Arthur Staats was born in New York in 1924, the youngest among four children. His Jewish mother, whose maiden name was Jennie Yollis, came from Tetiev, Russia. Her grandfather was a Talmudic scholar, devoted only to study. Her father, after his own study, became an atheist and radical thinker. When Staats was three months old his father Frank died suddenly, several days after the family arrived in Los Angeles after a voyage through the Panama Canal; his mother never remarried.

Through primary and secondary schools he scored very high on standardized tests but remained, by his account, a bored underachiever and a disappointment to his teachers. An otherwise happy childhood was devoted mostly to omnivorous reading and athletic play. With a family tradition of radical thought, he was exposed, especially by his sister and an uncle, to left-progressive literature and discussions, and began to form at a very early age a world view and an interest in political-social-economic affairs that has continued throughout his life. Raised in a family that was very poor, atheist in a Jewish ethnic tradition, vegetarian, and politically radical, Staats always felt different. He thought differently than his peers, he read different things, he questioned ideas that others accepted, and progressively he became a radical and original thinker, in ways that permeated every aspect of his life, including his various fields of study.

After serving in the Navy in World War II, Staats became a serious college student. In graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) his wide interests., combined with his drive for analysis in terms of basic principles, led him to complete the requirements for a PhD in clinical psychology while taking his degree in General-Experimental Psychology. With his objective view of human behavior, he found valuable elements in behaviorism's science philosophy and conditioning principles. However, he saw deep and widespread weaknesses also, including behaviorism's focus on animal research, its rejection of traditional psychology, and its divisive internecine rivalry. While still in graduate school, he began a research program to extend learning principles broadly in the systematic study of human behavior, a new development. The approach he constructed was a behaviorism, but not an ordinary behaviorism. It became "psychologized" because it incorporated essential elements of psychology, but it "behaviorized" those elements, so it remained a consistent, unified approach, later called psychological behaviorism.

In 1955 he became an Instructor at Arizona State University (ASU), advancing to Professor in five years. Beginning his own human behavioral program, within a few years he also succeeded in bringing in Jack Michael, Israel Goldiamond, and Arthur Bachrach to help begin the predominant center of the time for psychological behaviorism and radical behaviorism. While conducting intensive research in selected areas, he habitually placed it conceptually in a broad framework that lay the foundations for general development; then he would move on to the next needed development. For example, at ASU he began a human-oriented behaviorism that provided a critical foundation for the fields of behavior modification, behavior therapy, behavior analysis, and behavioral assessment. By the early 1960s, when others were just beginning to use reinforcement to change human behavior, which he had been doing for ten years, he was already laying the foundations for developments into areas such as cognitive behavior therapy, behavioral assessment, personality, and personality measurement.

He met his wife Carolyn at UCLA. When he went to ASU she became his assistant, completed her dissertation on a study in his research program, and contributed to two chapters in his first book. When they had a daughter in 1960, he soon devised training procedures to study and produce her language-cognitive and sensory-motor development, using his psychological behaviorism principles. He states that his children-Jennifer Kelley, a child psychiatrist, and Peter, an Associate Professor in pain medicine at Johns Hopkins-were the first children raised systematically within behaviorism. In this and other "experimental-longitudinal" child research Staats invented the "time-out" procedure that today is a household word, as well as the token reinforcer (token economy) system that he used in training dyslexic children.
His psychological behaviorism is set in a conceptual framework that involves unification with the biological sciences, from below, and the social sciences and humanities, from above. That perspective yields a philosophy of science, called unified positivism. Within the theoretical and philosophical paradigm Staats projects significant developments for many areas of psychology, including personality. In 1998 the Arthur W. Staats Unifying psychology Lecture was established in the American Psychological Association as an annual event to foster such developments (Cloninger, S.C. THEORIES OF PERSONALITY: Understanding Persons, 3/e, ©2000, p. 278. Electronically reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.)

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