Behaviorism trumps Cognitive Psychology? (Clara B. Jones)

Behaviorism Trumps Cognitive Psychology?

Some of the most subtle insights about Behaviorism are embedded in a joke heard on <bloggingheads.tv>. Partners were making love and, afterwards, one said, “I know it was good for you; how was it for me?” In 1990, the year of his death, B.F. Skinner gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of APA. He must have recognized that this speech would be his final opportunity to critique the discipline of psychology, and to make his case for operant conditioning, in front of a large audience. Perhaps the most controversial comment that he made in the hour long lecture was, “Cognitive science is the creationism of psychology.” Clearly, Skinner never renounced “radical behaviorism” nor, apparently, did he modify his views in response to critics such as Noam Chomsky and psychologists. In some ways, though clinical psychologists have dominated the APA for more than two decades, disagreements remain about what theoretical and empirical approaches are the most powerful (in a statistical sense) predictors of animal (including, human) behavior. A cognitive orientation currently dominates most departments of psychology in the United States. Nonetheless, most patterns of overt behavior may be expressed “automatically” in the sense that conscious and aware thought has not, unless I am mistaken, been shown to be a typical precursor to action patterns (motor patterns, “behavior”). As a demonstration of the last point, I developed a classroom exercise requiring students to think of a simple activity (e.g., cooking an egg, washing dishes, braiding hair), dividing the activity into motor patterns, and thinking through each component of the activity before expressing it. Most students found this exercise difficult or impossible to effect, and, in my experience, all students acting as subjects in this activity found it very frustrating to attempt and complete. Another, classic, demonstration entails asking a subject to fold her arms in the most natural manner to her (i.e., left or right arm on top of the other), asking her to switch her arms’ position, and finally instructing the subject that the original, habitual position must never be the one expressed in future. Most subjects recognize how difficult, if not impossible, such a change in habit would be.

While a postdoctoral fellow in population genetics at Harvard, I had an opportunity to speak with Skinner twice, one of the highlights of my academic career. At that time, I understood that Skinner acknowledged factors endogenous to the organism (e.g., genes, neurons) to be important but that factors inside the “black box” were not required to predict animal (including human) behavior. As a former research assistant to M.E.P. Seligman and a student of Behavioral Ecology, in addition to Biopsychology, I considered myself prepared to discuss with Skinner the relationship between radical behaviorism and Darwinism. I found, however, that, in our conversations, Skinner essentially repeated his ideas presented in his paper, “selection by consequences,” whereby an organism’s history of rewards or reinforcements determine its success or failure in interaction with the biotic (including social) and/or abiotic environments.

While it is likely that Skinner had little interest in speaking with me, thus investing few ideas and fewer minutes in our meetings, I think that I would have been able to detect in his comments the ability or willingness to distinguish between proximate (immediate) and ultimate (evolutionary) factors and between natural (who lives and who dies) and sexual (who reproduces and who does not) selection. To my knowledge, Skinner’s canon represents a literature of results demonstrating the precursors and effects of proximate causation, and the great psychologist may not have considered in depth the potential relationship between immediate causation as represented by operant or responding conditioning and its consequences for survival, ecological and reproductive competition, and lifetime reproductive success (“fitness”). Skinner seems to have overlooked the significance of measuring not only the results of his laboratory programs, in particular, schedules of reinforcement, but also which conditions impacted long-term success of his subjects compared to other conspecifics in the same situations, including identifying what endogenous and exogenous traits were responsible for individual consequences subsequent to reinforcement or punishment, as well as, identifying which behaviors and behavior patterns are genetically correlated and which vary within and between populations.

The influence of operant conditioning as a component of the Panopticon network is, perhaps, best symbolized by Seligman’s “learned helplessness” experiments. Indeed, this psychologist’s work utilizing aversive stimuli (electric shock) with canine subjects is a classic in its genre, becoming a highly successful model for depression, a mood disorder, and major psychopathology. In the late phase of his career, Seligman seems to have become more of a clinical researcher and theorist rather than a mainstream basic scientist. Nonetheless, his apparent transition highlights the close relationship between experimental and clinical psychology as nodes in the Panopticon Network since Seligman’s work highlights the fundamental role played by basic research as a generator of applied projects. Foucault’s Panopticon “continuum” and the Panopticon Network posited in the present text, emphasize what Foucault, with a degree and teaching experience in psychology, discussed as “power, knowledge, and discourse.” It is unfortunate that Foucault did not deconstruct clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, and “radical behaviorism”, including their relationships to one another, in an attempt to provide a deep (structural linguistic as well as semantic) understanding of each. It would have been interesting to determine, also, Skinner’s, Seligman’s, and other psychologists’ responses to Foucault.