Every morning, 7-year-old Georgia started her school day the same way: by sitting in her chair. Not just any chair — the same one, in the same spot, every day. If another student sat there, Georgia’s entire routine would unravel. Tears, yelling, and frustration would follow. For many autistic children like Georgia, rituals like this aren’t just habits. They’re part of how the world feels stable and predictable. To a behaviorist, that common understanding of autistic stereotypes are inconceivable, because it would ask them to think about the “but why” behind something they first identified as a “problem behavior”.

In her 2019 dissertation at the University of South Florida, Jennifer R. Weyman set out to answer a practical and compassionate question:

“Why do some autistic children become distressed when their rituals are interrupted, and how can we help them respond in calmer, more flexible ways?”

Five Children, Five Rituals

Weyman’s participants were five autistic children, each with their own unique rituals and personalities:

• Matthew, age 6, loved arranging number cards in perfect order.
• Georgia, age 7, insisted on sitting in the same chair every day.
• Rosemary, age 12, needed her classroom calendar to be perfectly straight.
• Sheldon, age 7, didn’t want anyone to lean against chairs or couches.
• Jasper, age 13, made sure the microwave always displayed the clock, not a timer.

Each child’s caregiver reported that when these rituals were interrupted, their child would exhibit crying, yelling, or aggression. Matthew’s meticulous ordering of number cards was documented as a “ritual behavior.” Georgia’s attachment to her specific chair was recorded as “seat-related rigidity,” as if her consistency was a failure of adaptation rather than a strategy for coping with the unpredictable social world of a classroom. Rosemary’s care in aligning the calendar, Sheldon’s concern over the way others sat, and Jasper’s attention to the microwave clock were all described as behaviors that required modification. A carpenter who has only a hammer available will naturally approach every task as if it were a nail, applying the same tool regardless of whether it fits the problem at hand.

As a behaviorist, she set out to devise an experiment to control the subjects to abide by her rules of conduct. Her experimental design implicitly placed the burden of adaptation on the autistic child, asking them to become more flexible to adult-imposed disruptions—an ethically troubling expectation given their developmental profiles. Her dissertation research, titled, “An Application of the Trial-Based Functional Analysis to Assess Problem Behavior Evoked by Ritual Interruption,” was just about measuring behavior. It was never about understanding what drives those reactions and finding ways to make everyday life easier for autistic children and their caregivers, which is a standard upheld in doctoral level social science work.

Finding the Function

Each child’s ritual became an operational template, a behavioral anchor that was transformed into a data point. Within the research protocol, they became triggers to be manipulated and measured. For Sheldon, the experimenter sat with their back against the couch. For Jasper, the experimenter removed something from the microwave and left a few seconds on the visual display. In the behavior-analytic vocabulary that guided Weyman’s experiment, the act of crying, shouting, or resisting interruption was a behavioral output to be analyzed in relation to its environmental consequences. 

If the child screamed when the ritual was disrupted and quieted only after being allowed to resume it, the “function” of the screaming was defined as “access to ritual.” To Weyman, the scream “functions” as a means to gain their ritual back. To a psychologist, a scream is a stress response and a cry for help. The behaviorist’s interpretation treated the crying as a learned mechanism for producing reinforcement, not an expression of fear, sensory overload, or loss of stability.

The research purpose was to measure whether these behaviors could be shaped, reduced, or redirected through reinforcement schedules. In practice, this meant that each child’s peace was deliberately disturbed in order to observe how long distress would persist and under what conditions it would subside. The experiment tested endurance and adaptation: would the child continue to cry indefinitely, or would the child modify that cry into a form that earned the return of the ritual? You’ll get it back if you stop crying after I interrupt your routine. Let’s make autistic children earn their ritual. Work for it.

The intervention was designed to change the function, not to interpret the meaning. The child was taught to replace distressful crying with a prescribed phrase or gesture, termed a “functional communication response.” 

For example:

• Matthew learned to say, “My way, please.”
• Georgia learned to say, “I want to sit there.”
• Rosemary learned to say, “I want to fix it.”
• Sheldon (who is nonspeaking) handed a picture card to request that someone stop leaning back.

Each child was “praised” and “allowed” to return to their ritual when they asked “calmly”. Over time, they learned that appeasing the adult-shaped interventionist would restore calm to their environment, much like an addict who agrees to go to rehab when their family gathers to confront them. In behavioral terms, success of the experiment occurred when the same environmental outcome, the ritual, could be accessed through the approved behavior rather than through crying. However, the child was not in distress when engaging in their ritual. The only thing that upset their status quo was the deliberate disruption of their routines.   

Reader Disclaimer:

If you’re reading this and begin to feel distressed, please pause and remove yourself from further reading. Studies like the one described below can be emotionally challenging to engage with, especially for autistic readers or those with lived experience of behavioral interventions. While it is important to examine these topics critically, it’s equally important to care for your well-being. Step away from the stimulus until your distress response subsides, and return only when you feel grounded and ready.

Moving The Goalposts: Hit Me Baby One More Time

Once Matthew had learned to use his trained communication phrase during the red-card intervals, the researcher began testing whether the same conditioned compliance would appear when a different ritual was disrupted. This time, the target was Matthew’s quiet enjoyment of removing the purple balls from the ball pit. Matthew’s activity harmed no one but was nonetheless labeled a “problem behavior.” The ball pit ritual had not been part of the original baseline or training; it was introduced later as a new setting for control. Within the logic of the experiment, the next step was clear: having demonstrated how to manage Matthew’s reactions in one ritual, the researcher sought to verify that the same method could regulate him in others. Here the behaviorist evaluates her own intervention to fulfill the “evidence base” that ABA practitioners depend on to define as their “gold standard”.

The next phase was the schedule-thinning phase, described as “scheduled flexibility testing.” After Matthew and the other children had mastered the replacement phrase for their ritual (“I want to fix it,” “My way, please,” etc.), the researcher began to stretch the time between the request and the reward. The children’s rituals were placed under a “multiple schedule”. Meaning, the researcher signaled when a request would be reinforced (🟢 Green card: “You can ask now”) and when it would not (🔴 Red card: “You have to wait.”). Over time, the red-card intervals grew longer. Within the logic of applied behavior analysis, this is described as teaching delay tolerance or scheduled flexibility—evidence that a behavior has come under discriminative control and that “problem behavior” has been reduced. 

According to the experimenter, the children learned to tolerate delays without distress while still trusting that their needs would eventually be met. To a psychologist, this is evidence that these children learned to hide how they feel, to maintain their needs and wants. The only choice they have under such a controlled situation is to comply, exacerbating their stress. The kids knew that if they didn’t do exactly what they adults wanted, things would get seriously more dysregulated, and so they had no choice but to comply. From an ethical or phenomenological standpoint, however, the situation resembles what you call a “prisoner’s conundrum.” The child is inside a closed system with only two permitted responses:

1. Comply and wait. Doing so produces praise and the eventual return of the ritual.
   Externally this is coded as “success.” Internally it may require the child to suppress mounting anxiety in order to earn the predictable outcome.
2. Resist or protest. Crying, self-stimulation, or attempts to reclaim the ritual are recorded as “problem behavior.”
   These acts prolong the red-card period or delay reinforcement, increasing stress rather than relieving it.

Conceptually, this situation parallels what sociologists describe as a “prisoner’s dilemma”: a closed contingency structure in which compliance is the only path to relief. The prisoner is already confined, so why should they behave? When offered a plea deal to get out of jail if they testify against their partner, each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare, motivated to minimize his own prison sentence. Within this contingency structure there is no third path: the child cannot negotiate, redefine the rules, or withdraw consent. Prisoners are a federally protected population and ethics committees in universities are not allowed to approve conducting research on them. Prisoners’ behaviors cannot be coded psychometrically as they are largely driven by self preservation metrics. 

In this experiment, the environment is arranged so that compliance is the only behavior that leads back to stability. All humans express distress to indicate a need for self preservation, when they have no other mechanism to access stability. Conventional parenting holds that a screaming infant should be fed, but behaviorists insist that the only allowable is for a parent to stop reinforcing the crying by withholding food.  Here in Weyman’s experiment, the variable that changes is not the adult’s responsiveness but the length of time the child must endure uncertainty. “Flexibility” therefore becomes a measure of how effectively the system can train compliance in the presence of frustration, not of how the child can safely regulate emotions. 

When Weyman reported that “children learned to tolerate delays without distress,” the data showed a decrease in visible protest, not necessarily a reduction in internal strain. The learning process, from this perspective, replaces authentic communication of need with controlled performance. The “scheduled flexibility” phase functions as a closed behavioral economy. The child’s only meaningful decision is whether to endure discomfort quietly or to express it and prolong the waiting period. The experiment treats reduced expression as evidence of calm, although it may represent exhaustion or resignation. All this was approved for experimentation by John Andrew Schinka, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who completed his training in 1974, and is serving as professor in the School of Aging Studies at the College of Behavioral and Community Sciences, at the University of South Florida. 

Inhumane Research with Human Subjects

Jennifer Weyman tested what she can measure in behaviors after long and drawn out exposure to interruptions. Children like Georgia will have to keep changing seats until Jennifer scores enough data for her research. The University of South Florida Institutional Review Board (IRB), approved Weyman’s protocol as “research not involving greater than minimal risk” and exempted the study from obtaining assent from children “due to the age, maturity and/or psychological state of the child.” The IRB materials associated with the protocol do not include the word autism or otherwise describe the participant cohort as developmentally disabled. (You can see the IRB approval in the appendix of her dissertation, embedded below this article page).

In the dissertation itself, however, autism appears immediately. In the opening sentence, Weyman defines autism according to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria from the DSM. The DSM is a handbook for clinicians that describes all the symptoms that must be identified to accurately diagnose a mental disorder. At this point in the document, no explanation is provided for how autism relates to the approved research protocol or why it is introduced at the outset.

The introduction then turns to restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs). Without first defining the construct, RRBs are categorized into higher-order and lower-order subtypes, drawing on earlier literature. Behaviorists often cite Turner (1999), Szatmari et al. (2006), and Boyd et al. (2012) to support the idea that repetitive behaviors in autism are not all the same, but fall into two broad patterns. One pattern involves repetitive movements or sensory actions, such as hand-flapping or object manipulation. The other includes routines, insistence on sameness, and intense interests. 

This distinction originates from developmental and psychological research, where such behaviors were historically understood as meaningful features of autism, linked to cognition, anxiety, and development. Later, behavior-analytic research adopted these same categories primarily as organizational tools for intervention studies—using them to classify behaviors rather than to interpret their significance for the individual. This marked a critical turning point in the psychological sciences, representing a divergence from earlier conceptions of meaning within autism research. It is important to recognize this red flag as it continues to manifest in contemporary behavior-analytic research and applications.

Autism is reframed in relation to “problem behavior,” establishing the context in which the intervention protocol is introduced. This reframing occurs early in the document, prior to any discussion of alternative ways autistic behaviors might be understood or contextualized. Weyman defines the functional behavior assessment tool used in the study, by stating that “individuals with ASD are more likely to engage in problem behavior than those who are not diagnosed with ASD.” The text moves from describing diagnostic features of autism to categorizing certain behaviors as problematic, followed by prevalence estimates indicating that at least “25% of individuals with ASD engage in self-injurious behavior and aggression.”

In clinical and psychiatric literature, these behaviors are more often examined as indicators of stress responses, including those associated with trauma. It is imperative that behavior analysts’ research be examined from the perspective of social science research, to evaluate whether mental health concerns are being assigned a “problem behavior” associated with autism. Across these sections, clinical characteristics are introduced, reclassified as problem behaviors, and positioned as necessary targets for intervention. The intervention framework is presented after the behaviors it addresses have already been defined in this way, establishing the context in which the protocol is applied. 

Behaviorist Jennifer Weyman conducted a study of how to evaluate the stress response, and then use that data to retrain children who had their rituals and favorite activities interrupted. Weyman never did fulfill the research claims made to her IRB, where she claims to “assess problem behavior” outside of behaviorism’s own metrics. She sets out to evaluate the fidelity of her tools, as a noble endeavor to inform educators on how they too can best modify these problem behaviors in the classroom, when the ABA therapist is not available. 

What the IRB ethics review could not anticipate is the approval of an experiment individualized to the autistic person’s stress response to invasions in their personal functional space. They claim to be offering a coping mechanism toward ‘normal’ behavior, but are doing so by targeted excision of what the response is stemming from. Weyman leaps from defining autism, to calling their attributes a problem, to linking it to mental health behaviors. This emboldens her to conduct the experiment designed to elicit a stress response in order to evaluate if it can be modified, suppressed, and measured in how they change, decrease, or become extinguished entirely. That in turn is applied in “therapy” settings as a gold-standard “treatment” for autism. 

IRBs reviewing Applied Behavior Analysis research must insist on accurate cohort descriptions, trauma‑informed risk assessment, and meaningful assent protections for autistic children. Protocols that target autistic participants cannot be labeled as generic “minimal risk” school studies, and any design that systematically provokes distress through repeated interruptions or invasions of personal space should be presumed greater than minimal risk, with clear operational definitions of assent and dissent and binding stopping rules when a child shows sustained distress.

Conceptual slippage from “autistic traits” to “problem behavior” must be explicitly interrogated, with IRBs requiring investigators to distinguish diagnostic features, stress responses, and mental‑health indicators instead of collapsing them into one behavior‑reduction target. When a study’s stated purpose is to elicit and then shape or extinguish distress responses, reviewers should demand strong scientific justification, scrutiny of long‑term psychosocial harms, explicit rejection of less intrusive alternatives, and evidence of autistic stakeholder input before approving protocols that may later be exported into “treatment” settings as a gold‑standard intervention.

Current ethics review standards often treat professional licensure, clinical credentials, and prior ethics training as sufficient evidence that a researcher understands and will uphold ethical norms, so review boards presume competence instead of independently validating it. As a result, oversight tends to focus on paperwork compliance and category labels like “minimal risk,” while the researcher’s own treatment framework and value system quietly become the operative ethical standard. 

Any IRB application from a behaviorist seeking to fulfill requirements for an Applied Behavior Analysis degree should be systematically screened for language that signals designs built around provoking and measuring distress in autistic participants. When terms such as “functional analysis” paired with “problem behavior,” or “rituals” and “interruption” appear together, these should automatically trigger heightened review and targeted questioning about potential sources of harm, especially for autistic children whose coping rituals and repetitive behaviors are being deliberately disrupted for data collection.

The persistence of these experimental logics—where distress is instrumentalized as data and compliance is coded as success—reveals the urgent need for reform in both ethical review and behavior-analytic research. Protecting autistic participants demands a paradigm shift toward understanding, assent, and co-designed inquiry grounded in neurodiversity-affirming principles. Jennifer Weyman’s dissertation is a perfect example of how science is corruptible, and rigorous oversight is critically necessary to assure a vulnerable population is not further harmed by misbehaviorists.

Autistic children’s rituals—like needing the same chair or a perfectly straight calendar—are not “problem behaviors.” They’re how kids create safety in an unpredictable world. This new article breaks down a USF dissertation that systematically disrupted those rituals in the name of “science,” and asks why ethics boards still call that “minimal risk.”

---

How to cite her study: Weyman, J. R., Bloom, S. E., Campos, C., & Garcia, A. R. (2022). An application of the trial‐based functional analysis to assess problem behavior evoked by ritual interruption. Behavioral Interventions, 37(4), 926-940.