Behaviorism

BEHAVIORISM

BEHAVIORISM. Since the early twentieth century behaviorism has offered the public and the field of psychology a mix of applied technology and philosophical iconoclasm. In 1913 John B. Watson proclaimed himself a "behaviorist" and announced a new theoretical tendency within psychology. "Behaviorism," he promised, would be a "purely objective experimental branch of natural science," dedicated to the "prediction and control of behavior." Consciousness, thoughts, and feelings would no longer be studied, he explained, just the behavior of animals—including humans. Purged of its metaphysical baggage, Watson claimed, psychology could be applied to various human problems created by industrialization and rapid social change. To businessmen he promised to "show how the individual may be molded (forced to put on new habits) to fit the environment." To parents he promised methods for rearing fearless children who could learn any trade or profession. Such techniques would be based on Pavlovian conditioning of involuntary behavior and the extinction of existing responses that were maladaptive (e.g., fear of harmless animals).

Forced to leave academe for a career in advertising, Watson never developed the techniques that would deliver on his promises. Nevertheless, by the 1930s the field of psychology had moved close enough to Watson's concepts that observers spoke of it undergoing "an intellectual revolution." Psychologists' methods became more objective and their data became more behavioral. At the same time, the psychology of learning became dominated by neobehaviorists, whose theories readmitted internalist concepts like "drive" that were anathema to Watson.

Skinner's Behaviorism

In the second half of the twentieth century, B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism revived Watson's call for a practical psychology of behavioral control. This was coupled with a radical empiricist epistemology in which drives, motives, and awareness play no role. Skinner's theory of motivation calls voluntary acts "free operants"; these are controlled by positive and negative reinforcers (similar to what others would call rewards and punishments). Key to Skinner's operant conditioning is the narrow specification of a behavior, whose repetitions are counted by an observer or mechanical device. The paradigmatic research

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apparatus is a "Skinner box," which holds a white rat (or sometimes a pigeon); the rat is taught to press a small lever and given reinforcement in the form of food pellets. This methodology provided Skinner with the basic data he used to construct his "laws of learning." Those laws, to Skinnerians, have universal applicability, explaining everything from lion-taming to human social events and what others would call moral development.

Like Watson, Skinner was a tireless popularizer who never shied from controversy. His blueprint for a utopian community, Walden Two (1948), found a receptive audience in the counterculture of the 1960s and inspired a number of experiments in communal living. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), he argued that social problems were best solved by behaviorists rather than philosophers, religious thinkers, or a political democracy.

Within psychology the influence of Skinner's radical behaviorism reached its peak in the 1960s, losing credibility in subsequent years as researchers found types of learning (e.g., language acquisition) that violate Skinnerian assumptions. Consequently, psychology has turned toward neobehavioral explanations, at the same time that cognitive and evolutionary schools of thought have become popular. As a behavioral methodology, operant conditioning has proven essential to fields as varied as psychopharmacology, neuroscience, and mental retardation. Versions of behaviorism have also appeared in other academic disciplines including philosophy and economics.

To the public, behaviorism has been notable for its environmentalist view of man and its promise of behavioral control. In 1923–1924, Watson advanced progressivist themes against the instinctivist social psychology of Harvard's William McDougall. In the pages of the New Republic, lectures at the New School, and in a public debate with McDougall in Washington D.C., Watson promoted his views, becoming an influential figure who promised a new man built on behaviorist principles.

By mid-century, many had come to see this promise of behavioral transformation as sinister and antihumanist. In his dystopia A Clockwork Orange (1963), Anthony Burgess portrayed an authoritarian government that exerts control using liberal rhetoric as well as Pavlovian conditioning and traditional punishments. The Manchurian Candidate (1959) expressed Cold War fears that foreign communists had perfected a neo-Pavlovian form of mind control.

In the Vietnam War era, the behaviorism of Skinner came under attack, in part because of Skinner's outspoken social philosophy. In 1971, Beyond Freedom and Dignity earned him a place on the cover of Time magazine and criticism from the political right and left. Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced him as a dangerous social engineer with a freedom-denying, anti-family agenda. To Noam Chomsky and the New Left, behaviorism was the technology of an incipient totalitarianism, with "gas ovens smoking in the distance."

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with post-Skinner behaviorists less visible and less philosophically radical, their image has become that of just another research specialty. Their reduced circumstance can be seen in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1990), where we learn that the masters of the universe are not behaviorists but the rats pretending to run through their mazes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bjork, Daniel W. B.F. Skinner: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Buckley, Kerry W. Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism. New York: Guilford Press, 1989.

Harris, Benjamin. "'Give Me a Dozen Healthy Infants …': John B. Watson's Popular Advice on Childrearing, Women, and the Family." In In the Shadow of the Past: Psychology Portrays the Sexes, edited by Miriam Lewin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Kallen, Horace M. "Behaviorism." In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin R. A. Seligman, Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1930.

O'Donnell, John M. The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870–1920. New York: New York University Press, 1985.

Smith, Laurence D. "Situating B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in American Culture." In B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in American Culture, edited by Laurence D. Smith and William R. Woodward. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1996.

Beni Harris

See also Psychology .