Cultural Humility vs Cultural Competence in ABA: The Real Difference

Cultural competence and cultural humility are two different frameworks, and the one you pick shapes every session note, intake, and supervision call you run. Competence treats culture like a class you can finish. Humility treats it like a habit you keep. Most Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) work today is built on the second one, and the bias-detection work the field talks about so much only makes sense once you know which framework you are working inside.

This page is the framework page. It sits one step above the day-to-day audit. Once you decide humility is the model, you can use the bias and assessment pages in this cluster to do the actual self-check work.

The short answer: competence claims a finish line, humility does not#

Cultural competence sounds like a skill you can master. Take the trainings. Read the books. Get the badge. Now you are competent in the culture you serve. That framing is the problem. It tells your brain you are done. It tells your supervisees they can be done too. And the moment a BCBA thinks they are done learning a family, that BCBA stops watching, stops asking, and starts assuming.

Cultural humility flips it. There is no badge. The work is a daily habit. You pause. You notice. You ask. You change a goal when the family tells you the goal does not match their values. You do not need to know every culture on Earth to be safe inside this model. You only need to keep the habit.

Here is how Mackenzie Sandler describes the humility side in the talk:

I always say that cultural humility really is a lifelong commitment to self evaluation and critique. We can constantly change. We can start to analyze and identify our own behaviors, our perspectives, our biases. From the talk — Mackenzie Sandler

That word "lifelong" is the whole point. The model never ends, and that is a feature, not a bug.

Where 'cultural competence' came from and why BCBAs moved past it#

Cultural competence was the older language across health and human services. It was helpful for a while because it pushed clinicians past the idea that culture did not matter at all. It said, you should learn things about the people you serve. Good. That was a fair first step.

But the model had two weak spots. The first was the finish-line problem. Once a team called itself culturally competent, the learning stopped. The second was the box problem. Competence treated a culture like a closed box you could study from the outside. One Latino family. One Orthodox Jewish family. One rural family. As if every family in that group behaved the same way.

ABA work in homes broke that fast. A BCBA in New York can serve two Dominican families on the same block and find the value systems are not the same. One is strict about screen time. One uses the tablet to keep the toddler safe while the parent works. Same race. Same neighborhood. Two different microcultures. The competence model could not hold that. Humility can, because it does not start with a closed box. It starts with a question.

That is why most BACB-aligned training now leads with humility. The board's ethics code asks you to treat each person with compassion, dignity, and respect. You cannot do that from a finished script. You can only do that from a live conversation.

What cultural humility looks like in a real ABA session#

Humility is not a feeling. It is a set of behaviors you can see on video. Here is what it looks like during a real session.

You walk into the home and you do not assume where to sit. You ask. You do not assume the child's reinforcer. You watch what the child reaches for and you ask the parent what is allowed today. You do not assume the family wants the goal you wrote last week. You read the goal out loud in plain words and you ask if it still matches what they care about.

You also drop jargon. You stop saying "antecedent" and "tact" and "noncompliance" when a parent is in the room, unless you explain those words first. You slow your speech down if the family is working through English as their second language. You bring an interpreter when the conversation matters, not just for the intake.

Mackenzie frames the action this way:

We have to acquire those knowledge and skills and continue to grow, continue to pause and ask ourselves questions. We want to evaluate our own biases, our own abilities to address the needs of individuals with diverse needs and backgrounds, because everyone is their own unique self. From the talk — Mackenzie Sandler

The two verbs to circle there are "pause" and "ask." Both are behaviors. Both are trainable. Both go on a fidelity checklist. That is humility in clinical form.

Three questions to ask yourself before every intake#

You do not need a 30-page audit before every intake. You need three honest questions you can run in the car before you walk in.

1. What am I already assuming about this family? Write the assumption down in one sentence. Naming it kills half of its power.
2. What do I not know yet that would change my goals? Languages spoken in the home. Who makes decisions. What food the child actually eats. What the family calls the bathroom. Whether tablets are welcome as reinforcers.
3. What is the first question I will ask the family today? Not a clinical question. A culture question. "What do you want me to know about your family before we start?" works almost every time.

These three questions are the pre-flight. They do not replace the intake form. They replace the autopilot that turns the intake form into a script.

How to model humility for your supervisees and RBTs#

Humility is not only a clinician-to-family habit. It is a supervisor-to-supervisee habit too. If you are mentoring a first-year BCBA or training Registered Behavior Technicians (RBTs), the way you handle culture in supervision is the way they will handle it in homes. Modeling matters more than the slide deck.

Mackenzie says it plainly:

Behavior analysts, we want to also evaluate our biases of our supervisees, our trainees, our colleagues. And now that we're mentoring new BCBAs for their first year, what does that look like? How are we helping them grow in their new certificate, their new career? From the talk — Mackenzie Sandler

Three small moves that work in real supervision:

• Ask your supervisee what they already assumed about the family before the first session. Make it a normal question, not a trap.
• Debrief one cultural moment from each session. One. Not all of them. Pick the moment the supervisee felt confused or uncomfortable. Talk about what they observed and what they would ask next time.
• Treat your own mistakes out loud. If you misread a family's value about eye contact or a sibling's role, say so in supervision. That teaches more than any reading list.

A supervisor who pretends to be culturally competent raises supervisees who pretend too. A supervisor who practices humility raises supervisees who pause and ask.

The BACB ethics code link most BCBAs miss#

Most BCBAs know the ethics code asks for compassion, dignity, and respect. Fewer notice that the code does not promise you a finish line. The code asks for ongoing behavior. It asks you to keep evaluating. It asks you to respect personal choice in service delivery. It asks you to make room for assent and consent, for individualization, and for cultural considerations.

That is humility language, not competence language. The code does not ask you to certify your culture knowledge once. It asks you to keep showing up to it. That is the link to circle in your notes.

When a treatment plan locks in goals that do not match the family's values, the ethics issue is not just clinical fit. It is a humility failure that the code was already pointing at. When a supervisor signs off on a plan without asking the supervisee what they observed in the home, same problem.

Frequently asked questions#

Is cultural competence still in the BACB ethics code?

The code does not use the phrase "cultural competence" as a finish-line idea. It uses ongoing language, like treating people equitably, respecting personal choice, and acknowledging diverse needs and backgrounds. The behavior the code wants is what most people now call cultural humility. If your team's policies still say "we are culturally competent" as a final statement, your policies are behind the code.

Can a BCBA be culturally humble without learning every family's traditions?

Yes. That is the whole reason humility works. You do not need a database of every culture you might meet. You need the habit of pausing, asking, and adjusting. You will still learn a lot over time, because every family you serve teaches you something. But the model does not depend on prior knowledge. It depends on present behavior.

What is the first sign a BCBA is leaning on competence instead of humility?

The first sign is a sentence that starts with "this family always" or "people from this culture always." That is the box-model showing up. Other signs include reusing a goal across families without checking fit, skipping the question about preferred language, and writing eye-contact goals as a default. If you catch yourself doing those things, the model has slipped. You can step back into humility by pausing and asking one question you did not ask last time.

Earn an hour of ethics CEU on this in the full talk#

This page is the framework view. The full session walks through real cases: a learner whose family hand-fed him at age eight, a sort-by-food task that failed because the visuals were not foods the child ate at home, an intake where the grandfather made every decision. The talk is one ethics CEU and you can watch it on demand.

Watch "Cultural Considerations in ABA Clinical Practice" with Mackenzie Sandler