Behaviorism

Emergence of Behaviorism

Behaviorism was presented to the modern world by Johns Hopkins psychology professor John Broadus Watson (1878–1958) in an influential 1913 article Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. Watson’s behaviorism is based on two claims: First, that individuals’ observations about their actions, motives, and mental processes are scientifically irrelevant. Second—and it almost follows from the first assumption—that the data of a scientific psychology must come from things that can be measured, and measured not by subject, but by a third party. As for theory, Watson didn’t even mention it: “prediction and control” of behavior was his aim. And he recognized “no dividing line between man and brute [i.e., nonhuman animals]” (1913/1948, p. 457).

None of this was entirely new; other scientists had also rejected human consciousness as a means of explaining behavior. The process by which we see, recognize, and interpret the visual world is also hidden from consciousness. The German physicist, philosopher, and physician Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) pointed out that perception operates by a sort of “unconscious inference.” In 1934, an inventor, American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. (1880–1955), built a special kind of room to illustrate the process of perceptual inference. Viewed through a peephole (i.e., from a fixed point of view), it looks like a regular room, with right-angle corners, and so on. But when a girl walks from one side of the room to the other, the girl seems to grow magically larger. The perception is wrong of course. The girl size has not changed. The reason the girl appears to grow is that the brain assumes—without the viewer’s awareness—that the angles are all right angles and the floor is level, when neither is true.

Perception involves unconsciously using very partial data to call up a complete picture of whatever the individual (unconsciously) infers he or she is seeing. Visual illusions such as the Ames room show how this process can misfire. Other examples of unconscious processes include the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon: knowing the name of the old movie star on the screen but being unable to bring it to mind until suddenly it appears. Novelists frequently say that after a certain point, their characters seem to “write themselves.” Mathematicians often say that proofs and theorems simply appear in their minds without [Page 188]any awareness of the complex calculations that must have been made to generate them.

If not conscious, these automatic processes must then be unconscious, yet Watson attacked the very idea of the unconscious. Behavior may be the product of unconscious processes, but what are they? On this, Watson’s behaviorism was silent.

Methodological Behaviorism and Radical Behaviorism

Watson and other researchers of the early 20th century used rats and other animals to study learning. The dominant behaviorists of the time were Clark L. Hull (1884–1952) at Yale University; Edward Chace Tolman (1886–1959), a cognitive behaviorist at University of California, Berkeley; and, to a lesser degree, Edwin Guthrie (1886–1959) at the University of Washington. The dominant movement, Hullian, and then neo-Hullian, behaviorism, was relabeled by B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), as methodological behaviorism. Skinner contrasted methodological behaviorism to his own proposal, termed radical behaviorism and described in his 1938 book, The Behavior of Organisms, and many later works.

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