1.3 The Search for Objective Measurement: Behaviorism Takes Center Stage

Our discussion of the development of clinical psychology into the 1960s took us a little ahead of ourselves—we need to turn our attention back a few decades to understand some other important developments.

The schools of psychological thought that had developed by the early 20th century—structuralism, functionalism, and psychoanalysis—differed substantially from one another. But they shared an important similarity: Each tried to understand the inner workings of the mind by examining conscious perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings or by trying to elicit previously unconscious material, all of which were reported by participants in experiments or patients in a clinical setting. In each case it proved difficult to establish with much certainty just what was going on in people’s minds, due to the unreliable nature of the methodology. As the 20th century unfolded, a new approach developed as psychologists challenged the idea that psychology should focus on mental life at all. This new approach was called behaviorism, which advocated that psychologists restrict themselves to the scientific study of objectively observable behavior. (See Other Voices: Is Psychology a Science? for a modern discussion of the science of psychology.) Behaviorism represented a dramatic departure from previous schools of thought.

Watson and the Emergence of Behaviorism

In 1894, Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939), a student of Edward Titchener at Cornell, became the first woman to receive a PhD degree in psychology. Washburn went on to a highly distinguished career, spent mainly in teaching and research at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Washburn wrote an influential book, The Animal Mind, developed a theory of consciousness, and contributed to the development of psychology as a profession.

ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY

John Broadus Watson (1878–1958) believed that private experience was too idiosyncratic and vague to be an object of scientific inquiry. Science required replicable, objective measurements of phenomena that were accessible to all observers, and the introspective methods used by structuralists and functionalists were far too subjective for that. So instead of describing conscious experiences, Watson proposed that psychologists focus entirely on the study of behavior—what people do, rather than what people experience—because behavior can be observed by anyone and it can be measured objectively. Watson thought that a focus on behavior would put a stop to the endless philosophical debates in which psychologists were currently entangled, and it would encourage psychologists to develop practical applications in such areas as business, medicine, law, and education. The goal of scientific psychology, according to Watson, should be to predict and to control behavior in ways that benefit society.

Why would someone want to throw the mind out of psychology? This may seem excessive, until you notice that Watson studied the behavior of animals such as rats and birds. In such studies, inferring a mind is a matter of some debate. Shall we say that dogs have minds, for instance, but leave out pigeons? If we include pigeons, what about worms? Animal behavior specialists staked out claims in this area. In 1908, Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939) published The Animal Mind, in which she reviewed what was then known about perception, learning, and memory in different animal species. She argued that nonhuman animals, much like human animals, have conscious mental experiences (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). Watson reacted to this claim with venom. Because we cannot ask pigeons about their private, inner experiences (well, we can ask, but they never tell us), Watson decided that the only way to understand how animals learn and adapt was to focus solely on their behavior, and he suggested that the study of human beings should proceed on the same basis.

Watson was influenced by the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), who carried out pioneering research on the physiology of digestion. In the course of that work, Pavlov noticed something interesting about the dogs he was studying (Fancher, 1979). Not only did the dogs salivate at the sight of food; they also salivated at the sight of the person who fed them. The feeders were not dressed in Alpo suits, so why should the mere sight of them trigger a basic digestive response in the dogs? To answer this question, Pavlov developed a procedure in which he sounded a tone every time he fed the dogs, and after a while he observed that the dogs would salivate when they heard the tone alone. In Pavlov’s experiments, the sound of the tone was a stimulus (sensory input from the environment) that influenced the salivation of the dogs, which was a response: an action or physiological change elicited by a stimulus. Watson and other behaviorists made these two notions the building blocks of their theories, which is why behaviorism is sometimes called stimulus—response (S-R) psychology.

OTHER VOICES: Is Psychology a Science?

Timothy D. Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of several popular books, including Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change (2011).

PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO, COURTESY TIMOTHY D. WILSON

Nobody can dispute that you are taking a course in psychology, but are you taking a science course? Some critics maintain that psychology fails to meet accepted criteria for what constitutes a science. Timothy Wilson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, took on the critics by drawing from an appropriate source: the scientific literature (Wilson, 2012).

Once, during a meeting at my university, a biologist mentioned that he was the only faculty member present from a science department. When I corrected him, noting that I was from the Department of Psychology, he waved his hand dismissively, as if I were a Little Leaguer telling a member of the New York Yankees that I too played baseball.

There has long been snobbery in the sciences, with the “hard” ones (physics, chemistry, biology) considering themselves to be more legitimate than the “soft” ones (psychology, sociology). It is thus no surprise that many members of the general public feel the same way. But of late, skepticism about the rigors of social science has reached absurd heights. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to eliminate funding for political science research through the National Science Foundation. In the wake of that action, an opinion writer for the Washington Post suggested that the House didn’t go far enough. The NSF should not fund any research in the social sciences, wrote Charles Lane, because “unlike hypotheses in the hard sciences, hypotheses about society usually can’t be proven or disproven by experimentation.”

Lane’s comments echoed ones by Gary Gutting in the Opinionator blog of the New York Times. “While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions,” wrote Gutting, “the social sciences do not. The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved.”

This is news to me and the many other social scientists who have spent their careers doing carefully controlled experiments on human behavior, inside and outside the laboratory. What makes the criticism so galling is that those who voice it, or members of their families, have undoubtedly benefited from research in the disciplines they dismiss.

Most of us know someone who has suffered from depression and sought psychotherapy. He or she probably benefited from therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy that have been shown to work in randomized clinical trials.

Problems such as child abuse and teenage pregnancy take a huge toll on society. Interventions developed by research psychologists, tested with the experimental method, have been found to lower the incidence of child abuse and reduce the rate of teenage pregnancies.

Ever hear of stereotype threat? It is the double jeopardy that people face when they are at risk of confirming a negative stereotype of their group. When African American students take a difficult test, for example, they are concerned not only about how well they will do but also about the possibility that performing poorly will reflect badly on their entire group. This added worry has been shown time and again, in carefully controlled experiments, to lower academic performance. But fortunately, experiments have also showed promising ways to reduce this threat. One intervention, for example, conducted in a middle school, reduced the achievement gap by 40%.

If you know someone who was unlucky enough to be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, he may have benefited from social psychological experiments that have resulted in fairer lineups and interrogations, making it less likely that innocent people are convicted.

An often-overlooked advantage of the experimental method is that it can demonstrate what doesn’t work. Consider three popular programs that research psychologists have debunked: Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, used to prevent post-traumatic stress disorders in first responders and others who have witnessed horrific events; the D.A.R.E. anti-drug program, used in many schools throughout America; and Scared Straight programs designed to prevent at-risk teens from engaging in criminal behavior.

All three of these programs have been shown, with well-designed experimental studies, to be ineffective or, in some cases, to make matters worse. And as a result, the programs have become less popular or have changed their methods. By discovering what doesn’t work, social scientists have saved the public billions of dollars.

To be fair to the critics, social scientists have not always taken advantage of the experimental method as much as they could. Too often, for example, educational programs have been implemented widely without being adequately tested. But increasingly, educational researchers are employing better methodologies. For example, in a recent study, researchers randomly assigned teachers to a program called My Teaching Partner, which is designed to improve teaching skills, or to a control group. Students taught by the teachers who participated in the program did significantly better on achievement tests than did students taught by teachers in the control group.

Are the social sciences perfect? Of course not. Human behavior is complex, and it is not possible to conduct experiments to test all aspects of what people do or why. There are entire disciplines devoted to the experimental study of human behavior, however, in tightly controlled, ethically acceptable ways. Many people benefit from the results, including those who, in their ignorance, believe that science is limited to the study of molecules.

Wilson’s examples of psychological investigations that have had beneficial effects on society are excellent, but perhaps even more important is his point that much of psychology is based on carefully controlled experimentation using randomization procedures that the critics apparently believe—mistakenly—cannot be applied to the study of human beings. The next chapter in this textbook is devoted to explaining how psychologists apply the scientific method to the study of the mind and behavior. It should come as no surprise to learn that your textbook authors believe that psychology is indeed a science. But what kind of science is psychology? (See the Hot Science box, “Psychology as a hub science”, for one approach to this question.) Should psychology strive to come up with general laws like those of physics, or try to make precise predictions like those made by so-called hard sciences? Should psychologists focus on laboratory experimentation or spend more effort attempting to study behavior in everyday life? What methods seem most promising to you as tools for psychological investigations? There is room for debate about what kind of science psychology is and should be; we hope that you think about these questions as you read this book.

Wilson, T. D. (July 12, 2012). Stop Bullying the ‘Soft’ Sciences. In The Los Angeles Times (Op Ed). Copyright 2012 Timothy D. Wilson and Sherrell J. Aston. Reproduced by permission.

Watson applied Pavlov’s techniques to human infants. In a famous and controversial study, Watson and his student Rosalie Rayner taught an infant known as “Little Albert” to have a strong fear of a harmless white rat (and other white furry animals and toys) that he had previously not feared. Why would they do such a thing? You’ll learn more about this study in the Learning chapter, but the short answer is this: Watson believed that human behavior is powerfully influenced by the environment, and the experiments with Little Albert provided a chance to demonstrate such influence at the earliest stage of life. Neither Watson nor later behaviorists believed that the environment was the only influence on behavior (Todd & Morris, 1992), but they did think it was the most important one. Consistent with that view, Watson became romantically involved with someone prominent in his environment: Rosalie Rayner. He refused to end the affair when confronted by colleagues, and the resulting scandal forced Watson to leave his position at Johns Hopkins University. He found work in a New York advertising agency where he applied behaviorist principles to marketing and advertising (which certainly involves manipulating the environment to influence behavior!). Watson also wrote popular books that exposed a broad general audience to the behaviorist approach (Watson, 1924, 1928). The result of all these developments (Pavlov's work in the laboratory, Watson and Rayner's applications to humans, and Watson's practical applications to daily life) was that by the 1920s, behaviorism had become a dominant force in scientific psychology.

B. F. Skinner and the Development of Behaviorism

Inspired by Watson’s behaviorism, B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) investigated the way an animal learns by interacting with its environment. Here, he demonstrates the Skinner box, in which rats learn to press a lever to receive food: The lever press is the learned behavior and the food is the reinforcement that increases the frequency of future lever pressing.

NINA LEEN/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

In 1926, Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904–1990) graduated from Hamilton College. Like William James, Skinner was a young man who couldn’t decide what to do with his life. He aspired to become a writer, and his interest in literature led him indirectly to psychology. Skinner wondered whether a novelist could portray a character without understanding why the character behaved as he or she did, and when he came across Watson’s books, he knew he had the answer. Skinner completed his PhD studies in psychology at Harvard (Wiener, 1996) and began to develop a new kind of behaviorism. In Pavlov’s experiments, the dogs had been passive participants that stood around, listened to tones, and drooled. Skinner recognized that in everyday life, animals don’t just stand there—they do something! Animals act on their environments in order to find shelter, food, or mates, and Skinner wondered if he could develop behaviorist principles that would explain how they learned to act in those situations.

Skinner built what he called a conditioning chamber but what the rest of the world would forever call a Skinner box. The box has a lever and a food tray, and a hungry rat could get food delivered to the tray by pressing the lever. Skinner observed that when a rat was put in the box, it would wander around, sniffing and exploring, and would usually press the bar by accident, at which point a food pellet would drop into the tray. After that happened, the rate of bar pressing would increase dramatically and remain high until the rat was no longer hungry. Skinner saw evidence for what he called the principle of reinforcement, which states that the consequences of a behavior deter mine whether it will be more or less likely to occur again. The concept of reinforcement became the foundation for Skinner’s new approach to behaviorism (see the Learning chapter), which he formulated in a landmark book, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (Skinner, 1938).

Skinner set out to use his ideas about reinforcement to help improve the quality of everyday life. He was visiting his daughter’s fourth-grade class when he realized that he might be able to improve classroom instruction by breaking a complicated task into small bits and then using the principle of reinforcement to teach children each bit (Bjork, 1993). He developed automatic devices known as teaching machines that did exactly that (Skinner, 1958). The teaching machine asked a series of increasingly difficult questions that built on the students’ answers to the simpler ones. To learn a complicated math problem, for instance, students would first be asked an easy question about the simplest part of the problem. They would then be told whether the answer was right or wrong, and if a correct response was made, the machine would move on to a more difficult question. Skinner thought that the satisfaction of knowing they were correct would be reinforcing and help students learn.

Skinner’s well-publicized questioning of such cherished notions as free will led to a rumor that he had raised his own daughter in a Skinner box. This urban legend, while untrue, likely originated from the climate-controlled, glass-encased crib that he invented to protect his daughter from the cold Minnesota winter. Skinner marketed the crib under various names, including the “Air-crib” and the “Heir Conditioner,” but it failed to catch on with parents.

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If fourth graders and rats could be successfully trained, then why stop there? In the controversial books, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) and Walden II (1948/1986), Skinner laid out his vision of a utopian society in which behavior was controlled by the judicious application of the principle of reinforcement (Skinner, 1971). In those books he put forth the simple but stunning claim that our subjective sense of free will is an illusion and that when we think we are exercising free will, we are actually responding to present and past patterns of reinforcement. We do things in the present that have been rewarding in the past, and our sense of “choosing” to do them is nothing more than an illusion. In this, Skinner echoed the sentiments of philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), who several centuries earlier had noted that “men are deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. As to their saying that human actions depend on the will, these are mere words without any corresponding idea” (1677/1982, p. 86).

Skinner argued that his insights could be used to increase human well-being and solve social problems. Not surprisingly, that claim sparked an outcry from critics who believed that Skinner was giving away one of our most cherished attributes—free will—and calling for a repressive society that manipulated people for its own ends. The criticism even extended to TV Guide, which featured an interview with Skinner and called his ideas “the taming of mankind through a system of dog obedience schools for all” (Bjork, 1993, p. 201). Given the nature of Skinner’s ideas, the critics’ attacks were understandable—he had seriously underestimated how much people cherish the idea of free will—but in the sober light of hindsight, they were clearly overblown. Skinner did not want to turn society into a “dog obedience school” or strip people of their personal freedoms. Rather, he argued that an understanding of the principles by which behavior is generated could be used to increase the social welfare, which is precisely what happens when a government launches advertisements to encourage citizens to drink milk or quit smoking. The result of all the controversy, however, was that Skinner’s fame reached a level rarely attained by psychologists. A popular magazine that listed the 100 most important people who ever lived ranked Skinner just 39 points below Jesus Christ (Herrnstein, 1977).