Board of Directors of The International Behaviorology Institute (TIBI) which is a non–profit (501–c–3) educational corporation that he helped establish to support behaviorologists by providing training in behaviorology and dissemination of behaviorology’s disciplinary literature.

• In 2001 he declined to continue as Chair so that he would have the time to accept and fulfill the appointment as the Editor of the TIBI journal, Behaviorology Today, which he edited through volume 14.
• He was also appointed as Editor of the TIBI website (behaviorology.org) which he still edits.

After also completing half a dozen study–question books for various textbooks, in 2005 Dr. Ledoux accepted the task of editing some books by Dr. Lawrence Fraley. He began with Prof. Fraley’s 1,600–page, three–course doctoral–level book, General Behaviorology: The Natural Science of Human Behavior. It was completed and published in late 2008.

• This was the first extensive and systematic book about the independent behaviorology discipline, and it provided inspiration for other books.
• These included Dr. Ledoux’s 2014 textbook, Running Out of Time—Introducing Behaviorology to Help Solve Global Problems.
• They also included Dr. Ledoux’s 2017 general–audience primer, What Causes Human Behavior—Stars, Selves, or Contingencies?
• Dr. Ledoux also edited two other books by Prof. Fraley, Dignified Dying—A Behaviorological Thanatology (2012) and Behaviorological Rehabilitation and the Criminal Justice System (2013). 

Also, in 2012 Prof. Ledoux updated B. F. Skinner’s 1963 article in Science, Behaviorism at Fifty, by publishing his article, Behaviorism at 100, in American Scientist. Two months later Behaviorology Today (now called Journal of Behaviorology) published Prof. Ledoux’s longer, peer–reviewed version of this article using the title, Behaviorism at 100 Unabridged.

Dr. Ledoux’s also wrote other books.

• One of these books is An Introduction to Verbal Behavior—Second Edition (published in 2014) which he wrote with first author Norman Peterson.
• Another of these books is Beautiful Sights and Sensations—Small Collections of Native American and Other Arts (published in 2016).
• More recently he published three more books, one of readings and two that each contained 72 newspaper columns plus some supporting papers.

You can find most of his books described on the BOOKS page. Also, he has arranged for most of his books to be offered for green “Print–On–Demand” sale at www.lulu.com.

Beyond teaching, writing, and research, Dr. Ledoux’s professional interests include:

• verbal behavior (especially as applied to language teaching),
• pedagogical effectiveness,
• and the experimental analysis of simultaneously evoked and simultaneously selected human behaviors.

Dr. Ledoux’s hobbies involve star gazing, meteorites, and arts from China, Japan, and Southwest Native Americans. He is also a photographer, having sold many photos to commercial interests. Some of his photos provide companion graphics for many of his newspaper columns in books and at this site, BehaviorInfo.com.

With his children grown, he retired to Los Alamos, NM, with his spouse.

The last of the six “column–supporting” papers—number “78”—in Prof. Ledoux’s first volume of newspaper columns (i.e., in the Explaining Mysteries of Living book) contains far more information about the contingencies operating in his life.