Psychology Question

316 CHAPTER 11 The functionalists tended to be more ideographic than nomothetic, that is, they were more interested in what made organisms different from one another than what made them similar. ■■ All functionalists were directly or indirectly influenced by William James. ■■ Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine Before we review the thoughts of some members of the school of functionalism, we too must consider the foundation provided by William James. William James William James (1842–1910) represents a transition between European psychology and U.S. psychology. His purpose was never to suggest a school of thought, but his ideas contained the seeds that would grow into the school of functionalism. As mentioned, James had already brought prominence to U.S. psychology through the publication of Principles two years before Titchener arrived at Cornell. James was 25 years older than Titchener, and James died in 1910 when Titchener’s influence was at its peak. James’s psychology, however, became far more influential than Titchener’s. In fact, soon after the publication of Principles, James began to compete with Wundt for the unofficial title of the worldwide voice of psychology. In 1896, the Third International Congress of Psychology met in Munich. Wundt’s laboratory was 17 years old, and he was 64. James’s Principles was six years old, and he was 54. At the time, a Berlin newspaper referred to Wundt as “the psychological Pope of the Old World” and to James as “the psychological Pope of the New World” (Hilgard, 1987, p. 37). Although neither Wundt nor James attended the conference, the designation of “pope” indicated their status. William James was born in New York City. His brother Henry, who would become a famous novelist, was born 15 months later. Their father, Henry James Sr., who had lost a leg in an adolescent accident, embraced the mystical Christian theology of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). So enchanted was the elder James that he wrote a book titled The Secret of Swedenborg. Henry James Sr. was independently wealthy and believed his children should William James receive the best possible education. After several private schools and tutors in the United States, the father decided that a European education would be even better; so William attended schools in Switzerland, France, Germany, and England. His early life was highly stimulating, involving a great deal of travel and exposure to intense intellectual discussions at home. In 1860, at 18 years of age and after showing a talent for painting, William decided on a career as an artist. However, his father was so distressed by this career choice that he moved the family away from William’s art teacher and even threatened suicide if William persisted on this course. Unfortunately for William, no career choice seemed to satisfy his father: Mr. James was not only critical of William’s desire to paint, but when he followed his father’s wishes and chose science, the elder James belittled that choice. Finally when William embraced metaphysics because his father praised philosophy as the most elevated intellectual pursuit, Henry maligned William for not adopting the proper kind. (Bjork, 1983, pp. 22–23) Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or A m er i ca n P s y ch o l o g y a n d F u n ct i o n a l i s m In 1861, James enrolled as a chemistry student at Harvard University. He soon switched to physiology to prepare himself for a career in medicine, and in 1864 (at the age of 22), he enrolled in Harvard’s medical school. James’s medical studies were interrupted when he accepted an invitation from Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), the famous Harvard biologist, to go on an expedition to Brazil. Seasick most of the time, James also came down with smallpox. Once he recovered, he decided to return to continue his medical studies, but after arriving back home, his health deteriorated, his eyesight became weak, and he experienced severe back pains. In 1867, James returned to Germany and bathed in mineral springs in hopes of improving his back problems. While in Germany, he began to read psychology and philosophy and attended lectures by Helmholtz and Du-Bois Reymond. In his diary, James shared a letter written to a friend in 1867, which shows that this was the time when James discovered Wundt and agreed with Wundt that it was time for psychology to become a science (James, 1920, Vol. 1, pp. 118–119). James’s Crisis James returned to the United States and finally obtained his medical degree from Harvard in 1869 at the age of 27. After graduation, however, James’s health deteriorated further, and he became deeply depressed. Apparently, one reason for his depression was the implications of materialistic physiology and psychology that had so impressed him. It was clear to James that if the materialism was correct, it applied to him as well. This meant that anything that happened to him was beyond his control. His depression, for example, was a matter of fate, and it made no sense to attempt to do anything about it. James’s acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution exacerbated the problem. In Darwin’s view, there is variation, natural selection, and survival of the fittest; there is no freedom or choice. A major turning point in James’s life came when he read an essay on free will by Charles-Bernard Renouvier (1815–1903). After reading this essay, James (1920) wrote in his diary: 317 I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second “Essais” and see no reason why his definition of free will—“The sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. … Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. (Vol. 1, pp. 147–148) This change in beliefs improved James’s depression, and he became highly productive. Here we also have the beginnings of James’s pragmatism— the belief that if an idea works, it is valid. That is, the ultimate criterion for judging an idea should be the idea’s usefulness or “cash-value.” At this point, we also see the conflict James perceived between the objective, scientific viewpoint based on determinism and personal, subjective feelings, such as the feeling that one’s will is free. James used pragmatism to solve the problem. While using the scientific method in psychology, he said, it was necessary to assume that human behavior is determined. As useful as this assumption was, however, it had limits. Certain metaphysical questions lay beyond the reach of science, and a subjective approach was more useful in dealing with them. Therefore, according to James, both a scientific and a philosophical approach must be used in the study of human behavior and thought. To assume that all aspects of humans could be known through scientific research, he said, was akin to a physician giving all his patients tics because it was the only thing he could cure. If something about humans—for example, free will—could not be studied effectively using Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 318 CHAPTER 11 a certain method, James said, one did not throw out that aspect of human existence. Rather, one sought alternative methods of investigation. In other words, for James, it was not proper for science to determine which aspects of human experience are worthy of investigation and which are not. James proposed a radical empiricism by which all consistently reported aspects of human experience are worthy of study. About James, Heidbreder (1933) said, “It was his opinion that nothing that presented itself as a possibility should be dismissed without a hearing” (p. 157). Following his own advice, as he often did, James explored the phenomenon of religious experience and summarized his findings in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), a volume that remains a standard text in psychology of religion courses even today. In 1872, James was given the opportunity to teach physiology at Harvard, which he did for one year. He then toured Europe for a year before again returning to Harvard to teach, but this time his course concerned the relations between physiology and psychology. In 1875, James created a small demonstration laboratory, which he used in teaching his course. This has raised a controversy concerning who should be given credit for establishing psychology’s first laboratory, Wundt in 1879 or James in 1875. Usually the credit is given to Wundt because his laboratory was more elaborate and was designed for research instead of merely for teaching demonstrations. James retired from Harvard in 1907 and died of a heart condition at his country home near Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire, on August 26, 1910, resting peacefully in his wife’s arms. The Principles of Psychology In 1878, publisher Henry Holt offered James a contract to write a textbook on psychology. The textbook was finally published 12 years later, in 1890, when James was 48 years old. Although James’s The Principles of Psychology was to revolutionize psychology, James (1920) did not think much of it, as he indicated in a letter he sent to the publisher along with the manuscript: No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. No subject is worth being treated of in 1000 pages. Had I ten years more, I could rewrite it in 500; but as it stands it is this or nothing—a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable. (Vol. 1, p. 294) James’s highly influential Principles appeared in two volumes, 28 chapters, and a total of 1,393 pages. Two years later, James published a condensed version of his Principles titled Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892/1985). The Briefer Course came to be called Jimmy, as the larger Principles was called James. In James’s writings we find treatment of a diverse array of topics, many of which later researchers pursued. As we will see, however, the themes of practicality (pragmatism) and individuality permeate most of his writings. Following his radical empiricism, James was always willing to entertain a wide variety of ideas ranging from religion, mysticism, faith healing, and psychic phenomena to the most rigorous scientific facts and methods available in psychology at the time. The Spanish-born U.S. philosopher and poet, and James’s Harvard colleague, George Santayana (1920) said of James, I think it would have depressed him if he had to confess that any important question was finally settled. He would still have hoped that something might turn up on the other side, and that, just as the scientific hangman was about to dispatch the poor convicted prisoner, an unexpected witness would ride up in hot haste, and prove him innocent. (p. 82) On German Psychology. Almost everything in Principles can be seen as a critical evaluation of what James perceived Wundt’s approach to psychology to be. James (1890/1950) was especially harsh in the following passage: Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or A m er i ca n P s y ch o l o g y a n d F u n ct i o n a l i s m Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and hardly could have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner … and Wundt obviously cannot; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little left of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronography-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. (Vol. 1, pp. 192–193) 319 Although James appreciated Fechner’s excursions into the supernatural (James wrote a sympathetic introduction to the English translation of Fechner’s The Little Book of Life After Death), he did not think as much of Fechner’s scientific endeavors, which had so impressed Wundt (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 1, pp. 534, 549). Indeed, James’s phrase “brass instrument psychology” came to be a widely used jab for any such tedious lab work. In many ways James was more closely aligned with the type of psychology seen in Stumpf. But within the Principles James tries to offer a fair consideration between the empirical and the rational, between the experimental and the phenomenological. This approach allowed critics anchored in those camps to find James inconsistent, but it also made the book an enduring classic. For more about James’s ideas in the context of the Principles, see Blanshard and Schneider (1942), Donnelly (1992), Johnson and Henley (1990), or McLeod (1969). Stream of Consciousness With his concept of stream of consciousness, James opposed those who were busy searching for the elements of thought. In the first place, said James, consciousness is personal. It reflects the experiences of an individual, and therefore, it is foolhardy to search for elements common to all minds. Second, consciousness is continuous and cannot be divided up for analysis: James, of course, was responding to Wundt the experimentalist. If James had been able to probe deeper into Wundt’s voluntarism and into his later Völkerpsychologie, he would have seen more similarity between himself and Wundt. In any case, it was Wundt the experimentalist who, after reading James’s Principles, commented, “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology” (Blumenthal, 1970, p. 238). Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section. … The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 320 CHAPTER 11 sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. (James, 1890/1950,Vol. 1, p. 244) Third, consciousness is constantly changing. Even though consciousness is continuous and can be characterized as a steady stream from birth to death, it is also constantly changing. James quoted Heraclitus’s aphorism about the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice. For James, the same is true for conscious experience. One can never have exactly the same idea twice because the stream of consciousness that provides the context for the idea is ever-changing. Fourth, consciousness is selective. Some of the many events entering consciousness are selected for further consideration and others are inhibited. James (1890/1950) writes: We see that the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. (Vol. 1, p. 288) Finally, and perhaps most important, consciousness is functional. This idea permeates all of James’s writing, and it is the point from which the school of functionalism developed. According to James, the most important thing about consciousness—and the thing the elementists overlooked—is that its purpose is to aid the individual in adapting to the environment. Here we see the powerful influence of Darwin on early U.S. scientific psychology. Consciousness, then, is personal, continuous, constantly changing, selective, and purposive. Very little in this is compatible with the view held by Wundt or the structuralists. James (1890/1950) reached the following famous conclusion concerning consciousness: Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (Vol. 1, p. 239) Although James first mentioned stream of consciousness in his 1884 article “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” Holland (1986) notes that George Henry Lewes used the term four years earlier in his Problems of Life and Mind (1880). Habits and Instincts James (1890/1950) believed that much animal and human behavior is governed by instinct: Why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange things, in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the hen, for example, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a fearfully uninteresting set of objects as a nestful of eggs, unless she has some sort of a prophetic inkling of the result? The only answer is ad hominem. We can only interpret the instincts of brutes by what we know of instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than on hard floors? Why do they sit around the stove on a cold day? Why, in a room, do they place themselves, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, with their faces towards the middle rather than to the wall? Why do they prefer saddle of mutton and champagne to hard-tack and ditch-water? Why does the maiden interest the youth so that everything about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, and takes to following them as a matter of course. (Vol. 2, pp. 386–387) Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or A m er i ca n P s y ch o l o g y a n d F u n ct i o n a l i s m James did not believe that instinctive behavior is “blind and invariable.” Rather, he believed that such behavior is modifiable by experience. Furthermore, he believed that new instinct-like patterns of behavior develop within the lifetime of the organism. James called these learned patterns of behavior habits. According to James, habits are formed as an activity is repeated. Repetition causes the same neural pathways to, from, and within the brain to become more entrenched, making it easier for energy to pass through those pathways (see 1890/1950). Thus, James had a neurophysiological explanation of habit formation, and his account of learning was very close to Pavlov’s (Chapter 12). Habits are functional because they simplify the movements required to achieve a result, increase the accuracy of behavior, reduce fatigue, and diminish the need to consciously attend to performed actions. For James (1890/1950), then, it is habit that makes society possible: Habit … alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. … It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the “shop,” in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new 321 set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again. (Vol. 1, p. 121) Through habit formation, we can make our ­nervous system our ally instead of our enemy: For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. (James, 1892/1985, p. 11) James (1892/1985) offered five maxims to follow in order to develop good habits and eliminate bad ones. Place yourself in circumstances that encourage good habits and discourage bad ones. ■■ Do not allow yourself to act contrary to a new habit that you are attempting to develop: “Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again” (p. 12). ■■ Do not attempt to slowly develop a good habit or eliminate a bad one. Engage in positive habits completely to begin with and abstain completely from bad ones. ■■ It is not the intention to engage in good habits and avoid bad ones that is important; it is the actual doing so. ■■ Force yourself to act in ways that are beneficial to you, even if doing so at first is distasteful and requires considerable effort. ■■ All of James’s maxims converge on a fundamental principle: Act in ways that are compatible with the type of person you would like to become. The Self James (1892/1985) discussed what he called the empirical self, or the “me” of personality, which consists of everything that a person could call his or her own: Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 322 CHAPTER 11 In its widest possible sense … a man’s Me [empirical self] is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes, and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht, and bank-­ account. (p. 44) James divided the empirical self into three components: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self. The material self consists of everything material that a person could call his or her own, such as his or her own body, family, and property. The social self is the self as known by others. “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” (1892/1985, p. 46). The spiritual self consists of a person’s states of consciousness. It is everything we think and also includes the emotions associated with our various states of consciousness. The spiritual self, then, has to do with the experience of one’s subjective reality. The empirical self (the me) is the person as known by himself or herself, but there is also an aspect of self that does the knowing (the I). Thus, for James, the self is “partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject” (1892/1985, p. 43). James admitted that dealing with the “me” was much easier than dealing with the “I,” or what he called “pure ego.” James struggled with his concept of self as knower and admitted that it was similar to older philosophical and theological notions such as “soul,” “spirit,” and “transcendental ego.” Self-esteem. James was among the first to examine the circumstances under which people feel good or bad about themselves. He concluded that a person’s self-esteem is determined by the ratio of things attempted to things achieved: With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure, no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus, Self-esteem 5 Sucess Pretensions (James, 1892/1985, p. 54) It should be noted that, according to James, one could increase self-esteem either by succeeding more or attempting less: “To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified” (1892/1985, p. 54). There is the strangest lightness about the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable “No.” Many Bostonians … (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men today, if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young,—or slender! Thank God! we say, those illusions are gone. Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man who lost every penny during our civil war went and actually rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy since he was born. (James, 1892/1985, p. 54) Emotions James reversed the traditional belief that emotion results from the perception of an event. For example, it was traditionally believed that if we see a bear, we are frightened, and then we run. According to James, if we see a bear, we run, and then we are frightened. Perception, according to James, causes bodily reactions that are then experienced as emotions. In other words, the emotions we feel depend Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or A m er i ca n P s y ch o l o g y a n d F u n ct i o n a l i s m on what we do. James (1890/1950) put his theory as follows: Our natural way of thinking about … emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see a bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry. (Vol. 2, pp. 449–450) valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate.The reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. (James, 1890/1950,Vol. 2, p. 463) James’s theory of emotion provides still another example of the importance of the Zeitgeist; the Danish physician Carl George Lange (1834–1900) published virtually the same theory at about the same time. In recognition of the contributions of both men, the theory is now known as the James– Lange theory of emotion. Almost immediately after this theory was presented, it was harshly criticized by such individuals as Wilhelm Wundt and Walter B. Cannon (1871–1945). For a review of these and other criticisms, see Finger (1994). However, subsequent research has generally favored James and Lange (e.g., Schachter & Singer, 1962; Zillman, Katcher, & Milavsky, 1972). Free Will Coupled with James’s belief in free will, his theory of emotion yields practical advice: Act the way you want to feel. If we believe James, there is a great deal of truth in Oscar Hammerstein’s lines, “Whenever I feel afraid, I … whistle a happy tune and … the happiness in the tune convinces me that I’m not afraid.” Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers.There is no more 323 Although James did not solve the matter of free will, he did arrive at a position with which he was comfortable. He noted that without the assumption of determinism, science would be impossible, and insofar as psychology was to be a science, it too must assume determinism. Science, however, is not everything, and for certain approaches to the study of humans, the assumption of free will might be very fruitful: Science … must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all. (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 2, p. 576) Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 324 CHAPTER 11 James’s Analysis of Voluntary Behavior. According to James’s ideo-motor theory of behavior, an idea of a certain action causes that action to occur. He believed that in the vast majority of cases, ideas of actions flowed immediately and automatically (habitually or reflexively) into behavior. This automatic process continues unless mental effort is expended to purposively select and hold an idea of interest in consciousness. For James, voluntary action and mental effort were inseparable. The ideas of various behavioral possibilities are retained from previous experience, and their recollection is a prerequisite to voluntary behavior: “A supply of the various movements that are possible, left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the prerequisite of the voluntary life” (James, 1892/1985, p. 283). From the ideas of various possible actions, one is selected for attention, and that is the one that causes behavior and continues to do so as long as the idea is attended to. Therefore, “what holds attention determines action” (James, 1892/1985, p. 315). The will functions, then, by selecting one from among many ideas of action we are interested in doing. By fiat, the will expends energy to hold the idea of interest in consciousness, thus inhibiting other ideas: “Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will” (James, 1892/1985, p. 317). It is by controlling our ideas of behavior that we control our actual behavior. Because ideas cause behavior, it is important to attend to those ideas that result in behavior deemed desirable under the circumstances: “The terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea” (James, 1892/1985, p. 322). So if we combine James’s theories of volition and emotion, what we think determines what we do, and what we do determines how we feel. James believed that bodily events cause thoughts and that thoughts cause behavior. Thus, on the mind–body question, he was an interactionist. Exactly how the mind and body interacted was not known to James and, to him, the nature of the interaction may never be known. He said, “Nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being, but how or why, no mortal may ever know” (1890/1950,Vol. 1, p. 182). Pragmatism Everywhere in James’s writing is his belief in pragmatism. According to pragmatism, which is a cornerstone of functionalism, any belief, thought, or behavior must be judged by its consequences. Any belief that helps create a more effective and satisfying life is worth holding, whether such a belief is scientific or religious. Believing in free will was emotionally satisfying to James, so he believed in it. According to the pragmatic viewpoint, truth is not something “out there” in a static form waiting to be discovered, as many of the rationalists maintained. Instead, truth is something that must be gauged by effectiveness under changing circumstances. What works is true, and because circumstances change, truth must be forever dynamic. There is a kinship between Vaihinger’s philosophy of “as if ” (see Chapter 9) and James’s pragmatism. Both insisted that words and concepts be judged by their practical consequences. James’s pragmatic philosophy is clear then in his description of the methods that psychology should employ. He urged the use of both introspection and experimentation, as well as the study of animals, children, preliterate humans, and abnormal humans. In short, he encouraged the use of any method that would shed light on the complexities of human existence; he believed that nothing useful should be omitted. In 1907, James published Pragmatism (dedicated to the memory of John Stuart Mill), in which he delineated two types of personality: the tender-minded and the tough-minded. Tender-minded people are rationalistic (principle-oriented), intellectual, idealistic, optimistic, religious, and dogmatic, and they believe in free will. Conversely, tough-minded people are empiricistic (fact-oriented), sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, skeptical, and fatalistic. James viewed pragmatism as a way of compromising between the two worldviews. The pragmatist simply takes from each list whatever works best in the circumstances at hand. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or A m er i ca n P s y ch o l o g y a n d F u n ct i o n a l i s m Again, the criterion of the validity of an idea, according to the pragmatist, is its usefulness. No idea, no method, no philosophy, no religion should be accepted or rejected except on the basis of usefulness: Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean [lofty, abstract]. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact—if that should seem a likely place to find him. Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence? She could see no meaning in treating as “not true” a notion that was pragmatically so successful. (James, 1907/1981, pp. 38–39) Following his belief that any idea has potential pragmatic value, James enthusiastically embraced parapsychology and in 1884 was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research. For an interesting survey of James’s thoughts on parapsychology, religion, and faith healing, see Murphy and Ballou (1960/1973). James’s Contributions to Psychology James helped incorporate evolutionary theory into psychology. By stressing what is useful, he represented a major departure from the pure psychology of both voluntarism and structuralism. For James, as well as for the functionalists who followed him, usefulness defined both truth and value. James expanded research techniques in psychology by not only accepting introspection but also encouraging 325 any technique that promised to yield useful information about people. By studying all aspects of human existence—including behavior, cognition, emotions, volition, and even religious experience— James also expanded the subject matter of psychology. As we will see in Chapter 20, James’s eclectism is very much in accordance with postmodernism. James’s students at Harvard included many we will see in this chapter—Angell, Calkins, Hall, Santayana, Thorndike, and Woodworth. Others were author Gertrude Stein and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, W. E. B. Du Bois. James’s ideas are not only considered foundational for functional psychology and pragmatic philosophy but can be seen in behaviorism, cognitive science, and existential-phenomenological psychology (Henley, 2007), as well as clinical psychology (Howard, 1992) and education. Numerous biographies exist (e.g., Angell, 1911; Myers, 1986; Perry, 1935; Simon, 1998; Starbuck, 1943; Townsend, 1996), all of which highlight not only his intellect, his gift as a writer, but also his kindness and impish sense of humor. In 1892, when James was 50, he decided to return his attentions back to philosophical matters, something that necessitated relinquishing the directorship of the Harvard Psychology Laboratory. To maintain the laboratory’s reputation as the best in the country, James sought an outstanding, creative, experimentally oriented psychologist, and certainly one who did not just parrot Wundtian psychology (at least as James understood it). He found such a person in Hugo Münsterberg. Hugo Münsterberg Born in the east Prussian port city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) was one of four sons of prominent parents. His father was a successful businessman, his mother a recognized artist and musician. Both his mother and father died before he was 20 years old. Throughout his life, Münsterberg had wide-ranging interests. In his early years, he displayed talent in art, literature, poetry, foreign languages, music, and acting. Then, while studying at the University of Leipzig, he heard Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or CHAPTER 11 Wikipedia 326 Hugo Münsterberg a lecture by Wundt and became interested in psychology. Münsterberg eventually became Wundt’s research assistant and received his doctorate under Wundt’s supervision in 1885, at age 22. Perhaps on Wundt’s advice, Münsterberg next studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, receiving his medical degree in 1887. That same year, he began teaching at the University of Freiburg, where he started a psychology laboratory and began publishing papers on time perception, attentional processes, learning, and memory. During the time when he was Wundt’s assistant, one of Münsterberg’s jobs was to study voluntary activities through introspection. The two men disagreed, however, over whether the will could be experienced as a conscious element of the mind during introspection. Wundt believed that it could, whereas Münsterberg believed that it could not. In fact, Münsterberg did not believe that will was involved in voluntary behavior at all. For him, as we prepare to act one way or another, we consciously experience this bodily preparedness and confuse it with the will to act. For Münsterberg then, what we experience consciously as will is an epiphenomenon, a by-product of bodily activity. This idea, of course, was diametrically opposed to Wundt’s interpretation of voluntary behavior. For Wundt, volitional behavior is always preceded by a conscious will to act. Although James would never have removed consciousness as a causal element in his analysis of voluntary (willful) behavior, he did see in Münsterberg’s position some support for his ideo-motor theory of behavior. If nothing else, both analyses noted a close, direct relationship between thoughts and behavior. However, the relationships postulated were converse. For James ideas cause behavior; for Münsterberg behavior causes ideas. In fact, there was a closer correspondence between James’s theory of emotion and Münsterberg’s analysis of voluntary behavior. As we have seen, the James– Lange theory of emotion states that consciously experienced emotions are by-products of bodily reactions elicited by a situation. For Münsterberg the feeling of willful action results from an awareness of covert behavior, or a readiness to act overtly, elicited by a situation. In both cases (emotion for James, the feeling of volition for Münsterberg), conscious experience is a by-product (epiphenomenon) of behavior. In any case, in 1888, Münsterberg elaborated his theory in Voluntary Action, a book that James called a masterpiece and Wundt criticized harshly. James was ­ ünsterberg’s publications impressed by many of M and cited them often in his Principles. He arranged to meet Münsterberg in Paris at the first International Congress of Psychology in 1889, and their relationship strengthened further. After completing Principles, James wanted very much to leave psychology, especially experimental psychology, so that he could more actively pursue his interests in philosophy. To make the change, James needed someone to replace him as director of the Harvard Psychology Laboratory. In 1892 (the same year that Titchener arrived at Cornell), James offered Münsterberg the job despite the fact that Münsterberg could read but not speak English. Münsterberg accepted and learned to speak English so well and so quickly that his classes were soon attracting many students. Although he adjusted well, Münsterberg could not decide whether he wanted to give up his homeland (Germany) in favor of a lifelong commitment in the United States. In 1895, Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or A m er i ca n P s y ch o l o g y a n d F u n ct i o n a l i s m he asked for and received a leave of absence so that he could return to the University of Freiburg. After two years, he was unable to obtain the type of academic appointment that he sought. He wrote to James in 1897, once again accepting the position at Harvard. However, Münsterberg never severed his emotional ties with his homeland. For several years, Münsterberg did extremely well at Harvard. In 1898, he became chair of the Division of Philosophy at Harvard, which at the time still included psychology. When in 1900 he published Basics of Psychology, he dedicated it to James. As time went on, however, James’s pragmatic attitude toward philosophy and psychology began to irritate Münsterberg, who had a more positivistic approach to science. He was especially appalled by James’s acceptance of psychoanalysis and religious phenomena into the realm of psychology. For Münsterberg, “Mysticism and mediums were one thing, psychology was quite another. Experimental psychology and psychic hocus-pocus did not mix” (Bjork, 1983, pp. 63–64). More and more, however, Münsterberg’s interests turned to the practical applications of psychological principles. Münsterberg felt very strongly that psychologists should attempt to uncover information that could be used in the real world. With his efforts, ­M ünsterberg did much to create what is now referred to as applied psychology. Münsterberg’s Applied Psychology In an attempt to understand the causes of abnormal behavior, Münsterberg saw many mentally ill people. Because he was seeing them for scientific reasons, he never charged them a fee. He applied his “treatment,” which consisted mainly of causing his patients to expect to improve, to cases of alcoholism, drug addiction, phobia, and sexual dysfunction, but not to psychosis. He felt that psychosis was caused by deterioration of the nervous system and could not be treated. Along with the suggestion that individuals would improve as the result of his efforts, Münsterberg also employed reciprocal antagonism, which involved strengthening the thoughts opposite to those causing problems. Although Münsterberg 327 was aware of Freud’s work, he chose to treat symptoms directly and did not search for the underlying causes of those symptoms. Münsterberg said of Freud’s theory of unconscious motivation, “The story of the subconscious mind can be told in three words: there is none” (1909, p. 125). Forensic Psychology. Münsterberg was the first to apply psychological principles to legal matters, thus creating forensic psychology. Among other things, he pointed out that eyewitness testimony could be unreliable because sensory impressions could be ­illusory, suggestion and stress could affect perception, ­ ünsterberg and memory is not always accurate. M would often stage traumatic events in his classroom to show that even when witnesses were attempting to be accurate, there were wide differences in the individual accounts of what had actually ­happened. Münsterberg urged that p­ sychological methods replace the brutal i­nterrogation of criminals. He believed that harsh interrogation could result in false confessions because some people want to please the interrogators, some need to give in to authority figures, and some very depressed p­ eople may feel a need to be punished. ­Münsterberg published his thoughts on forensic psychology in his best-selling book On the Witness Stand (1908). In this book, he described an apparatus that could detect lying by observing changes such as those in pulse rate and respiration. Others, such as the Harvard-trained p­ sychologist William Marston would follow ­Münsterberg’s lead and later create the “lie detector.” As an aside, Marston is perhaps better known for another of his creations, the comic book character Wonder Woman. Industrial Psychology. Münsterberg’s Vocation and Learning (1912) and Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913) are usually considered the beginning of what later came to be called industrial psychology. In these books, Münsterberg dealt with such topics as methods of personnel selection, methods of increasing work efficiency, and marketing and advertising techniques. To aid in personnel selection, for example, he recommended defining the skills necessary for performing a task and then Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 328 CHAPTER 11 determining the person’s ability to perform that task. In this way, one could learn whether a person had the skills necessary for doing a certain job adequately. Münsterberg also found that whether a task is boring could not be determined by observing the work of others. Often, work that some people consider boring is interesting to those doing it. It is necessary, then, to take individual differences into account when selecting personnel and when making job assignments. Münsterberg’s Fate Because of his work in applied psychology, ­M ünsterberg was well known to the public, the academic world, and the scientific community, serving in 1898 as the seventh president of the APA. ­William James had made psychology popular within the academic world, but Münsterberg helped make it popular with the general public by showing its practical uses. In addition, Münsterberg had among his personal friends some of the most influential people in the world, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and the Nobel Prize–winning philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was invited to dine at the White House, and in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he and his wife often hosted European scholars and German royalty. In addition, he was awarded several medals by the German government. By the time Münsterberg died in 1916, however, the general attitude toward him had turned negative, and his death went essentially unnoticed. The main reason for his unpopularity was his desire to create a favorable relationship between the United States and his native Germany. Never obtaining U.S. citizenship, Münsterberg maintained a nationalistic loyalty toward Germany. He believed that both Germans and Americans had inaccurate stereotypes of each other, and he wrote books attempting to correct them—for example, The Americans (1904). In another book, American Problems (1910), Münsterberg was highly critical of Americans, saying that they had a general inability to concentrate their attention on any one thing for very long. He explained this national inability to attend by the fact that, in the United States, women were influential in forming intellectual and cultural development. The intellectual vulnerability of women also explained the popularity of psychological fads such as seances. While James was attempting to discover if any of the claims of “mediums” were valid, Münsterberg was busy exposing them as dangerous frauds. As World War I approached, Münsterberg found himself caught up in the U.S. concern over German military actions. He was suspected of being a spy, many of his colleagues at Harvard disassociated themselves from him, and there were threats against his life. Perhaps because of all the stress, ­Münsterberg died on December 16, 1916, from a cerebral hemorrhage just as he began a lecture; he was only 53 years old. For an interesting account of Münsterberg’s rise to fame and his decline into ­disfavor, see Spillmann and Spillmann (1993). Harvard sought Titchener as a replacement for Münsterberg, but Titchener refused the offer. James McKeen Cattell applied for the position, but his application was denied. The position was finally filled by William McDougall, whom we mentioned in the last chapter and will cover in the next. Mary Whiton Calkins When Münsterberg took over James’s psychology laboratory, he also became supervisor of the psychology graduate students, and it was he who directed their dissertation research. One of those graduate students was Mary Whiton Calkins (1863– 1930) . Calkins grew up in Buffalo, New York, where her father, Wolcott Calkins, was a Protestant minister. In 1881, the family moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where the reverend accepted a pastorate. After completing high school in Newton, Calkins attended Smith College and graduated in 1885. Shortly after her graduation, Calkins accompanied her family on a yearlong vacation in Europe. Upon their return, Calkins was offered a position at Wellesley College teaching Greek (she was also already fluent in French and German). This began Calkins’s more than 40-year affiliation with Wellesley. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 406 CHAPTER 13 behaviorism and those of Tolman’s purposive behaviorism (considered later in the chapter) battled with each other throughout the 1930s and 1940s. This running debate resulted in one of the most productive periods in psychology’s history. Between 1929 and 1950, Hull wrote 21 theoretical articles in the Psychological Review, and in 1940 he (with coauthors Hovland, Ross, Hall, Perkins, and Fitch) published Mathematico-Deductive Theory of Rote Learning. This book was an effort to show how rote learning could be explained in terms of condi­ rinciples tioning principles. In 1943 Hull published P of Behavior, one of the most influential books in psychology’s history; and A Behavior ­System (1952b) extended the ideas found in Principles to more complex phenomena. In 1948, while preparing the manuscript for A Behavior System, Hull suffered a massive heart attack that exacerbated his already frail physical condition. It took all the strength he could muster, but he finished the book four months before he died, on May 10, 1952, of another heart attack. Near his death, Hull expressed profound regret that a third book he had been planning would never be written. He believed that his third book would have been his most important because it would have extended his system to human social behavior. Hull’s Hypothetico-Deductive Theory Hull and his disciples were the first (and perhaps last) psychologists to attempt to create a hypothetico-deductive theory of learning. Hull first reviewed the research that had been done on learning; then he summarized that research in the form of general statements, or postulates. From these postulates, he inferred theorems that yielded testable propositions. Hull (1943) explained why such a system should be self-correcting: Empirical observation, supplemented by shrewd conjecture, is the main source of the primary principles or postulates of a science. Such formulations, when taken in various combinations together with relevant antecedent conditions, yield inferences or theorems, of which some may agree with the empirical outcome of the conditions in question, and some may not. Primary propositions yielding logical deductions which consistently agree with the observed empirical outcome are retained, whereas those which disagree are rejected or modified. As the sifting of this trial-and-error process continues, there gradually emerges a limited series of primary principles whose joint implications are progressively more likely to agree with relevant observations. Deductions made from these surviving postulates, while never absolutely certain, do at length become highly trustworthy. This is in fact the present status of the primary principles of the major physical sciences. (p. 382) Whereas Watson believed that all behavior could be explained in terms of the associations between stimuli and responses, Hull concluded that a number of intervening internal conditions had to be taken into consideration. For Hull, the intervening events were primarily physiological and linked to innate drives and needs. As such, Hull’s theory can be seen as an elaboration of Woodworth’s S–O–R concept. Using operational definitions, Hull attempted to show how a number of internal events interact to cause overt behavior. Hull’s theory then is also in the ­Darwinian tradition because it associates reinforcement with those events that are conducive to an organism’s survival. In Hull’s final statement of his theory (1952b), he listed 17 postulates and 133 theorems, but we review only a few of his more important concepts here. Reinforcement Unlike Watson (and Tolman), Hull was a reinforcement theorist. For Hull, a biological need creates a drive in the organism, and the diminution of this drive constitutes reinforcement. Thus, Hull had a drive-reduction theory of reinforcement. For Hull Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or N e o b eha v i o r i s m 407 drive is one of the important events that intervenes between a stimulus and a response. If a response made in a certain situation leads to drive reduction, habit strength (SHR) is said to increase. Hull operationally defined habit strength, an intervening variable, as the number of reinforced pairings between an environmental situation (S) and a response (R). For Hull an increase in habit strength constitutes learning. Drive is not only a necessary condition for reinforcement but also an important energizer of behavior. Hull called the probability of a learned response reaction potential (SER), which is a function of both the amount of drive (D) present and the number of times the response had been previously reinforced in the situation. Hull expressed this relationship as follows: S ER = SHR × D If either SHR or D is zero, the probability of a learned response being made is also zero. Hull postulated several other intervening variables, some of which contr ibuted to S E R and some of which diminished it. The probability of a learned response is the net effect of all these positive and negative influences, each intervening variable being carefully operationally defined. For a more detailed account of Hull’s theory, see Bower and Hilgard (1981). Hull’s Influence Within 10 years of the publication of Principles of Behavior (1943), 40% of all experimental studies in the highly regarded Journal of Experimental Psychology and Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology referred to some aspect of Hull’s theory. The figure increases to 70% when only the fields of learning and motivation are considered (Spence, 1952). Hull’s influence went beyond these areas, however; during the period between 1949 and 1952, there were 105 references to Hull’s Principles of Behavior in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, compared to only 25 for the next most commonly cited work (Ruja, 1956). In 1945 Hull was awarded the prestigious Warren Medal by the Society of Experimental Psychologists. It carried this inscription: To Clark L. Hull: For his careful development of a systematic theory of behavior. This theory has stimulated much research and it has been developed in a precise and quantitative form so as to permit predictions which can be tested empirically. The theory thus contains within itself the seeds of its own ultimate verification and of its own possible final disproof. A truly unique achievement in the history of psychology to date. (Kendler, 1987, p. 305) Given his long period of dominance over U.S. psychology, there were many well-known disciples and students of Hull. For example, throughout this text we have cited one of psychology’s most able historians, and the 1949 APA president, Ernest ­Hilgard (1904–2001). Hilgard got his start in the field at Yale, just as Hull was establishing his program. Another APA president (1963), Charles Osgood (1916–1991) also got his start at Yale before earning his fame as creator of the semantic differential—a way of understanding the linguistic meaning of concepts. O. Herbart Mowrer (1907–1982; APA president 1954) survived the sizable scandal following his misbegotten undergraduate research project on sexuality at Missouri and went on to Johns ­Hopkins to complete his PhD with Watson’s erstwhile col­ owrer joined league, Knight Dunlap. From there M Hull’s team at Yale, which soon included notables such as Robert Sears (Chapter 10), Carl Hovland (Chapter 19), and Neal Miller (below). After Hull’s death in 1952, one of his former students, Kenneth W. Spence (1907–1967), became the major spokesman for his theory (see Spence, 1956, 1960). The extensions and modifications Spence made in Hull’s theory were so substantial that the theory became known as the Hull–Spence theory. So successful was Spence in perpetuating Hullian theory that a study showed that as late as the 1960s, Spence was the most cited psychologist in experimental psychology journals, with Hull himself still in eighth place (Myers, 1970). In recent years, Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 408 CHAPTER 13 Hull’s grand theory has largely given way to the goal of developing hypotheses designed to explain specific phenomena (see, for example, Amsel, 1992; Rashotte & Amsel, 1999). Neal Miller (1909–2002; APA president, 1961) also made important, although very different extensions. Miller completed his PhD from Yale in 1935, working under Hull. After a stint at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute to study Freud, he returned to Yale where he remained for many years. Frequently writing in collaboration with the sociologist John Dollard (1900–1980), Miller developed a simplified version of Hull’s system which he applied to personality, psychopathology, and various social phenomena such as conflict and aggression. His key works included Social Learning and Imitation (Miller & Dollard, 1941) and Personality and Psychotherapy (Dollard & Miller, 1950). In 1966 Miller left Yale and focused his attentions on the physiology of behavior, conducting research that would provide a foundation for later work in biofeedback. Although Hull’s theory eventually “won” its battle with Tolman’s and was extremely popular in the 1940s and 1950s—and under Spence’s (and Miller’s) influence, even into the 1960s—it eventually “lost” to the simpler and more pragmatic behavioral approach offered by Skinner (next). Hull attempted to create a general behavior theory that all social sciences could use to explain human action, and his program fit all the requirements of logical positivism (for example, all his theoretical concepts were operationally defined). However, although Hull’s theory was scientifically respectable, it was relatively sterile. More and more, the testable deductions from his theory were criticized for being of little value in explaining behavior beyond the laboratory. Psychologists began to feel hampered by the need to define their concepts operationally and to relate the outcomes of their experiments to an ever more complex grand theory such as Hull’s. B. F. Skinner As the complex theoretical system of Hull began to lose popularity, another form of behaviorism was in its ascendancy: The version promoted by B. F. Skinner. As we will see, Skinner’s brand of behaviorism was more in accordance with positivism than with logical positivism. After World War II, Skinner’s behaviorism began rivaling all other versions, and in time would surpass them. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990) was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, into a warm, stable, middle-class family. Skinner had a younger brother who was a better athlete and more socially popular than he was but who died suddenly at the age of 16. Skinner was raised according to strict moral standards but was physically punished only once: I was never physically punished by my father and only once by my mother. She washed my mouth out with soap and water because I had used a bad word. My father never missed an opportunity, however, to inform me of the punishments which were waiting if I turned out to have a criminal mind. He once took me through the county jail, and on a summer vacation I was taken to a lecture with colored slides describing life in Sing Sing. As a result I am afraid of the police and buy too many tickets to their annual dance. (Skinner, 1967, pp. 390–391) In high school, Skinner did well in literature but poorly in science, and he earned money by playing in a jazz band and with an orchestra. He went to Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in New York, where he majored in English. Skinner did not fit well into college life, was terrible at sports, and felt “pushed around” by requirements such as daily chapel. By his senior year, Skinner viewed himself as “in open revolt” against the school. He, along with a friend, decided to play a trick on their English composition professor, whom they disliked because he was “a great name-dropper.” Skinner and his friend had posters printed that read: “Charles Chaplin, the famous cinema comedian, will deliver his lecture ‘Moving Pictures as a Career’ in the Hamilton ­C ollege chapel on Friday, October 9” (­Skinner, 1967, p. 393). The Chaplin visit was said to be under the auspices of the disliked English professor. The posters were displayed all over town, and Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or N e o b eha v i o r i s m 409 Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine warned us sternly that we would not get our degrees if we did not settle down. (Skinner, 1967, p. 393) B. F. Skinner Skinner’s friend called the newspaper in Utica with the news. By noon the prank was completely out of hand. Police roadblocks were necessary to control the crowds. The next day, the English professor to whom the hoax was directed wrote an editorial lambasting the entire episode. Skinner said that it was the best thing the professor ever wrote. The Chaplin prank was only the beginning of a mischievous senior year for Skinner: As a nihilistic gesture, the hoax was only the beginning. Through the student publications we began to attack the faculty and various local sacred cows. I published a parody of the bumbling manner in which the professor of public speaking would review student performances at the end of the class. I wrote an editorial attacking Phi Beta Kappa. At commencement … I covered the walls with bitter caricatures of the faculty … and we [Skinner and his friends] made a shambles of the commencement ceremonies, and at intermission the President Skinner graduated from Hamilton College with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a Phi Beta Kappa key and without having had a course in psychology. He left college with a passion to become a writer. This passion was encouraged in part by the fact that the famous poet Robert Frost favorably reviewed three of his short stories. Skinner’s first attempt at writing was in the attic of his parents’ home: “The results were disastrous. I frittered away my time. I read aimlessly … listened to the newly invented radio, contributed to the humorous column of a local paper but wrote almost nothing else, and thought about seeing a psychiatrist” (Skinner, 1967, p. 394). Next, Skinner tried writing in New York City’s Greenwich Village and then in Paris for a summer; these attempts also failed. By this time, Skinner (1967) had developed a distaste for most literary pursuits: “I had failed as a writer because I had had nothing important to say, but I could not accept that explanation. It was literature which must be at fault” (p. 395). Having failed to describe human behavior through literature, Skinner decided to describe it scientifically. While in Greenwich Village, Skinner had read about the works of Pavlov and Watson and was greatly impressed. On his return from Europe in 1928, he enrolled in the graduate program in psychology at Harvard. A course with Walter Hunter (Chapter 11) introduced him to animal behavior, and at last Skinner had found his niche: I would rise at six, study until breakfast, go to classes, laboratories, and libraries with no more than fifteen minutes unscheduled during the day, study until exactly nine o’clock at night and go to bed. I saw no movies or plays, seldom went to concerts, had scarcely any dates and read nothing but psychology and physiology. (Skinner, 1967, p. 398) This high degree of self-discipline typified Skinner’s work habits throughout his long life. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 410 CHAPTER 13 Skinner earned his master’s degree in two years (1930), and his doctorate the next (1931), and then remained at Harvard for five more years as a postdoctoral fellow. Skinner began his teaching career at the University of Minnesota in 1937 and remained there until 1945. While he was at Minnesota, ­Skinner published The Behavior of Organisms (1938), which established him as a nationally prominent experimental psychologist. In 1945 Skinner moved to Indiana University as chairman of the psychology department, where he remained until 1948 when he returned to ­Harvard. At Indiana, Skinner overlapped with others that would flourish during the heyday of ­A merican behavior ism, including the aforementioned ­William Estes, Jacob Robert Kantor ­(1888–1984), Winthrop Kellogg (an animal psychologist who raised a chimp alongside his son), and William Verplanck (cofounder of the prestigious Psychonomic Society). Like Watson, Kantor developed his “interbehaviorism” out of his graduate studies at Chicago. Interbehaviorism sought to align psychology with the objective methods of the natural sciences but focused more on social behavior and language. Variations on Kantor’s approach are still used in modern behavior therapy and were associated with the “ecological” approach of other psychologists such as J. J. Gibson (Chapter 6) and Roger Barker. It was during his time at Indiana that Skinner built his infamous “baby-tender” and wrote his utopian novel—Walden Two. Following the birth of his second daughter, Deborah, Skinner made a “cribsized living space [with] sound-absorbing walls and a large picture window. Air entered through filters at the bottom … and around the edges of a tightly stretched canvas, which served as a mattress. A strip of sheeting ten yards long passed over the canvas, a clean section of which could be cranked into place” (Skinner, 1979, p. 275). Although he initially failed to get General Mills to mass-produce the invention, he did publish an article about it in Ladies Home Journal, and some years later they were manufactured for sale by the Aircrib Corporation. As for the novel, it describes the benefits of a society based on behavioral principles, as advocated by its founder—Frazier. Over his lifetime, sells were good, with almost 2,500,000 copies sold by 1990. After Indiana, Skinner remained affiliated with Harvard until his death in 1990. In 1974 he became professor emeritus, but continued for years to walk the two miles between his home and his office in William James Hall to answer correspondence, to meet with scholars who paid him visits from around the world, and on occasion to conduct research and supervise graduate students. (Fowler, 1990, p. 1203) In addition to the short autobiography Skinner wrote in 1967, he described the details of his life in three more extensive volumes: Particulars of My Life (1976), The Shaping of a Behaviorist (1979), and A Matter of Consequences (1983). Skinner’s Positivism In Chapter 4, we discussed the great Renaissance thinker Francis Bacon. Bacon was intensely interested in overcoming the mistakes of the past and thus arriving at knowledge that was free of superstition and prejudice. His solution to the problem was to stay very close to what was empirically observable and to avoid theorizing about it. Bacon proposed that science be descriptive and inductive rather than theoretical and deductive. Following Bacon’s suggestion, scientists would first gather empirical facts and then infer knowledge from those facts (instead of first developing abstract theories from which facts are deduced). Bacon’s main point was that in the formulation of theories, a scientist’s biases, misconceptions, traditions, and beliefs (perhaps false beliefs) could manifest themselves and that these very things inhibited a search for objective knowledge. Skinner was deeply impressed by Bacon and often referred to his influence on his life and work (L. D. Smith, 1992). Bacon can be seen as a forerunner to the positivistic traditions of Comte and then Mach. As he did with Bacon, Skinner often acknowledged a debt to Mach (see, for example, Skinner, Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or N e o b eha v i o r i s m 411 1931/1972, 1979). For Mach, as we have previously noted, it was important that science rid itself of metaphysical concepts, which, for him, were any concepts that refer to events that cannot be directly observed (such as causation). Mach and the other positivists were interested only in facts and how facts are related to each other. According to Mach, the scientist determines how facts are related by doing a functional analysis. That is, by noting that if X occurs, Y also tends to occur. To ponder why such relationships exist is to enter the dangerous and unnecessary realm of metaphysics. The job of science is to describe empirical relationships, not explain them. Skinner followed Mach’s positivism explicitly. By adopting Mach’s functional approach to science, Skinner (1931/1972) avoided the complex problem of establishing causation in human behavior: We may now take the more humble view of explanation and causation which seems to have been first suggested by Mach and is now a common characteristic of scientific thought, wherein … the notion of function [is] substituted for that of causation. (pp. 448–449) So, as far as theory is concerned, Skinner was a positivist, not a logical positivist. Functional Analysis of Behavior. Skinner believed that what we call mental events are simply verbal labels given to certain bodily processes: “[My] position can be stated as follows: What is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind or mental life but the observer’s own body” (Skinner, 1974, p. 17). But, said Skinner, even if there were mental events, nothing would be gained by studying them. He reasoned that if environmental events give rise to conscious events, which, in turn, cause behavior, nothing is lost and a great deal is gained by simply doing a functional analysis of the environmental and the behavioral events. Such an analysis avoids the many problems associated with the study of mental events. These so-called mental events, said Skinner, will someday be explained when we learn which internal physiological events people are responding to when they use such terms as thinking, choosing, and willing to explain their own behavior. Skinner, then, was a physical monist (materialist) because he believed that consciousness as a nonphysical entity does not exist. Because we do not at present know to which internal events people are responding when they use mentalistic terminology, we must be content simply to ignore such terms. Skinner (1974) said, There is nothing in a science of behavior or its philosophy which need alter feelings or introspective observations. The bodily states which are felt or observed are acknowledged, but there is an emphasis on the environmental conditions with which they are associated and an insistence that it is the conditions rather than the feelings which enable us to explain behavior. (p. 245) Skinner (1974) also said, “A completely independent science of subjective experience would have no more bearing on a science of behavior than a science of what people feel about fire would have on the science of combustion” (pp. 220–221), and “There is no place in the scientific position for a self as a true originator or initiator of action” (p. 225). Like Watson then, Skinner was a radical behaviorist in that he refused to acknowledge any causal role of mental events in human conduct. For Skinner, so-called mental events were nothing but neurophysiological events to which we have assigned mentalistic labels. Skinner continued to attack cognitive psychology throughout his professional life, and toward the end of his life, he deeply regretted the increased popularity of cognitive psychology. Operant Behavior Whereas Watson modeled his psychology after the Russian physiologists, Skinner modeled his after Thorndike. Watson and Pavlov attempted to correlate behavior with environmental stimuli; that is, they were interested in reflexive behavior. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 412 CHAPTER 13 Skinner called such behavior respondent behavior because it was elicited by a known stimulus. Given that both Pavlov and Watson studied the relationship between environmental stimuli (S) and responses (R), their endeavors represent S–R psychology . Thorndike, however, studied behavior that is controlled by its consequences. For example, behavior that had been instrumental in allowing an animal to escape from a puzzle box tends to be repeated when the animal is next placed in the puzzle box. Using Thorndike’s experimental arrangement, a response was instrumental in producing certain consequences, and therefore the type of learning that he studied was called instrumental conditioning. Thorndike neither knew nor cared about the origins of the behavior, only that it is controlled by its consequences. What Thorndike called instrumental behavior, Skinner called operant behavior because it operates on the environment in such a way as to produce consequences. Unlike respondent behavior, which is elicited by known stimulation, operant behavior is simply emitted by the organism. It is not that operant behavior is not caused but that its causes are not important. The important aspect of operant behavior is that it is controlled by its consequences. Skinner’s focus on operant behavior made his brand of behaviorism very different from Watson’s. Although both Skinner and Thorndike studied behavior controlled by its consequences, how they studied behavior differed. Thorndike measured how long it took an animal to make an escape response as a function of successive, reinforced trials. He found that as the number of reinforced escapes increases, the time it takes for the animal to escape decreases. His dependent variable was the latency of the escape response. Skinner’s procedure was to allow an animal to respond freely in an experimental chamber (called a Skinner box) and to note the effect of reinforcement on response rate. For example, a lever-press response may occur only 2 or 3 times a minute before it is reinforced and 30 or 40 times a minute when it results in reinforcement. Rate of responding, then, was Skinner’s primary dependent variable. Based on this work, several schedules of reinforcement were identified. These include variable interval schedules, such as a teacher that calls on students in class. Not knowing when they might be called on (the variable interval), students need to remain on task in order to be reinforced. In contrast, there are also fixed interval schedules, such as how students behave as the end of a class period nears. Have you ever noticed that in a class that always runs until the end of the period that students close their books and start to fidget in advance of being dismissed? After a period of no opportunity for reinforcement, a flurry of behavior comes just before and at the fixed interval. Besides time intervals, schedules can be understood as ratios of behavior to reinforcement. For example, when you use a vending machine, you know how many quarters to use before you get your food—that is, the ratio between the behavior (putting in a quarter) and getting your reward is fixed, so it is unlikely you would under or over respond. And last, there are variable ratios—such as slot machines. In this case, you do not know how many quarters you will need to put in before a pay out, and as such behavior will be repeated often. Despite the differences between them, however, both Watson and Skinner exemplified radical behaviorism because they believed that behavior could be completely explained in terms of events external to the organism. For Watson, environmental events elicit either learned or unlearned responses; for Skinner, the environment selects behavior via reinforcement contingencies. For both, what goes on within the organism is relatively unimportant. In contrast, Hull exemplified methodological behaviorism because he postulated a wealth of events that were supposed to intervene between experience and behavior. The Nature of Reinforcement If an operant response leads to reinforcement, the rate of that response increases. Thus, those responses an organism makes that result in reinforcement are more likely to recur when the organism is next in Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or N e o b eha v i o r i s m 413 that situation. This is what is meant by the statement that operant behavior is controlled by its consequences. According to Skinner, reinforcement can be identified only through its effects on behavior. Just because something acts as a reinforcer for one organism under one set of circumstances does not mean that it will be a reinforcer for another organism or for the same organism under different circumstances: In dealing with our fellow men in everyday life and in the clinic and laboratory, we may need to know just how reinforcing a specific event is. We often begin by noting the extent to which our own behavior is reinforced by the same event. This practice frequently miscarries; yet it is still commonly believed that reinforcers can be identified apart from their effects upon a particular organism. As the term is used here, however, the only defining characteristic of a reinforcing stimulus is that it reinforces. (Skinner, 1953, p. 71) Thus, for Skinner, there is no talk of drive reduction, satisfying states of affairs, or any other mechanisms of reinforcement. A reinforcer is anything that, when made contingent on a response, changes the rate with which that response is made. For Skinner, nothing additional needs to be said. He accepted Thorndike’s law of effect but not the mentalism that the phrase “satisfying state of affairs” implies. The Importance of the Environment. Whereas the environment was important for Watson and the Russian physiologists because it elicited behavior, it was important for Skinner because it selected behavior. The reinforcement contingencies the environment provides determine which behaviors are strengthened and which are not. Change reinforcement contingencies, and you change behavior: The environment is obviously important, but its role has remained obscure. It does not push or pull, it selects, and this function is difficult to discover and analyze. The role of natural selection in evolution was formulated only a little more than a hundred years ago, and the selective role of the environment in shaping and maintaining the behavior of the individual is only beginning to be recognized and studied. As the interaction between organism and environment has come to be understood, however, effects once assigned to states of mind, feeling, and traits are beginning to be traced to accessible conditions, and a technology of behavior may therefore become available. It will not solve our problems, however, until it replaces traditional prescientific views, and these views are strongly entrenched. (Skinner, 1971, p. 25) Thus, Skinner applied Darwinian notions to his analysis of behavior. In any given situation, an organism initially makes a wide variety of responses. Of those responses, only a few will be functional (reinforcing). These effective responses survive and become part of the organism’s response repertoire to be used when that situation next occurs. According to Skinner, the fact that behavior is governed by reinforcement contingencies provides hope for the solution of a number of societal problems. If it was the “mind” or the “self ” that needed to be understood instead of how the environment selects behavior, we would be in trouble: Fortunately, the point of attack is more readily accessible. It is the environment which must be changed. A way of life which furthers the study of human behavior in its relation to that environment should be in the best possible position to solve its major problems. This is not jingoism, because the great problems are now global. In the behavioristic view, man can now control his own destiny because he knows what must be done and how to do it. (Skinner, 1974, p. 251) Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or 414 CHAPTER 13 Skinner’s novel Walden Two also made many of these points. Following Watson’s “commercialization” of psychology to the public, there had been something of a backlash against the notion of a better life through the science of psychology. For example, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World both featured conditioning gone amok. As such, many of Skinner’s works sought to showcase how psychology could positively serve society. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Skinner reviewed the reasons that cultural engineering, although possible, has been largely rejected. The Control of Behavior. Like Thorndike, ­Skinner (1971) found that the effects of r­einforcement and punishment are not symmetrical; reinforcement strengthens behavior, but punishment does not weaken behavior: A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue; and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence. Punished behavior is likely to reappear after the punitive contingencies are withdrawn. (p. 62) Why, if punishment is ineffective as a modifier of behavior, is it so widely used? Because, said Skinner (1953), it is reinforcing to the punisher: Severe punishment unquestionably has an immediate effect in reducing a tendency to act in a given way. This result is no doubt responsible for its widespread use. We “instinctively” attack anyone whose behavior displeases us—perhaps not in physical assault, but with criticism, disapproval, blame, or ridicule. Whether or not there is an inherited tendency to do this, the immediate effect of the practice is reinforcing enough to explain its currency. In the long run, however, punishment does not actually eliminate behavior from a repertoire, and its temporary achievement is obtained at tremendous cost in reducing the over-all efficiency and happiness of the group. (p. 190) The “tremendous cost” involved in the use of punishment comes from the many negative by-products associated with it, including the fact that it induces fear, it often elicits aggression, it justifies inflicting pain on others, and it often replaces one undesirable response with another, such as when a child spanked for a wrongdoing cries instead. How then is undesirable behavior to be dealt with? Skinner (1953) said to ignore it: The most effective alternative process [to punishment] is probably extinction. This takes time but is much more rapid than allowing the response to be forgotten. The technique seems to be relatively free of objectionable by-products. We recommend it, for example, when we suggest that a parent “pay no attention” to objectionable behavior on the part of his child. If the child’s behavior is strong only because it has been reinforced by “getting a rise out of ” the parent, it will disappear when this consequence is no longer forthcoming. (p. 192) Because of the relative ineffectiveness of punishment and the many negative by-products associated with its use, Skinner consistently urged that behavior be modified positively through reinforcement contingencies, not negatively through punishment. Students are sometimes confused then by the notion of (and term) negative reinforcement. Importantly, negative reinforcement is not punishment. Negative reinforcement is reinforcement by removal of an unpleasant environmental circumstance instead of providing a rewarding circumstance (as in positive reinforcement)—but in both situations the result is reinforcing. Skinnerian Principles Skinner’s Attitude Toward Theory. Skinner accepted operationism but rejected the theoretical aspects of logical positivism. He was content to manipulate environmental events (such as reinforcement contingencies) and note the effects of these manipulations on behavior, believing that this Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or N e o b eha v i o r i s m 415 functional analysis is all that is necessary. For this reason, Skinner’s approach is sometimes referred to as a descriptive behaviorism. There is, Skinner felt, no reason for looking “under the skin” for explanations of relationships between the environment and behavior. Looking for physiological explanations of behavior is a waste of time because overt behavior occurs whether or not we know its neurophysiological underpinnings. We have already reviewed Skinner’s attitude toward mentalistic explanations of behavior. Because Skinner did not care what was going on “under the skin” either physiologically or mentally, his approach is even referred to as the empty organism approach. Skinner knew, of course, that the organism is not empty, but he thought that nothing is lost by ignoring events that intervene between t..

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