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THE NEW BEHAVIORISM Mind, Mechanism and Society

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THE NEW BEHAVIORISM Mind, Mechanism and Society THE NEW BEHAVIORISM Mind, Mechanism and Society John Staddon CONTENTS Part 1: History Chapter 1: Early Behaviorism Chapter 2: Behaviorism and Learning Psychology Part 2: Radical Behaviorism Chapter 3: Radical Behaviorism, I: Method Chapter 4: Radical Behaviorism, II: Explanation Chapter 5: Skinner and Theory Chapter 6: Variation and Selection Chapter 7: Behavior-Evolution Parallels Chapter 8: Rationality Chapter 9: Truth, Science and Behaviorism Chapter 10: Free Will and Utopia Chapter 11: Values Chapter 12: Skinner and Mental Life Part 3: The New Behaviorism Chapter 13: Cognitivism and The New Behaviorism i Chapter 14: Internal States: The Logic of Historical Systems Chapter 15: Consciousness and Theoretical Behaviorism Postscript to Parts 1-3: Alchemy of the Mind Part 4: Behaviorism and Society Chapter 16: Law, Punishment and Behaviorism Chapter 17: The Health-Care Schedule Chapter 18: Reinforcement and ‘Socialized’ Medicine Chapter 19: Teaching ii Preface to the Second Edition This edition is almost completely rewritten. It is about 45% longer than the first. I cover two new social issues and also devote more space to the philosophy of cognitivism and the science behind theoretical behaviorism. B. F. Skinner figures less prominently in this edition than the last, but his work is a theme that still runs through many chapters – because his influence has been so great and his writings raise so many provocative issues that are identified with behavior- ism. But, as readers of the first edition detected, my position is far from Skinnerian. Many reviewers thought well of the first edition but, naturally, I want to attend to those who did not. Some thought I was too hard on B. F. Skinner. One even accused me of an ad hominem attack. Many thought that I did not present a favorable enough view of behaviorism and that my own position was little short of…cognitive. One otherwise sympathetic critic thought the book “conservative” – not a term that will endear it to most psychologists. The critics are right to this extent. The book was not and is not an advertisement for rad- ical behaviorism. It is, first, a short history of a fascinating movement in psychology. Second, it is an analysis of what I think went wrong with behaviorism as time went on. Third it is a pro- posal for a theoretical behaviorism. I describe the philosophy behind theoretical behaviorism as well as some more or less detailed applications of the approach to laboratory phenomena, rang- ing from choice behavior in animals to human perception. I suggest that theoretical behaviorism can provide a unified framework for a science of behavior that is now fragmented. And finally, I suggest how it can provide insight into broader practical issues such as law and punishment, the health-care system and teaching. Behaviorism began with a healthy skepticism about introspection. Conscious thought tells us very little about the springs of action. Behaviorism of all types is right about that. It is right to emphasize action over information and representation, which is the theme, even the pre- occupation, of cognitive psychology. On the other hand, not all cognitive psychology is philo- sophically or experimentally flawed. It should not be ignored. Behaviorism is right also to em- phasize biology and evolution, which is driven not by thought but by action. And radical behav- iorism, as advanced by B. F. Skinner and his students, was wonderfully right in developing new experimental methods for studying the behavior of individual organisms in real time. The dis- covery of reinforcement schedules was a great advance and opened up a huge new field to be explored. But behaviorism also lost its way in several respects. Methodological behaviorism – ne- obehaviorism – went along with the standard methods of psychology: group comparisons and settling for statistical significance as a measure of scientific success. I have little to say about it. I do discuss the serious flaws of null-hypothesis statistical testing in Chapter 9. Although radical behaviorism accepts evolutionary continuity between man and animals, its has consistently neglected the nature part of the nature-nurture dyad. It also imposed ridicu- lous strictures on theoretical development, to the point that behaviorist theory became an oxymo- ron. Radical behaviorism also became increasingly isolated from the rest of psychology through a self-consciously idiosyncratic vocabulary and a naïve epistemology that caused many philoso- iii phers to dismiss the whole field. Fred Skinner bears much responsibility for that and for the lim- its he placed on theory. And finally, Skinner’s pronouncements on society and its reform led him to extrapolate an infant laboratory science to social realms far beyond its reach. My response to this is not so much “conservative” as just cautious. Human society is immensely complex. Political decisions involve values as much as techniques. Much has been written on the organization of society. Not all of it is worthless. Almost none was addressed by Skinner. To “design a culture” as one might design a Ford is to confuse ‘culture’ with contraption, and place oneself far above humani- ty in general as a sort of all-wise, all-knowing philosopher king. We would all like to find a phi- losopher king, but they are in short supply. Skinner was not one. The book is in four parts. The first part (Chapters 1, and 2) is a brief history of behavior- ism. The second part (Chapters 3-12) is the longest. It discusses the experimental methods and theory associated with Skinnerian behaviorism and the single-subject method (Chapters 3 and 4), Skinner’s views on theory, the parallel between learning and evolution, and the theoretical rela- tions between behavioral psychology and economics (Chapters 5-8). I have a longish discussion of choice behavior and matching, a laboratory phenomenon that has played an important part in the development of behaviorist theory. This section ends with a discussion of the new consensus on a Darwinian, selection/variation approach to learning, the limitations of Skinner’s utopian ideas and finally Skinner’s idiosyncratic view of mental life (Chapter 9-12). Two chapters deal with Skinner’s still-influential proposal to ‘design a culture.’ The popularity of behavioral eco- nomics, exemplified by books like Nudge1, the policies of New York’s Mayor Bloomberg about things like smoking and obesity, and the continuing efforts, especially in Europe and the UK, to diminish the role of punishment in the legal system, all reflect the influence of Skinner’s ideas. Skinner, like many ‘scientific imperialists’ today, believed that science provides the ends as well as the means for enlightened social policy. So it’s OK to use science to trick the citizenry as long as it gets them to do the right thing. I examine all this in Chapters 10 and 11. The third part is about theoretical behaviorism: What it is, how it deals with some learn- ing phenomena and with phenomena of consciousness, in humans and in animals. (Chapters 13- 15). Part 4 is a beginning attempt to analyze the reinforcement contingencies that underlie three major areas of society: the legal system, health care and teaching. John Staddon Durham, North Carolina, April, 2013. 1 Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a book written by Richard H.Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Yale University Press, 2008. See also http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16Sunstein- t.html?pagewanted=all iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people were kind enough to comment on chapters and on talks I have given on some of the topics of the book. I thank in particular John Malone, Nancy Innis, Jennifer Higa, Kent Ber- ridge. Jérémie Jozefowiez, Armando Machado and Peter Killeen. I thank Peter Harzem for the great Pavlov quotation and for detailed comments on the draft of the first edition. I am especial- ly grateful to Armando Machado (for the first edition) and Jérémie Jozefowiez (for both editions) , whose thoughtful comments made me think very hard about many tricky points. I thank the University of Western Australia for hospitality when I was preparing a final revision of the first edition. Two friends, Charles Hosler and Ralph Heinz, kindly read and commented on the first edition. I gratefully acknowledge research support from the Alexander von Humboldt Founda- tion, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Without the long- term support provided by a Senior Research Scientist Award from NIMH, and Duke University’s willingness to cooperate by relieving me of most teaching and administrative responsibilities, this work could never have been undertaken. Needless to say, all errors and misjudgments are entirely my responsibility. v CHAPTER 1: EARLY BEHAVIORISM Behaviorism was once the major force in American psychology. It participated in great advanc- es in our understanding of reward and punishment, especially in animals. It drove powerful movements in education and social policy. As a self-identified movement, it is today a vigorous but isolated offshoot. But its main ideas have been absorbed into experimental psychology. A leading cognitive psycholo- gist, writing on the centennial of B. F. Skinner’s birth, put it this way: “Behaviorism is alive and I am a behaviorist.”2 I will describe where behaviorism came from, how it dominated psychology during the early part of the twentieth century, and how philosophical flaws and concealed ideologies in the original formulation sidelined it − and left psychology prey
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