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Behaviorism or behaviourism is an approach within psychology based on the proposition that behavior can be researched scientifically without recourse to inner mental states.

Definition

Behaviorism is a form of materialism, denying any independent significance for the mind. A similar approach may be found in political science known as "Behavioralism."

One of the assumptions many behaviorists hold is that free will is an illusion. As a result, behaviorism dictates that all behavior is determined by a combination of genetic factors and the environment, either through classical or operant conditioning.

The behaviorist school of thought ran concurrent with psychoanalytic movement, originated by the work of Sigmund Freud, in psychology in the twentieth century. Its main instigators were Ivan Pavlov, who investigated classical conditioning, John B. Watson who coined the term "behaviorism," and sought to restrict psychology to experimental methods, and B.F. Skinner who sought to give a grounding to behaviorism, conducting research on operant conditioning.

Key Concepts

Learning: A change in behavior attributed to the result of experience.

Parsimony: The principle that states in the philosophy of science, a person should always opt for the simplest explanation.

Stimulus: Anything that may affect the environment and thereby affect an individual's behavior.

Response: Any reaction to a stimulus. For behaviorists, the response is limited to any measureable behavior.

Reflex: An unlearned response that is triggered by certain stimuli.

Voluntary Response: A response that the individual has control over.

Classical Conditioning: The study of learning that focuses on reflex responses.

Operant Conditioning: The study of learning that focuses on the changes in voluntary responses as a result of their consequences.

Radical Behaviorism: A position adopted by Watson and Skinner, which stated that the study of internal processes are impossible to study objectively and are irrelevant to understanding a person's behavior.

Behavior Modification: Applying conditioning principles to alter a person's behavior.

Equipotentiality: The idea that the principles of condition should appy to all behaviors and all species.

Ethology: The study of the behavior of animals in their natural habitat.

Species-specific Behavior: Sometimes referred to as instincts, these are behaviors that are characteristic of a specific species.

The Founders of Behaviorism

J. B. Watson

Early in the 20th century, Watson argued in his book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist for a psychology which concerned itself solely with objective observation of behavior. At the time, this was a substantial break from the predominant structuralist psychology, which used the method of introspection and considered the study of behavior obsolete.

Watson, unlike many of his colleagues, studied the adjustment of organisms to their environments. More specifically, he was interested in determining the particular stimuli that led organisms to make their responses. Watson's approach was much influenced by the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered the phenomenon of classical conditioning in his famous study of dogs' digestive systems. Watson's approach emphasized physiological response and the role of stimuli in producing conditioned responses. For this reason, Watson may be described as an S-R (stimulus-response) psychologist.

Methodological behaviorism

Watson's theory persuaded most academic researchers of the importance of behavioral study. In the field of comparative psychology in particular, it was consistent with the warning note that had been struck by Lloyd Morgan's canon, against some of the more anthropomorphic work such as that of George Romanes, in which mental states had been freely attributed to animals. It was eagerly seized on by researchers such as Edward L. Thorndike who had been studying cats' abilities to escape from puzzle boxes. However, most psychologists took up a position that is now called methodological behaviorism: they acknowledged that behavior was either the only or the most effective method of objective observation in psychology.

Among well-known twentieth-century behaviorists taking this kind of position were Clark L. Hull, who described his position as neo-behaviorism, and Edward C. Tolman, who developed much of what would later become the cognitivist program. Tolman argued that rats constructed cognitive maps of the mazes they learned even in the absence of reward, and that the connection between stimulus and response (S->R) was mediated by a third component - the organism (S->O->R).

Methodological behaviorism remains the position of most experimental psychologists today. With the rise of interest in animal cognition since the 1980s, and the more unorthodox views of Donald Griffin among others, mentalistic language including discussion of consciousness is increasingly used even in discussion of animal psychology, in both comparative psychology and ethology; however, this is in no way inconsistent with the position of methodological behaviorism.

B.F. Skinner

Skinner, who carried out experimental work in the field comparative psychology from the 1930s to the 1950s, but he still Behaviorism's best known theorist and exponent until his death in 1990. Skinner developed a distinct kind of behaviorist philosophy, which came to be called radical behaviorism. He is credited with having founded a new version of psychological science, called behavioral analysis or the Experimental Analysis of Behavior after variations on the subtitle to his 1938 work The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis Of Behavior.

Skinner's Radical Behaviorism

While EAB differs from other approaches of behavioral research on numerous methodological and theoretical points, radical behaviorism departs from methodological behaviorism most notably in its acceptance of the treatment of feelings, states of mind and introspection as existent and scientifically treatable. However, radical behaviorism stops short of identifying feelings as causes of behavior. Among other points of difference were a rejection of the reflex as a model of all behavior and a defense of a science of behavior complementary to but independent of physiology.

Experimental and Conceptual Innovations

This philosophical position gained strength from the success of Skinner's early experimental work with rats and pigeons, surmised in his books The Behavior of Organisms (1938) and Schedules of Reinforcement (1957, with C. B. Ferster). Of particular importance was his discovery the operant response, of which is famously remembered through his 'Skinner Box'. An operant response contrasts with a reflex response as it is a class of structurally distinct but functionally equivalent responses. For example, while a rat might press a lever with its left paw or its right paw or its tail, all of the different responses operate on the world in the same way and achieve a common consequence. Operants are often thought of as series of responses that achieve similar ends or with respect to Operant conditioning, consequences.

Skinner's empirical work expanded on earlier research of trial-and-error learning by researchers such as Thorndike and Guthrie. Skinner's work also observed the effects of different schedules and rates of reinforcement on the rates of operant responses made by animals.

He achieved remarkable success in training animals to perform unexpected responses, to emit large numbers of responses, and to demonstrate many empirical regularities within behavior. These findings lent some credibility to his radical conceptual analysis.

Relation to language

As Skinner turned from experimental work to concentrate on the philosophical underpinnings of a science of behavior, his attention turned to human language. His book Verbal Behavior (1957) laid out a theory for functional analysis of verbal behavior. The book was strongly criticized in a review by the linguist Noam Chomsky.^[1] Skinner did not himself respond in detail; but he claimed that "[Chomsky] doesn’t know what I am talking about and for some reason is unable to understand it".^[2]

What was important for a behaviorist analysis of human behavior was not language acquisition so much as the interaction between language and overt behavior. In an essay republished in his 1969 book Contingencies of Reinforcement, Skinner took the view that humans could construct linguistic stimuli that would then acquire control over their behavior in the same way that external stimuli could. The possibility of such 'instructional control' over behavior meant that contingencies of reinforcement would not always produce the same effects on human behavior as they reliably do in other animals.

Behaviorism in philosophy

In many ways, behaviorism is both a psychological and a philosophical movement. The basic premise of radical behaviorism is that the study of behavior should be an empirical science, such as chemistry or physics. Behaviorists sought to create a discipline that forsook all hypothetical and subjective internal states of the organisms they studied.

There are approaches within analytic philosophy that have named themselves, or have been coined by others, as behaviorist. In logical behaviorism (as held, e.g., by Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel), the meaning of psychological statements are their verification conditions, which consist of performed overt behavior. Quine made use of a type of behaviorism, influenced by some of Skinner's ideas, in his own work on language. Gilbert Ryle defended a distinct strain of philosophical behaviorism, sketched in his book The Concept of Mind, in which his central claim was that instances of dualism frequently represented "category mistakes," and hence that they were really misunderstandings of the use of ordinary language.

Daniel Dennett likewise has acknowledged himself to be a type of behaviorist (Bennett 1993). It has sometimes been argued that Ludwig Wittgenstein defended a behaviorist position, and there are important areas of overlap between his philosophy, logical behaviorism, and radical behaviorism (e.g., the "beetle in a box" argument in which Wittgenstein refered to the concept wherein we imagine that each of us has a box with a beetle inside. No one can look inside anther's box, and each claims to know what a beetle is only by examining their own. Wittgenstein suggested that in such a situation, the word "beetle" could not be the name of a thing, since each of us may perceive the beetle differently; the beetle "drops out of consideration as irrelevant"). However, Wittgenstein was not a behaviorist, and his style of writing is sufficiently elliptical to admit of a range of interpretations. Mathematician Alan Turing has also sometimes been considered a behaviorist, but he himself did not make this identification.

Criticisms of Behaviorism

To some, Behaviorism is a rather deterministic view of human behavior. It is argued that by ignoring the internal psychological and mental processes, Behaviorism oversimplifies the complexity of human behavior. Some would even argue that the strict nature of radical behaviorism essentially defines human beings as mechanisms without free will. This approach has also been critized for its inability to account for learning or changes in behavior that occur in absence of environmental input; since such occurences would signal the presence of an internal psychological or mental process. Research by ethologists shows that the principles of conditioning are not universal and this restricts the behaviorist claim of equipotentiality across conditioning principles.

Legacy

The study of Operant conditioning and Classical Conditioning has greatly contributed to the understanding of human behavior in psychology. Even though it is no longer an authoritative source, behaviorism was a dominant force in North American psychology for a considerable amount of time. Behaviorism grew out of a reactionary response to introspective structuralists, who were unsuccessful in explaining mental processes. In manys, behaviorists paved the way for a new scientifically based psychology.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Baum, W. M. (2005) Understanding behaviorism: Behavior, Culture and Evolution. Blackwell.
Bennett, Daniel C. (1993) The Message is: There is no Medium (reply to Jackson, Rosenthal, Shoemaker & Tye), Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 53, (4), 889-931, Dec. 1993.
Ferster, C. B., and Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Mills, John A., Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology, Paperback Edition, New York University Press 2000
Lattal, K.A and Chase, P.N. (2003) "Behavior Theory and Philosophy". Plenum
Plotnik, Rod. (2005) Introduction to Psychology. Thomson-Wadsworth (ISBN 0534634079)
Rachlin, H. (1991) Introduction to modern behaviorism. (3rd edition.) New York: Freeman.
Skinner,B.F., Beyond Freedom & Dignity, Hackett Publishing Co, Inc 2002
Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Skinner, B. F. (1945). The operational analysis of psychological terms. Psychological Review. 52, 270-277, 290-294.
Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior (ISBN 0029290406)
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Skinner, B. F. (1969). Contingencies of reinforcement: a theoretical analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts
Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences. Science, 213, 501-514.
Staddon, J. (2001) The new behaviorism: Mind, mechanism and society. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Pp. xiii, 1-211.
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158-177. (on-line)
Watson, J. B. (1919). Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist
Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviorism
Zuriff, G. E. (1985). Behaviorism: A Conceptual Reconstruction, Columbia University

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↑ Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language (35): 26-58.
↑ Skinner, B. F. (1972). I Have Been Misunderstood.... Center Magazine (March-April): 63.

[1] Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language (35): 26-58.

[2] Skinner, B. F. (1972). I Have Been Misunderstood.... Center Magazine (March-April): 63.

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