Christina Chun compared founder etiquette training to ABA in business

Christina Chun gave the training a name. In her years as an entrepreneur, she told the Sydney panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in June 2024, she did a lot of entrepreneurship training that covered such things as how to shake someone’s hand when you first meet them. “I went through that training almost like ABA in business.” The comparison was her own, and she used it to describe instruction designed to make autistic founders fit an existing mould.

Applied behaviour analysis is an autism intervention built on behavioural procedures such as reinforcement, and the criticism Chun’s comparison drew on has been acknowledged inside the field. Writing for the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center in January 2022, Pablo Juárez, a board certified behaviour analyst, summarised autistic self advocates’ concerns under two headings. One was compliance, the use of authority to make a person follow directions. The other was conformity, teaching skills because they match what is socially acceptable, with eye contact as his example. He called goals of that kind ableist and said they do not honour neurodiversity.