Agnotology in Action: How ABA Obscures Harm to Maintain Power

Dr. Scott Frasard is an autistic autism advocate who is a published author and an outspoken critic of operant conditioning approaches to change natural autistic behaviors to meet neuronormative social expectations.

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Introduction

What if the most widespread intervention for autistic people wasn’t just flawed, but functioned exactly as intended—not to support, but to obscure, to mislead, to consolidate authority? What if the story we’ve been sold about care, science, and progress is not one of benevolent advancement, but a narrative carefully crafted to legitimize control, sideline dissent, and commodify compliance? What if what we call support is, in practice, a system of silencing?

For decades, Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) has been promoted as the gold standard of autism intervention, cited in policy documents, championed in funding mandates, and presented to families as the most evidence-based option available. Its surface gleams with clinical credibility and data-driven precision, drawing power from the language of science and the authority of certification. But beneath this carefully maintained façade lies a system that thrives not on clarity, but on cultivated ignorance. Its defenses are preemptive, its critiques pathologized, and its harms reframed as therapeutic gains. ABA does not merely escape critique, but rather it inoculates itself against it through the very structures that claim to ensure its legitimacy.

This piece contends that ABA’s endurance is not a triumph of science, but of agnotology: the deliberate construction of ignorance to serve institutional interests. Through this lens, ABA’s staying power becomes less about empirical support and more about the strategic management of perception, credibility, and dissent. By tracing the mechanisms through which dissent is silenced, harm is reframed, and evidence is manufactured, we uncover a system built to preserve authority, not accountability. This is not accidental oversight, but a deliberate architecture of unknowing. And once we begin to see it clearly, we must ask with urgency and clarity: Who benefits from what we are not allowed to know?

What Is Agnotology?

To understand how ABA sustains itself despite deep ethical concerns, we must first understand agnotology. This concept reveals that ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge, but a political and cultural artifact often actively constructed and weaponized. In practice, agnotology helps us recognize how institutions deliberately obscure harm to protect their authority and maintain public trust. It explains why some voices are amplified while others are dismissed, why certain data is celebrated while inconvenient truths are buried. Agnotology offers a lens to see how systems protect themselves, not by offering more clarity, but by clouding it; not by debating critiques, but by erasing them. Through this framework, ABA's continued legitimacy begins to look less like evidence-based practice and more like the result of deliberate obfuscation and strategic misdirection.

Originally developed to understand how the tobacco industry sowed doubt about the links between smoking and cancer, agnotology reveals how powerful entities maintain control by muddying scientific consensus, delaying policy action, and discrediting dissent (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). The tobacco industry pioneered strategies such as manufacturing controversy, funding seemingly independent research, and launching public relations campaigns to obscure growing evidence. These tactics were not merely defensive; they were calculated moves to protect economic interests and prevent regulatory action. Agnotology, then, is not a passive phenomenon. It is a tactic of survival, carefully constructed to disarm public concern while shielding systems of power from accountability.

Agnotology reveals how powerful entities maintain control by muddying scientific consensus, delaying policy action, and discrediting dissent

The same playbook has since been adopted by climate change denialists, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and, more quietly but no less consequentially, the autism intervention industry. Like its predecessors, the ABA field has strategically framed dissent as fringe, largely deflected calls for ethical reform, and deployed professional authority to maintain its dominance. ABA has become a textbook example of agnotology in action, not through overt suppression, but by constructing a narrative in which its harm is unthinkable, and its methods are beyond question.

ABA as a System of Manufactured Ignorance

The persistence of ABA in the face of growing ethical scrutiny cannot be explained by empirical rigor or clinical success alone. It endures because it has mastered the art of agnotology. While many assume that ABA’s dominance is the result of merit or outcomes, its continued legitimacy is more accurately understood as a product of calculated knowledge control. Through a complex web of language, institutional power, and credentialing, the ABA industry has created a system in which dissent is neutralized, harm is rebranded, and ignorance is actively produced. This system operates across professional, academic, and cultural domains, each reinforcing the other to construct a reality in which alternatives to ABA are rendered invisible or illegitimate. The following four mechanisms illustrate how this deliberate unknowing operates in practice:

Rebranding Harm Through Euphemism

In recent years, the ABA industry has engaged in a calculated campaign to reframe its identity. Facing growing criticism from autistic individuals and allies, many providers now promote terms like "modern ABA," "compassionate care," and "positive reinforcement" as indicators of progress and evolution. These phrases suggest transformation, but closer inspection reveals continuity. The structure remains rooted in behaviorist logic: reward behaviors that conform to neurotypical norms and extinguish those that do not. The underlying assumptions about what constitutes acceptable behavior remain unchanged, and the same principles of external reinforcement and behavioral correction continue to dominate. By shifting the language without addressing the foundation, the industry retains its legitimacy while evading the need for accountability or structural change.

This rhetorical shift serves a strategic purpose. It enables practitioners to maintain access to funding and institutional legitimacy while appearing responsive to public pressure. By invoking the language of compassion, the industry obscures the coercive nature of its interventions and appeals to the emotional needs of parents and professionals seeking morally acceptable treatments. Even "trauma-informed ABA," increasingly referenced in marketing materials and practitioner handbooks, often functions more as a rebranding strategy than a meaningful departure from behaviorist control. In practice, such frameworks rarely challenge the core goals of behavior modification or the hierarchies of authority embedded in ABA settings, but instead act as buffers against public scrutiny and ethical critique.

These euphemisms are not neutral. They sanitize interventions that continue to prioritize compliance over autonomy and surface-level behavior over internal experience. By presenting long-standing practices in a new linguistic wrapper, the industry reduces the likelihood of critical inquiry and deflects attention from the enduring harms at the heart of its methods. The shift in language masks the lack of structural change, creating a façade of ethical progress while preserving the field’s foundational goals. In doing so, the industry constructs a comforting narrative for funders, institutions, and parents, which substitutes symbolic gestures for substantive change. This strategic framing allows ABA to present the appearance of progress while sidestepping the growing demands from autistic people who are calling not for superficial reform, but for a complete dismantling of coercive systems.

This strategy mirrors broader patterns in agnotological systems. By redefining its practices without fundamentally altering them, ABA protects itself from accountability and avoids the deeper reckoning that true transformation would require. The optics of change are used to satisfy institutional expectations and defuse public criticism, while the core dynamics of behavioral compliance and power asymmetry remain untouched. It does not dismantle harm; it rebrands it.

Discrediting and Silencing Dissent

Autistic critiques of ABA are often dismissed as anecdotal, emotional, or unscientific. Lived experience is subordinated to behaviorist metrics that value observable outcomes over internal states, relationships, or long-term well-being. This epistemic hierarchy privileges the external gaze of the practitioner while devaluing the self-knowledge and agency of the autistic person. Professional gatekeeping ensures that only certain kinds of knowledge, quantifiable, compliance-oriented, observer-defined, are legitimized, creating a system where the most affected voices are structurally excluded from shaping the discourse.

Social media platforms and academic institutions alike frequently marginalize autistic voices that speak against ABA. Algorithms often deprioritize posts that challenge mainstream practices, while moderation policies can flag critiques as aggressive or unprofessional, reinforcing a status quo of palatable discourse. In academic spaces, autistic scholars who critique ABA may face subtle forms of exclusion, such as being overlooked for panels, publications, or collaborations. In a cruel irony, the very people most affected by these interventions are frequently deemed least credible in assessing them, often under the guise of lacking objectivity or emotional distance.

This discrediting is not incidental. It is woven into the fabric of how the field maintains its authority. Peer-reviewed journals overwhelmingly publish studies authored by behaviorists, reinforcing internal consensus while positioning outsider critiques as uninformed or irrelevant. These publications often rely on familiar methodologies and replicate established findings, thereby sustaining the illusion of progress while shielding the field from foundational challenges. Meanwhile, media coverage of ABA often features providers and parents, presenting a curated version of the field that centers professional authority and caregiver approval. Autistic perspectives, when included at all, are typically treated as outliers or emotional anecdotes, rather than as sources of legitimate knowledge.

The result is a curated discourse where dissent is not simply ignored, but rendered illegible. Public critiques are often redirected into technocratic discussions that prioritize institutional comfort over ethical reckoning. Calls for reform are diluted into debates over tone, deflecting attention from the substance of the critique to the manner in which it is delivered. Demands for abolition are reframed as misunderstanding, cast as emotional overreach rather than informed resistance. This systemic silencing ensures that ABA’s foundational assumptions remain intact, shielded from the kind of transformative scrutiny that might actually center autistic well-being and challenge the industry’s core logics.

Professionalization as Epistemic Laundering

The rise of the Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) credential, the proliferation of ABA-governed journals, and partnerships with academic institutions have created a self-reinforcing ecosystem. These credentials and institutions function as gatekeepers, granting authority and credibility only to those who operate within the behaviorist paradigm. Within this closed loop, research is produced, reviewed, and cited almost exclusively by those already invested in behaviorist methodologies, ensuring that critique from outside the framework is systematically excluded. This creates a feedback cycle in which ABA's core assumptions and methods are rarely questioned and often celebrated, reinforcing the field’s internal logic while appearing scientifically robust to external observers. In short, the field’s internal structures ensure that its assumptions are continually reproduced, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of legitimacy and authority.

Academic programs that train behavior analysts often include minimal, if any, engagement with autistic scholarship or disability studies. Core curricula tend to prioritize technical fluency in behaviorist techniques while overlooking critical frameworks that emphasize social context, neurodiversity, and lived experience. Instead, these programs reinforce a narrowly mechanistic view of autism as a set of deficits to be managed, often presenting behavioral conformity as the primary goal of intervention. This further distances practitioners from the lived realities and critiques of those they claim to support, and leaves them ill-equipped to engage meaningfully with autistic perspectives on ethics, autonomy, and well-being.

Ethical review boards, which might otherwise serve as a check on such practices, often lack autistic representation. Decisions about what constitutes ethical care are typically made without the input of those most directly impacted by behaviorist interventions. Without meaningful inclusion of autistic individuals, these boards risk functioning more as institutional gatekeepers than as advocates for justice. Ethics becomes a bureaucratic formality rather than a transformative safeguard, constrained by compliance protocols and professional norms that rarely interrogate the power dynamics at play. In this context, professionalization does not elevate the field; it shields it from scrutiny and recasts critique as ignorance.

Research as a Self-Reinforcing Echo Chamber

The research base of ABA is frequently cited as evidence of its scientific legitimacy. Yet a closer examination reveals an echo chamber more than a robust dialogue. Much of the research recycles the same narrow objectives: increasing compliance, reducing so-called problem behaviors, and measuring surface-level changes through short-term observation. These studies often prioritize metrics that serve institutional needs, such as observable outcomes and cost-effectiveness, over questions of long-term well-being or ethical justification. Rarely does this body of work interrogate the broader ethical, developmental, or social consequences of these interventions, nor does it meaningfully engage with the lived experiences of autistic individuals who have undergone these treatments.

Many of these studies rely on methodologically weak designs that virtually guarantee pro-ABA outcomes. Common practices include using small, homogenous samples that do not reflect the diversity of autistic experiences, relying on pre-post assessments without appropriate control groups, and employing vague or behaviorally biased operational definitions of success. Additionally, rather than employing appropriate inferential statistics, ABA research often depends on visual analysis of graphs and simple frequency counts. These methods, favored in single-subject designs, lack the statistical robustness and generalizability of broader population-level studies. This approach enables the field to bypass complex statistical analyses that could reveal unintended consequences, challenge the consistency of outcomes, or question the validity of intervention claims. Further, the absence of longitudinal follow-up obscures potential long-term harm, while the exclusion of qualitative methods ensures that the emotional, relational, and developmental experiences of autistic individuals remain unexamined. Harm reduction, identity formation, and self-determination are rarely treated as research priorities. Instead, outcomes are shaped around externally defined compliance goals, which allows the field to sustain a veneer of scientific legitimacy while avoiding deeper ethical accountability.

The field's commitment to behavioral data as the gold standard obscures deeper questions about subjective experience, autonomy, and dignity. This reliance on externally measurable outputs often sidelines the internal, relational, and emotional dimensions of development that are crucial to holistic well-being. Instead of asking whether interventions are just, humane, or aligned with autistic values, ABA research often focuses on whether behaviors can be reduced, regardless of what those behaviors may signify or protect. Behaviors that serve as communication, self-regulation, or expressions of distress are frequently pathologized without exploring their underlying meaning. This approach narrows the scope of inquiry and detaches research from the lived realities of those it claims to serve, resulting in interventions that may produce compliance while perpetuating harm.

This insularity is reinforced by peer review structures dominated by behaviorists, publication venues tied to ABA institutions, and funding streams dependent on showing efficacy through quantifiable change. Journals often prioritize studies that align with established behavioral goals, which further discourages methodological diversity or critical engagement. The result is a field that generates a high volume of publications while contributing little to meaningful understanding or innovation. Research that questions the foundational premises of ABA or centers autistic perspectives is systematically excluded or dismissed, not because it lacks rigor, but because it disrupts the consensus that sustains the industry's legitimacy.

Research that questions the foundational premises of ABA or centers autistic perspectives is systematically excluded or dismissed, not because it lacks rigor, but because it disrupts the consensus that sustains the industry's legitimacy.

Furthermore, the conflation of "evidence-based" with internal consensus enables the field to reject outside critique without genuine engagement. When a practice is labeled as evidence-based, it gains an aura of unassailable authority, even if that evidence emerges from a closed network of ideologically aligned researchers. This framing allows contested practices to be presented as scientifically resolved, shutting down dialogue before it begins. As long as the metrics remain narrowly defined and the evaluators remain within the same ideological circle, the appearance of evidence can be maintained without addressing fundamental harms or asking whether the questions being studied are even the right ones.

The definition of success remains narrowly focused on compliance, even as concerns grow about trauma, identity suppression, and long-term wellbeing. Behaviors deemed undesirable by neurotypical standards are targeted for elimination, while behaviors aligned with institutional expectations are praised, regardless of their personal meaning to the individual. This form of evidence is not neutral. It is shaped by what the field chooses to measure, the values it embeds in those metrics, and whom it chooses to ignore. Until the research agenda is reoriented around the voices and values of autistic people, those most intimately affected by these practices, the knowledge produced will continue to reflect and reinforce institutional power rather than challenge it in any meaningful way.

Capitalism, Control, and the Compliance Economy

ABA did not rise in a vacuum. It flourished within a capitalist context that prizes productivity, conformity, and normative behavior. These cultural values are tightly bound to systems of economic exchange, where being deemed "functional" or "independent" translates into increased employability, lower perceived care costs, and institutional favor. Within this framework, autistic people are often measured against their economic utility and ability to conform to dominant social norms. ABA’s emphasis on shaping autistic behavior to meet these norms is not incidental; it is a mechanism aligned with the broader goal of social and economic assimilation, reinforcing the idea that worth is contingent upon productivity and compliance rather than intrinsic humanity.

Through early intervention mandates and insurance reimbursement structures, ABA has become a lucrative enterprise. These systems reward quantifiable outcomes that mirror mainstream expectations: still hands, eye contact, speech approximations, and decreased "problem behaviors." The metrics deemed valuable are not grounded in autistic well-being, but in the comfort and preferences of neurotypical observers. Normalization is not just an outcome; it is a commodity that can be sold to anxious parents seeking certainty, often grappling with a manufactured fear of the unknown and the culturally imposed shame of having an autistic child, and purchased by funding agencies aiming to minimize perceived long-term costs. This commodification shapes the priorities of service providers, who are incentivized to produce results that satisfy bureaucratic and economic requirements rather than individual needs.

Private equity firms now invest in ABA centers, viewing them as scalable service platforms with repeat customers and guaranteed reimbursement. These firms bring a profit-maximizing logic to autism intervention, prioritizing expansion, operational efficiency, and predictable outcomes that appeal to investors and regulators. This financialization of autism intervention transforms care into an industry, where decisions about service delivery are increasingly shaped by market incentives rather than individual needs. Behaviorist goals align seamlessly with the compliance requirements of school systems, workplaces, and healthcare institutions, reinforcing a model of intervention that serves institutional convenience over personal flourishing. In this context, ABA becomes a tool of behavioral management under the guise of support, marketed as therapy while functioning as a mechanism of control.

Rather than supporting diverse modes of communication, relationship, and embodiment, ABA systematically targets behaviors that diverge from neurotypical expectations. These include traits and expressions that are not harmful in themselves but are perceived as socially disruptive or non-normative, such as stimming, echolalia, or avoidance of eye contact. ABA's goal is not to foster self-acceptance or adaptive flourishing, but to reduce social friction in environments that refuse to adapt to neurodivergent ways of being. It promotes the idea that the autistic person must change to fit the world, rather than questioning why the world remains so hostile to difference. In this way, ABA functions as a gatekeeper of acceptability, training autistic people to accommodate systemic inflexibility rather than challenging that inflexibility itself.

Echoes of Other Agnotological Industries

The tactics of agnotology are not unique to ABA. The tobacco industry famously insisted that "more research was needed" even as the evidence mounted, creating a smokescreen of uncertainty to delay regulatory action. Climate change denialists similarly weaponized complexity and selective data presentation to confuse the public and undermine consensus. Pharmaceutical companies have long used ghostwritten studies, sponsored panels, and professional spokespeople to manufacture credibility and suppress critical inquiry. In each case, the goal is not to foster informed debate but to shape public perception, protect institutional interests, and maintain the illusion of neutrality and scientific legitimacy. These industries provide a blueprint for how power can be maintained not through truth, but through strategic ignorance.

The goal is not to foster informed debate but to shape public perception, protect institutional interests, and maintain the illusion of neutrality and scientific legitimacy.

These industries succeeded not by disproving their critics, but by sowing doubt, fragmenting public trust, and creating the illusion of legitimate controversy. They invested in public relations firms to shape public perception, sponsored research that appeared independent to bolster their credibility, and discredited whistleblowers as fringe or biased to protect their authority. Such coordinated strategies insulated them from public accountability and delayed meaningful reform. These efforts were not aimed at finding truth but at preserving institutional stability, minimizing liability, and maintaining economic control over their respective domains.

ABA mimics the patterns of these other industries. It manufactures consent through credentialing, clouds critique through euphemism, and deflects accountability through institutional power. Credentialing organizations, academic alliances, and professional networks work in concert to validate ABA’s authority while marginalizing dissent. Behaviorist research often borrows the language of objectivity and neutrality, presenting itself as scientifically rigorous, even when the underlying assumptions and methods remain narrowly focused on compliance. These rhetorical strategies serve the ideological function of behavioral normalization, reinforcing the belief that divergence from neurotypical standards must be corrected. Critics are cast as unqualified, emotional, or ideologically extreme, reinforcing the narrative that only those within the behaviorist establishment possess the legitimacy to evaluate the field or define what constitutes valid evidence.

Just as climate denial delayed urgent policy change and tobacco science prolonged public harm, the agnotological machinery within ABA ensures that questions of ethics, identity, and harm remain sidelined. These parallels are not simply historical coincidences, but indicators of a broader pattern in which industries consolidate power by suppressing inconvenient truths. They show how scientific authority can be weaponized to protect systems of control, and how dissenting voices, particularly those of the most affected, can be erased through institutional design. The parallels are not incidental. They are diagnostic, pointing to a deeper architecture of ignorance that must be confronted through collective reckoning and structural change.

Conclusion

The central harm of ABA is not only in what it does, but in what it strategically conceals. Its survival hinges on an architecture of manufactured ignorance. This system obscures its roots in compliance training, sanitizes harm through euphemism, and erects structural barriers against the very voices it claims to support. ABA does not merely resist change; it fortifies itself against it. In the face of growing critique from autistic people, the industry doubles down, rebranding itself with hollow buzzwords while continuing to market behavior control as therapeutic care.

This architecture of manufactured ignorance is not the result of passive oversight or isolated bad actors. It is the deliberate deployment of agnotology: the calculated production of ignorance designed to shield the industry from accountability and to fortify its institutional power. ABA survives not on the strength of scientific merit or trust from the autistic community, but on its ability to suppress dissent, deflect scrutiny, and manipulate public perception. It cultivates a facade of legitimacy through credentialing systems, self-referential research, and policy advocacy that masquerades as progress while preserving the status quo. These mechanisms are not neutral; they are instruments of epistemic control, built to insulate the field from ethical reckoning and maintain the illusion of care where there is, in truth, systemic coercion.

Reforming ABA is not the answer. Its foundation is rotten, constructed on systems of control, epistemic exclusion, and performative legitimacy rather than genuine trust or ethical care. What is needed is refusal—a principled and unapologetic rejection of the assumptions that frame compliance as compassion, that conflate professional validation with moral authority, and that persist in defining neurodivergent existence as a deviation to be corrected. These are not misunderstandings to be clarified but ideologies to be dismantled. The call is not for incremental repair, but for bold, systemic resistance grounded in the epistemologies and lived truths of autistic people.

Reforming ABA is not the answer. Its foundation is rotten, constructed on systems of control, epistemic exclusion, and performative legitimacy rather than genuine trust or ethical care.

Disrupting this system means naming the harm, even when it is buried beneath layers of data, credentials, and institutional authority. It means affirming that the voices of autistic people are not supplemental to the discourse but are vital sources of epistemic truth. It means recognizing that what ABA upholds as evidence often serves as a performance of control, structured more to reinforce the industry's dominance than to genuinely assess ethical or developmental value.

If we want justice, we must reject the cultivated silence that sustains ABA’s authority and shields it from accountability. We must believe autistic people, not as an act of charity, but as a recognition of their epistemic authority. And we must be brave enough to imagine and build systems rooted not in coercion or compliance, but in care, respect, and the full humanity of neurodivergent life.

References

Broderick, A. A. (2022). The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism into Big Business. Myers Education Press.

Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press.

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