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Concept
Sidney W. Bijou
Summary
Sidney William Bijou (November 12, 1908 – June 11, 2009) was an American developmental psychologist who developed an approach of treating childhood disorders using behavioral therapy, in which positive actions were rewarded and negative behaviors were largely ignored, rather than punished.
Bijou was born in the Arlington neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. He moved to Brooklyn, New York with his family when he was 10 years old. He earned a degree in business administration at the University of Florida in 1933. He was awarded a master's degree in psychology at Columbia University in 1937 and earned his Ph.D. in the field at the University of Iowa in 1941. Together with Joseph Jastak, he developed the Wide Range Achievement Test, a comprehensive assessment of an individual's ability in reading, comprehension, spelling, and mathematics. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces.
He was hired by Indiana University in 1946, where he spent two years under pioneering behaviorist B. F. Skinner. While other child psychologists had focused on the use of techniques such as play therapy to identify the motives and causes of problematic behavior, Bijou used Skinner's behavioral techniques to encourage positive behaviors through such rewards as praise, hugs and pieces of candy. Children who were defiant would be given a time-out and separated from a group activity, with the expectation that the bad behavior would be its own punishment, and that any additional sanctions would not have a positive effect. A child isolated from a group would strive to behave appropriately in order to have the opportunity to rejoin the group.
He relocated to the University of Washington in 1948, where he applied Skinner's techniques on children at the Institute of Child Development, and wrote several textbooks in the field together with Donald Baer. Studies he performed there showed that encouragement of good behavior would elicit more good behavior even from unruly children.
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