behaviourism

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The view that the actions of an individual occur as responses to stimuli. Through constant repetition, the individual learns to make the same, ‘correct’ response to a given stimulus; the ‘classic’ example comes from the experimental work of I. P. Pavlov (trans. and ed. G. V. Anrep, 1927), who rang a bell before he fed his dogs. He was thus able to condition dogs into salivating when they heard the sound of a bell, even when the food was no longer provided.

Thus, some psychologists claimed, it should be possible to predict the learned behaviour that the individual would act out for each stimulus. This is the stimulus-response model.

Behaviourism has been widely rejected by social scientists who note that it over-simplifies human behaviour and takes no account of the mental processes involved in the perception of, and response to, a stimulus; it neglects all the aspects of human behaviour which cannot easily be observed.

1. Behaviourism is a school of psychology that takes the objective observation of behaviour, as measured by responses to stimuli, as the only proper subject for study and the only basis for its theory, without any reference to conscious experience.

2. Behaviouralism is a movement in political science which insists on analysing (only) the observable behaviour of political actors. The two movements have much intellectual background in common.

Psychological behaviourism is driven by the belief that the mind is unexaminable, except in anatomical specimens. The only proper subject of study, in humans or other animals, is their behaviour in response to external stimuli. This led some psychologists, notably B. F. Skinner in his briefly notorious Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), to reject the whole of political philosophy and ethics in favour of producing desired social effects by conditioning. A similar gritty positivism underlies economists' insistence that their proper study is revealed preference: what people do as revealed by their choices, rather than what they say they do.

Behaviouralism in political science emerged in the 1940s, was dominant in the United States until the early 1970s, and is still influential. It was driven by similar but less extreme impatience with studying what people said or (said they) thought. Armed with the newly developed tools of survey research, it turned away from the study of constitutions and from saying how states ought to be ruled to the study of the behaviour of political actors and to statements about how states actually were ruled. Behaviourists were mostly drawn to subjects about which quantitative data could be obtained, and thus the study of mass political behaviour was promoted at the expense of studying elites. Behaviourism and rational choice were initially hostile to each other, but have become reconciled.

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In psychology behaviourism, associated with Watson and such researchers as Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), was first of all a methodological view, counselling the avoidance of introspection and the subjective in favour of the scientific measurement of behaviour and its causes. In later hands, particularly those of B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), the view became identified with a simplistic vision of the springs of human action, and with the prospect of control of action by relatively simple manipulation of the stimuli and patterns of reinforcement that are allowed to impinge on an agent. Skinner's belief that the explanation of behaviour through belief, intention, and desire is somehow unscientific, or the preserve of ‘mentalists’, has also lost ground to the development of cognitive studies.

Philosophically the doctrine of behaviourism is that mental states are logical constructions out of dispositions to behaviour, or in other words, that describing the mental aspects of a person is a shorthand for describing the various dispositions to behaviour that the person possesses. The most influential work promoting this point of view was The Concept of Mind (1949) by Ryle which urged behaviourism as the best defence against the Cartesian myth of the ‘ghost in the machine’. The extent to which Wittgenstein, writing the Philosophical Investigations at the same time, intended to promote a behaviourist doctrine is subject to dispute. Like other reductionist doctrines behaviourism fell foul of the difficulty of providing workable analyses, notably because of the holism of the mental, or the fact that how a person behaves is not a function of one belief or one desire, but of a whole field or network of beliefs and desires. The modification to take care of this turns behaviourism into its more popular modern successor, functionalism.

A school of psychology that stresses an objective natural science approach to psychological questions. Behaviourists usually study the principles of learning, for example, through animal experiments, then apply these principles to understanding and manipulating human behaviour. The main tenet of behaviourism is that only observable behaviour can be scientifically studied. Although this observable behaviour may include verbal behaviour, which expresses thoughts, behaviourists tend to ignore mental functions; they concentrate their studies on stimulus-response relationships and the circumstances under which conditioning takes place. Behaviourism has influenced sports psychology in procedures such as behaviour modification, and the use of rewards and punishments in coaching.