Behaviorism Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Behaviorism was a dominant school of American psychological thought from the 1930s through the 1960s. Its principal founder, John B. Watson, clearly defined behaviorism as follows: ”Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. The behaviorist recognizes no dividing line between man and brute” (Watson 1914: 158). B. F. Skinner, who developed the dominant theory of behaviorism for 30 years, was squarely on the nurture side of the nature-nurture controversy and on the deterministic side of the free will-determinism issue. He disavowed favorite psychological constructs such as consciousness, freedom, indwelling agents, dignity, and creativity. In each case Skinner argued that these examples either represent constructs from one’s own biological/ environmental histories or are behaviors in which the antecedents (controlling agents) are not clearly understood.

Although Skinner’s radical behaviorism is no longer a major player in psychological theory, the applications that his research fostered are very much a part of the contemporary scene. These applications span many areas in contemporary psychology, including clinical psychology and therapy. He gave us a strong hint of his application of learning called operant conditioning in his one and only novel, Walden Two, a book first published in 1948 and still in print. The novel represented Skinner’s attempt to engineer a utopian society based upon Skinnerian operant principles. Sometimes called social engineering, Skinner’s novel was his solution to the horrors of World War II. He hoped to engineer out of the human repertoire all negative emotions, leaving only the positive ones. This is an example of behavioral modification, and many of its elements (positive reinforcement, successive approximations, gradual change in behavior through desensitization) have been incorporated successfully in therapy today.

The principal set of events that led to the demise of behaviorism as a compelling theory was the growth of connectionism and the cognitive revolution of the 1970s, which was theoretically friendlier to the biological causes of behavior. More specifically, the Chomsky (1971)-Skinner (1957) debates of the 1960s concerning the origins and development of native languages sealed the fate of radical behaviorism, since Skinner was never able to deal with the irrepressible novelty of human speech. Young children usually speak grammatically and in novel form with each new utterance, a fact that is anathema to any learning paradigm of language acquisition.

The legacy of behaviorism for modern psychology was its insistence upon measurable behavior, thus transforming psychology from its introspective and subjective past into the world of scientific inquiry. This process allowed psychology to embrace new disciplines such as statistics and measurement theory in attempts to add legitimacy to its new endeavors at the expense of more humanistic approaches to psychology.

Bibliography:

Chomsky, N. (1971) The case against B. F. Skinner. New York Review of Books (December 30): 18—24.
Skinner, B. F. (1948) Walden Two. Macmillan, New York.
Skinner, F. (1957) Verbal Behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.
Watson, J. (1914) Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. Holt, Rinehart, Winston, New York.