Murray Sidman

Dr. Sidman’s publications in peer-refereed journals number close to 100 and have defined much of our current understanding of stimulus control, stimulus equivalence, and avoidance behavior. His 1960 text, Tactics of Scientific Research, is considered the first primer on within- subject research methodology. It is a classic that is still used today. Other contributions have extended to important social problems. The second edition of his book Coercion and Its Fallout was published in 2000, and his treatment of “Terrorism as Behavior” was published in Behavior and Social Issues.

Sidman took his PhD at Columbia in psychology from Columbia University 1952 under the advisorship of William N. Schoenfeld. He has worked at many research institutions, including Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He served as director of the Behavioral Sciences Department at the E.K. Shriver Center for Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities. Until his death, he was professor emeritus at Northeastern University. Dr. Sidman has held academic appointments at the University of São Paulo in Brasil, Keio University in Tokyo, Japan and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Murray Sidman (April 29, 1923 – May 18, 2019) was a behavioral scientist, best known for Sidman Avoidance, also called "free-operant avoidance", in which an individual learns to avoid an aversive stimulus by remembering to produce the response without any other stimulus. Sidman's explanation of free-operant avoidance is an alternative to the Miller-Mowrer two-process theory of avoidance.