About Us
OUR STORY
Ogden R. Lindsley, Ph.D., opened Behavior Research Company (BRCo) in October 1959 in Belmont, Massachusetts. He managed the company until his death in October 2004. Today, BRCo is administered by the Ogden Lindsley Trust.
BRCo originally marketed equipment, mainly the Lindsley Manipulandum, which Dr. Lindsley designed for Behavior Research Laboratory, Metropolitan State Hospital. In 1953, Lindsley and his mentor B.F. Skinner established the operant laboratory, under the auspices of Harvard Medical School, to study human subjects.
In 1965, Lindsley moved BRCo to Kansas City, Kansas, when he became a professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center. He and his students quickly developed the Standard Behavior Chart, based on cumulative recording of behavior in operant labs. Later the chart evolved into the family of Standard Celeration Charts. BRCo’s product line became the standard charts and associated counters and timers used to monitor human behavior. Precision Teaching is the best known of the applications.
Short Courses, developed to teach standard charting, and The Behavior Bank, a computer based system of collecting, analyzing, and distributing behavior change projects, were important activities of BRCo in the late 1960s and early 1970s.