The central tenet of behaviourism is that thoughts, feelings, and intentions, all mental processes, do not determine what we do. Our behaviour is the product of our conditioning. We are biological machines and do not consciously act; rather we
react to stimuli.
In 1913,
John B. Watson argued that human psychology could do without the concept of
consciousness and the technique of
introspection. Instead, people could be studied objectively, as are cats, monkeys, and rats, by observing their behaviour. Watson claimed that research on consciousness had led nowhere because investigators who contemplated consciousness could never really agree about what was going on 'in the mind'. Behaviour was public. Two scientists could time how long it takes a rat to get to the end of a maze or how much of an evening John spends dancing with Jane. This approach came as a shock because, in its early days, psychology was linked closely to philosophy. The assertion that human beings were observable like animals jolted many pioneers who assumed that humankind was a cut above the rest of nature. Watson, furthermore, did not want behaviourism to be just an academic theory. Its goal ought to be 'the control and prediction of behaviour'. If you could predict behaviour, it would show psychology was a science, just like physics, and if you could control behaviour, you could improve life.
The history of behaviourism has had its ironies. Though Watson was forced out of psychology because of a divorce scandal and temporarily reduced to selling rubber boots, behaviourism came to dominate Anglo-American psychology from the early 1920s to the mid-1950s. Moreover, though it came under increasing attack for neglecting not just consciousness but feelings, it shaped much of psychology in the 20th century. Even a psychoanalyst,
Anna Freud, explained in a late interview that it was well worth observing how children used toys, responded to tests, or ate meals. 'The analyst as behaviourist', she pointed out, 'can use pieces of behaviour to infer for example how a child deals with anxiety or frustration.' It is a mark of the success of behaviourism that even those who were radically opposed to it conceded that psychology has to involve studying actual behaviour. Watson and his followers were remarkable in claiming that psychology should study nothing else. Watson himself, however, did not quite stick to this extreme position: he was always willing to listen to what people said about what they did and, in
A Balance Sheet of the Self, he suggested that psychology students ought first to analyse their own behaviour, reactions, and fears before being allowed to practise on anyone else.
Behaviourism has featured in political literature. Two nightmares and one Utopia were inspired by the notion that it is possible to condition people's behaviour. Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World and George Orwell's
1984 both feared that advances in psychology had given the state the technology with which to control individuals. In B. F. Skinner's
Walden Two, psychology is also in power. But Skinner, a behaviourist, firmly believed that its insights could be used to make people better and happier. In his community there is harmony, love, cooperation, and creativity, because human beings have been reinforced to behave that way to each other. Many critics of behaviourism have argued that
Walden Two is, in its cloying, apple-pie harmony, just as oppressive as the Orwell and Huxley nightmares. Be that as it may, these three books bear witness to the cultural importance of behaviourism. The only other school of psychology to have impressed the 20th century as much was
psychoanalysis.
Watson was very much responsible for the initial success of behaviourism. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1878. His mother Emma was a zealous Baptist; his father Pickens was a misfit who enjoyed bourbon whiskey and eventually ran away from his pious wife to live with two Indian women. Religious Greenville was shocked and vitriolic; this helped make Watson detest religion, and was to prove important in his development — and that of behaviourism. After a difficult adolescence during which he was arrested for 'nigger bashing' and for firing a gun in the middle of Greenville, Watson went to Furman University; there 'I cut my teeth on metaphysics'. Having graduated, he went to the University of Chicago to study under the philosopher
John Dewey. But Watson soon became disillusioned with Dewey and turned to the study of animal behaviour. His doctoral thesis, 'Animal learning', looked not at how rats run mazes but at how they learn a variety of tricks including getting out of a box and opening a drawbridge.
In 1903, psychology was very young. Before the start of its first laboratories in 1879, it had often been called experimental philosophy, and in many universities psychologists still worked under the department of philosophy. It is not surprising that much of the discipline was rather abstract. Much effort was devoted to introspection and the unravelling of consciousness. In 1903, introspecting did not mean brooding on one's
psyche but rather trying to dissect what was going on inside one's mind. Psychologists believed that a trained observer could report on what was going on in his consciousness when he saw dots, waited for a tone, or was asked to respond to a picture by pressing a button. Taking their models from chemistry and physics, they hoped to work out what were the 'atoms' of consciousness, but different subjects reported very different mental processes.
Introspection made Watson acerbic. 'I hated to serve as a subject,' he wrote in an autobiographical note in 1936; 'I didn't like the stuffy artificial instructions given to subjects. I always was uncomfortable and acted unnaturally. ... More and more the thought presented itself. Can't I find out by watching their behaviour everything the other students are finding out by using
O's.'
O's were introspective observers. Evidence that he began to be highly critical of orthodox ideas does not depend only on his memory. He raised the possibility of studying humans like animals with
James Angell, his doctoral supervisor. Angell told him to stick to animals. This dismayed Watson and, with the pressure of finishing his doctorate, it led to a short breakdown. But he did not abandon his critique. He vowed to a friend that he would remodel psychology.
By 1908, Watson had a national reputation as 'an animal man'. He took the professorship of psychology at Johns Hopkins University and began to read widely in human psychology. He tested some of his ideas in letters to Robert Yerkes, an animal psychologist. Yerkes warned that Watson was too extreme; yet, in 1912, in a series of summer lectures at Columbia University, Watson outlined his critique. The lectures were well attended, and Watson, given the radical nature of his ideas, was nervous about how they would be received. Angell, he had heard, 'thinks I am crazy. I should not be surprised if that is the general consensus of opinion'.
The lectures, published in 1913, remain the text for behaviourism. Psychology 'as the behaviourist views it is a purely objective branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the control and prediction of behaviour'. Introspection was no help and psychologists should not judge the value of their data by whether it shed any light on the intricacies of consciousness. The behaviourist 'recognises no dividing line between man and brute.' Watson's dislike of religion, learned in Greenville, made him hostile to the idea that human beings were superior organisms with souls.
He made much fun of the failure of introspection. 'If you can't observe 3–9 states of clearness in attention, your introspection is poor. If, on the other hand, a feeling seems reasonably clear to you, your introspection is again faulty.' Sweeping such mystical nonsense away would enable psychology to become a proper science linked to biology rather than to metaphysics.
Rejecting introspection was easy; developing a coherent theory of how human beings behaved was rather harder. Watson drew heavily on the work of
Pavlov, who had shown that you could condition dogs to salivate not just at the sight of food but at the sound of a bell that preceded food. A reflex like salivation was malleable. Watson argued that human behaviour is built on just such conditioning. He claimed that almost all behaviour is learnt: if one gets up every time a lady enters the room, one is acting not out of politeness but because behaviour is a chain of well-set reflexes. Watson claimed that what determined the next item of behaviour a person 'emitted' was
recency and
frequency — what had occurred just before and what, in the past, had been the response a person made to that particular stimulus: if one usually gets up when a lady enters the room, one is very likely, if a lady enters the room now, to get up again. The behaviour may be explained as a polite action, but it is a reaction that could have been predicted. In Watson's scheme, rewards and punishments were not crucial.
In 1916, Watson began to study how children develop. He wanted to isolate the most important early reflexes on which conditioning could build. He also examined the idea of applying such ideas to psychiatry. In the early 1920s, he reported a study of Little Albert, a child who was taught to fear rats and then not to fear them entirely through manipulating. This paper (whose integrity has been disputed) was an inspiration to behaviour therapists who aim to train people out of their phobias and neuroses.
The historian John Burnham has warned against being romantic about Watson. Other psychologists were inching towards behaviourism, too. Burnham stressed T. S. Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions which states that scientific revolutions occur when the field is ripe for a new paradigm. According to this view, Watson prevailed because the prevailing mood was right. But Kuhn's theory may not fit psychology too well. In arguing for behaviourism, Watson was not so much making a new discovery as offering a new philosophy and methodology. Behaviourism was a self-conscious revolution against consciousness. Some traditional psychologists grasped its dangers very well and reacted with hostility: James Angell said privately that Watson should be 'spanked', while Watson said of E. B. Titchener that he 'roasted me'. There is some dispute about how quickly behaviourist ideas spread through American psychology, but by 1920 Watson was recognized as one of the leading American psychologists.
In the 1930s and 1940s, behaviourism became very much laboratory based. B. F. Skinner (see
behaviourism, B. F. Skinner on and
Skinner box) made his name through his studies of how to reward pigeons and other creatures;
Clark Hull, perhaps the leading behaviourist of the 1940s, devised immensely complicated models of animal behaviour. These developments make it easy to imagine that Watson was bent not only on making psychology scientific but on imprisoning it in the laboratory. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In
Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919), Watson argued passionately that psychology should be relevant to real life. Scientists should analyse what people did in the factory, the office, the home, and even the bedroom. He initiated studies on subjects as varied as how well one can throw darts while drunk and the effects of anti-venereal disease propaganda on the sex lives of GIs. Behaviourism was to be a psychology of real life. But after the divorce scandal he had to resign from Johns Hopkins and could not see his programme through. Following his job as a travelling salesman, the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson employed him. Advertising was to benefit from his psychological skills — he pioneered many modern advertising techniques — but he was lost to serious psychology. He was only 42 at the time of his divorce, an age at which many psychologists begin doing their best work.
Behaviourism as it developed between 1913 and 1920 had many problems. It was a fluid theory. Watson tended to ignore the power of reinforcement. There was no convincing account of language, let alone of thought. Skinner later attempted to remedy this with his
Verbal Behavior (1957); further research showed conclusively, however, that we do not just learn language but that we are innately 'wired' to speak. Then, from 1920 and into the 1930s, American universities expanded quickly and many new departments of psychology were set up. Behaviourism was in an attractive position because it seemed to ensure that psychology could be scientific. Most psychologists accepted Watson's methods though not his vision of applying psychology objectively to all of life. Behaviourism became narrower than it might have been if he had remained active.
The three major figures among those who developed behaviourism through the 1930s and 1940s were Edward Guthrie (1886–1959), Clark Hull, and Skinner. Guthrie followed Watson most closely but dropped frequency as an important determinant of behaviour. For Guthrie, 'a combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement'. He tried to show that all learning could be explained on this principle, ignoring how it might explain novel combinations of movements.
Hull proposed a more systematic total behaviourist theory. He tried to link the external circumstances (such as the intensity of a pain stimulus or the size of a reward) with internal body states (hunger and thirst) and with specific behaviours such as the speed with which an animal will run a maze for a food reward. Hull wanted a theory of behaviour as formal as Euclid's theory of geometry, and he introduced theorems and postulates which could account for all behaviour. The scheme was a grand one, and defined precisely some internal states such as drive, and strength of habit. For example, a rat who had been deprived of food for seven hours was likely to be hungrier than a rat deprived of food for three hours, unless the seven-hour rat had been used to going without food for longer. Hull perfected his system over some twenty years, but it had its problems. First, some experiments had inconvenient results. For example, Hull argued that habit strength built up slowly. It could therefore be expected that, for an animal used to doing
X for reward
Y, if the reward was reduced it would still tend to do
X because of the habit strength attached to
X. In fact, diminishing rewards reduced the behaviour fast. Then, as Hull tried to accommodate such results, internal inconsistencies in the theory began to creep in. He succeeded in offering a very grand vision of a theory that was precise and quantifiable. His books are full of equations. But by 1952, the year of his death, he knew that he had not quite succeeded, and it may be that his failure to make his system convince affected the ambitions of psychology. Perhaps it was too soon to attempt a comprehensive theory of behaviour.
Skinner now became the leading exponent of behaviourism. His first major theoretical contribution had tended to go against Watson's ideas. Arriving at Harvard in 1929 to work for his doctorate, Skinner was committed to a scientific and practical psychology. But he grew dissatisfied with basing everything on the reflex. It seemed to him not only that people respond to the environment but also that 'behaviour operates on the environment to generate consequences'. If a rat gets food every time it presses a lever, it is operating on the environment. Skinner argued, therefore, that most behaviour involves operant conditioning. We behave the way we do because of the consequences our past behaviour has generated. If every time a man takes his wife out to dinner, she is very loving, he is likely to learn to take her out to dinner if he wants her to be loving. Though this example (like many of Skinner's) involves description of behaviour in which motives, feelings, and intents appear to matter, Skinner himself was always scathing about what he described as 'the mentalists'. For Skinner, it is the history of reinforcements that determines behaviour. Consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, and feelings are not causes of actions but consequences. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled without reference to them.
Skinner made famous the notion of
shaping. By controlling the rewards and punishments the environment offers in response to particular behaviours, you can shape behaviour. Pigeons can be 'shaped' even to play ping-pong. Psychiatric patients can be 'shaped' to behave in less anxious and more socially acceptable ways. Much of Skinner's detailed technical work was aimed at discovering the different effects of different schedules of reinforcement. Which are most effective: regular rewards, irregular rewards, or a mixture of the two?
The controversies Skinner has fuelled arise largely because, like Watson, he was not content to see behaviourism merely as a scientific method; rather it offers a way of organizing our lives better. Skinner has been accused of helping to perfect technologies of control, but the truth is more prosaic. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a vogue for trying out 'token economies' in penal and psychiatric institutions. Professionals tried to 'shape' the behaviour of inmates by giving them rewards for behaviour that was deemed good or appropriate. Usually, the inmates were not punished, a point Skinner liked to stress. But though some institutions continue to use such methods of 'behaviour modification', as it has been called, it would be an exaggeration to say they are widespread or entirely successful. The individual histories of human beings are too complex for their behaviour to be shaped like that of laboratory-reared birds. Moreover, Skinner claimed, human beings cling to illusions of being free to act because they think, wrongly, that without them they will lose all dignity. We are, in fact, controlled by our past and controlled by our environment. The more we realize that — the more we analyse the nature of that control — the better our situation. Herein there is a paradox that Skinner does not really explore in his enthusiasm to go against the importance of thoughts, intentions, and feelings. Skinner has certainly attracted much respect and fame but his form of classic behaviourism is now less and less in vogue especially as cognitive psychology has, since the late 1960s, suggested that it is possible to be objective about studying mental processes.
Behaviourism has been seen in different lights by different observers. The British psychologist
Donald Broadbent argued (1961) that it offers the best method for rational advance in psychology, allowing one to weed out facts from fantasy and to replace armchair speculation about the nature of the soul or the mysteries of consciousness with repeatable results. In contrast, Nehemiah Jorden asked the question (1968), 'can one positive contribution towards any increased knowledge of man be pointed to since Watson wrote his famous paper?' And answered it: 'None such can be found.' Any assessment of behaviourism has to recognize such different opinions, but almost all psychologists and psychiatrists see merit in some of Watson's ideas, while very few are strict behaviourists. One needs to study behaviour objectively. There are close links between human and animal behaviour, and conditioning does play an important part in human development. Many would also applaud the original aim of establishing a scientific psychology of life in the factory, the office, and the home. On the other hand, 70 years of research have shown that consciousness cannot be dismissed as uninteresting in human psychology and that even introspection has its uses, as one tool among many.
(Published 1987)— David Cohen
Bibliography- Broadbent, D. (1961). Behaviour.
- Cohen, D. (1979). J. B. Watson, the Founder of Behaviourism.
- Jorden, N. (1968). Themes in Speculative Psychology.
- Skinner, B. F. (1961). Walden Two.
- Watson, J. B. (1919). Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist.
