BEHAVIORISM

Most generally, behaviorism is a viewpoint that takes psychological phenomena as physical activity rather than as belonging to a special domain of mental events. For a behaviorist, then, psychology is the study of behavior and its physical, mainly environmental, determinants rather than of the nature of experience or of mental process. Behaviorism originated in natural-science traditions of the late nineteenth century, and precursors of its methods and concepts developed at the turn of the century in the work of E. L. Thorndike and Russian physiologist I. P. Pavlov, as well as of several other psychologists and physiologists (Day, 1980; Herrnstein, 1969).

But behaviorism as a distinct viewpoint came to be recognized with the publication of American psychologist John B. Watson's article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (1913). Identification of behaviorism with the controversial Watson persists despite the fact that it developed into several distinct traditions that bear only a family resemblance to Watson's views and to each other (Malone, 1990; Zuriff, 1985). The leading contemporary behaviorist position derives from the work of B. F. Skinner, which differs from other behaviorisms in its detailed account of verbal functioning and in its inclusion of activities such as thinking and feeling as behavior to be accounted for, while maintaining a primary focus on behavior-environment relations rather than upon processes inferred as underlying those relations.

Behaviorism originated in opposition to an orthodox psychology that attempted to analyze conscious experience by focusing upon reports by observers who were trained to examine their own mental functions through techniques of introspection. Watson boldly rejected this, asserting that behavior, per se, is the proper domain of psychology. For Watson, prediction and control of overt behavior, rather than introspection of mental processes, formed the basis for an objective, scientific psychology. Behavior was to be analyzed into stimulus-response (S-R) units without appeal to hypothetical activities of brain or mind. The units could be of widely varying size, from the relatively molecular eyeblink elicited by a flash of light to the more "molar" shopping trip as response to an empty cupboard. Watson emphasized the continuity between human and nonhuman species, and he stressed the importance of learning, in animals as well as in humans, as the fundamental basis for understanding psychological process.

A neobehaviorism that came to the fore in the 1930s, that of Clark L. Hull and his student Kenneth Spence, dominated until mid-century. Like Watson, Hull described behavior as composed of S-R units, but whereas Watson had presented S-R analyses as adjustable in scale, the Hull-Spence approach focused on molecular building blocks that were described as forming chains of connecting events between environmental stimuli and observed behavior. These mediating events included hypothetical (but presumably physical) stimulus traces, covert responses, and response-produced stimuli. Learned S-R units were called habits. Hull contrived an elaborate theory whose theorems and postulates, presented in geometer's style, were concerned with the formation of habit strength and with the mechanistic conversion of habit strength into overt action. The theory was published as essentially complete in 1943. Although highly touted, it proved ponderous, with numerous terms that were difficult to evaluate; it fell of its own weight within a decade. Nevertheless, Hullian students gained dominant positions within academic psychology, and elements of that approach can be discerned to this day in theorizing that rests on the metaphor of mechanical associative connections. Hull's emphasis on formal hypothesis testing, directed at hypothetical constructs that are anchored to observable events as specified by operational definitions, also survives as a "methodological behaviorism" (Skinner, 1945) that has permeated much of psychology.

A counterpoint to Hull's views in the 1930s and 1940s was provided by Edward C. Tolman, who attempted to include purposive, intentional language within a behavioristic system. He invoked terms like purpose, expectation, and cognition to capture the larger-scale, goal-oriented "molar" organization of behavior. Tolman asserted that these terms need not imply anything nonphysical or mentalistic; indeed, he employed them in accounting for behavior of laboratory rats as well as of humans. But Tolman undermined such disclaimers by characterizing his view as S-O-R theory, with the "O" denoting a special role for processes within the behaving organism. The learning of complex relationships, often characterized as "cognitive maps," was said to mediate between environment and behavior. Critics of Tolman's account suggested that it left the organism "buried in thought." To the extent that he addressed the sources of action, Tolman placed them within the organism, which tended to link his account with traditional mentalistic explanations of action. Thus it is not surprising that Tolman's inclusion of intentional language never was accepted by the broader behavioristic community.

B. F. Skinner also departed from the S-R behavioral mainstream of the 1930s and 1940s, but in different ways. He rejected mentalistic terms as "misleading fictions" while including the relationships that were Tolman's primary concern. Skinner's first conceptual innovation was to reformulate the reflex; he described this simplest unit of behavior not as stimulus-response connection but as directly observable abstraction, a correlation between classes of stimuli and classes of responses. Then he distanced his theory further from mediational notions of mechanism and associative connection by delineating non-reflexive behavioral units that he called operants. Operants act upon the environment; they are selected by their consequences through processes denoted as reinforcement, punishment, and extinction. Operants can range from small to large, and are defined by the consequences that shape or maintain them but also by the contexts within which the selecting consequences have occurred. The result is a three-term relationship composed of classes of responses, consequences, and discriminative stimuli.

Operant behavior often is characterized in ordinary language as intentional and purposive, thus having the "molar" characteristics that were Tolman's primary concern. But the traditional appeal to mentalistic intention is replaced by environment-based selection in this account of action, just as in Darwinian biology natural selection replaces divine intention in the account of new species. Learning of new behavior is readily demonstrated by rapidly shaping new patterns through differential reinforcement and through gradual fading of discriminative stimuli. In later work, Skinner (1984) described selectionist principles as applying to behavior patterns at the evolutionary level as well as at the level of cultural practice, giving accounts with close affinity to contemporary work in anthropology (e.g. Lloyd, 1985) and biology (Dawkins, 1982; Smith, 1986).

While his theory also included other principles, Skinner emphasized reinforcement as a basic relation, examining its properties and its broad implications. Empirically, he asked what would happen if only some occurrences of a response are reinforced; he devised schedules of reinforcement to explore the many ways in which this can happen and their effects on rates, patterning, and persistence of behavior. Contemporary research has extended this to examine issues such as the conditions of self-control and preferences among schedules that are relevant to microeconomics (e.g., Rachlin, 1989) and to biological theories of foraging (e.g., Fantino and Abarca, 1985). Interpretatively, Skinner addressed the functional characteristics of verbal behavior, describing how an individual affects the behavior of others and how others teach the individual's verbal discriminations (Skinner, 1957). His approach initially was not welcomed by linguists, but later developments in linguistics are more congenial to it (Andresen, 1990). The analysis includes activities like thinking, feeling, and even introspecting as behavior to be accounted for rather than as special bases for explaining overt action. It asserts that individuals know their private thoughts and feelings less well than they know external events, because the world cannot as accurately teach individuals to discriminate the former (Skinner, 1963). This provocative position gains independent support from the philosophies of Ryle (Schnaitter, 1985) and Wittgenstein (Day, 1969).

Skinner also addressed ethical and social issues in light of reinforcement-based principles, speculatively in Walden Two, a utopian novel that sketches an experimental approach to communal living, and analytically in essays such as "The Ethics of Helping People" (Skinner, 1978), which asserts that human rights properly concern empowerment of effective action rather than access to things or services. Extensive discussions of these and other implications of reinforcement theory are provided by Skinner (1971, 1974), and by Catania and Harnad (1988). Contemporary behavioral research related to language emphasizes relationships between verbal and nonverbal behavior (Cerutti, 1989; Hayes, 1989) and issues such as the nature and origins of symbolic functioning (Sidman, 1986).

Of contemporary approaches, the most distinctly behavioral one is behavior analysis. Extending from Skinner's work, it differs philosophically and conceptually from other behaviorisms as well as from mainstream psychology (Lee, 1988). Its pragmatic contributions have proved effective in such diverse settings as health-maintenance programs concerned with weight control, smoking, and wearing of automobile seat belts; "frequent flier" marketing techniques launched by airlines; techniques for basic research on drug addiction as well as for its treatment; educational techniques of documented effectiveness for handicapped and disadvantaged, as well as for mainstream, children (Becker, 1978; Wolf et al., 1987); and innovative formats for personalized instruction at the college level (Keller, 1977). Contemporary behaviorists are represented by professional organizations that include several thousand researchers, scholars, and practitioners (Thompson, 1988) whose work is represented by more than a score of primarily behavioral journals (Wyatt et al., 1986). Thus, behaviorism has extended well beyond, while continuing an appositional role within, the specialized field where it began.

See also:OPERANT BEHAVIOR; SKINNER, B. F.; TOLMAN, EDWARD C.

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Philip N.Hineline