Mathew Israel is an American behavioral psychologist who is known for founding the Judge Rotenberg Center and inventing the Graduated Electronic Decelerator. As a freshman in college, Israel read B. F. Skinner's novel, Walden Two, in which the heroes build a utopia by conditioning the residents of a commune through the behaviorist principles of reward and punishment. Israel said that reading Walden Two was like a "religious conversion" for him. After reading the book, Israel devoted himself to making the utopia described in it a reality. Israel said that the period between reading the book and his first attempts to start the utopia was a very difficult time of his life. "I thought about committing suicide," he said. "If I couldn't bring a community into existence, [in] what sense was life