Behaviour

D. E. Broadbent

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317753469
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie cognitive et cognition

Original blurb from 1961: For most laymen the science of behaviour hardly exists. Few people have any clear idea of its methods, its history or, above all, its significance. Beside the popular interest aroused, for example, by the achievements of Freud, the work of the behaviourists is almost unknown. Yet this is a science which is of the highest importance, has practical applications of immediate use, and offers the hope of profound insights into the human mind.

What distinguishes the behaviourists is their insistence on exact scientific verification. Introspection may suggest a theory but only objective experiments will be admitted as evidence in its favour. The observation of how a rat behaves in a maze may seem a far cry from the study of mankind but it has the supreme advantage that what is observed can be exactly recorded and analysed. Progress by such methods is slow but what is discovered is much less likely to be upset by future discoveries than is work based on subjective judgments.

Some of the results already obtained are fruitful and suggestive. Mr Broadbent's treatment of rewards and punishments is most striking, both for the importance of the results and for the precision of the methods by which they are obtained. To reward a child for doing something or to punish him for abstaining might seem to be equally effective methods, to be distinguished only on ethical grounds. Mr Broadbent, however, sets out modern evidence and opinion about the means by which each method operates and so demonstrates that there exist sharp and general rules governing the situations in which each is likely to be effective. He describes the state of 'neurotic' conflict produced when a reward and a punishment are both associated with the same object and again a series of simple, controlled experiments throws light on a basic human problem.

The science of behaviour is closely linked with other branches of research such as the theory of information and the development of electronic and mechanical 'brains', and this common field of research promises exciting results. Mr Broadbent shows how behaviourism has grown towards such sophisticated developments from the beginnings of such men as Watson and Pavlov.

To any intelligent reader this book will give not only the pleasure of watching a series of brilliantly devised experiments gradually giving birth to a new and important science, but also the insight which comes from examining such basic concepts as memory and learning, of discovering how much of what we think we know is merely an unexamined assumption, and of being forced to think again in precise terms. For anyone willing to make this effort Behaviour is an exceptionally rewarding book.

1

Why Behaviour?

In the far-off days before the First World War, a man named J. B. Watson coined the word ‘behaviourism’, and under that title stated an attitude to psychology which aroused great enthusiasm in some people: and equally great antagonism in others. As a result, his name is probably as well known to laymen as that of his contemporary Lord Rutherford, the nuclear physicist. But whereas the layman usually has some idea of the trend of nuclear physics since Edwardian times, he has little knowledge of Watson’s successors in psychology. The reason is presumably that neither psychology in general nor behaviourism in particular is likely to blow the layman’s body to the four winds: nor will they light and heat his home after the world’s stocks of oil are gone. The practical effects of nuclear physics, whether good or evil, are more spectacular than those of the study of behaviour. This may not be true in the future. Even in 1960 experimental psychology has a number of useful applications: but as yet nuclear physics is more useful, and therefore attracts attention even from the most determinedly unscientific of humanists.

Yet practical consequences are not everything. The same humanist, whose familiarity with Oppenheimer’s role in the development of the H-bomb is balanced by his ignorance of Skinner’s role in the analysis of operant conditioning, is often the man who professes contempt for mere technology. Science, he may say, is concerned only with the inferior material circumstances of life. Far more important are the problems of personal adjustment and of the nature of man. At this point in the argument there is usually a concealed assumption that the study of history or literature sheds more light on these spiritual problems than science does. This assumption tends to be unconvincing to scientists: but many of them would agree with the early stages of the argument. If physics can shed any light on philosophy, that contribution is as real as nuclear power. We want to understand the world as well as manipulating it. If physics can contribute in this way, surely the study of behaviour can do so even more? When we look at inorganic matter, any inferences to our own nature must be indirect: the facts most relevant to ourselves come from sources closer to ourselves. Even though Watson’s successors may have made no bombs, their provision of facts about living creatures gives them a claim on the attention of all of us.

We must not, of course, expect too much. Perfect knowledge of all the laws of nature (assuming such knowledge to be possible or even meaningful) would probably still be consistent with numerous different attitudes to life. Our own knowledge is very imperfect, even in physics, and the implications to be drawn from it are correspondingly more open to argument. The tentative conclusions of behaviourists since Watson’s time will not therefore turn the entrance of the Church of England into a one-way street: but they deserve, in any assessment of the world, at least as much weight as do the properties of electrons. The following pages, therefore, try to tell the story of behaviourism over the past fifty years, in broad and simplified outline. We shall see that many of Watson’s original views have been forced out of scientific circulation by the pressure of experiment. Some of his other ideas have spread until almost all psychologists accept them. So as a beginning to our story we ought to look at his views and try to understand how he came to put them forward.

Classical Introspectionism: Examining One’s Thoughts

Any short description of psychology as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century must be a caricature. The main feature of the subject was that different eminent men held rather different views, so that one would have to go into a lot of detail to cover all of them. It is perhaps fair to say, though, that the majority thought the main purpose of psychology to be the study of human experience. What was the content of man’s consciousness in various situations, and what were the processes within it? A great deal of effort was put into finding answers to these questions, using more or less rigorous methods. People were placed repeatedly in controlled situations, such as looking at particular lights or listening to certain sounds. They were asked to observe their own experience and to report exactly what it was. This meant a rather sophisticated form of observation, and usually the people used were trained in this type of process. In principle, though, the technique could be justified in the same way as techniques of observation in the physical sciences. If we want to carry out an accurate measurement of length, we choose an observer who is careful and attentive to making his readings: so also when we want to know something about the nature of experience we should choose a careful observer. It could even be argued that the nature of the observation is really the same in both cases. No observer can do more than report his experience; in physics we make use of experiences such as seeing a pointer indicate a particular reading. In psychology our interest is in the experience itself rather than in the pointer-reading, but the principle might be held to be the same. The main difference was that in psychology one must take great care to report the content of consciousness and not inferences about the events in the outer world which give rise to that content. One must not say ‘I see a pointer which reads such-and-such’ but report the actual pattern and colour of one’s visual awareness. Some books on philosophy take rather this approach even today, asserting that one is sure of sensations such as colour and form, and that knowledge of the external world is inferred from these sensory data. The aim of the introspective psychologists was to make a list of the basic data and an account of the processes of inference.

Broadly speaking, this type of observation found three kinds of element in consciousness. There were sensations, which were experiences stemming directly from stimulation of the sense-organs, the eye, the ear, and so on. There were images, which resembled sensations but arose within the mind itself without any stimulation of the senses. There were also feelings, which could be described by such adjectives as pleasant or unpleasant, and provided the emotional tone of experience. By Watson’s time, however, this division was running into certain difficulties. In spite of the care taken to secure accurate observation, different laboratories found different results in their introspections. Let us take three examples.

If you suddenly look up and see a man-eating tiger, you will probably say that you feel fear. You will also suffer certain bodily changes, of a kind which are useful if you run away or engage the tiger in unarmed combat. You will receive sensations from these bodily changes just as you do from your eyes and ears: your stomach will probably feel queasy, and you may notice your heart pounding. Now the suggestion was made by James and by Lange that the emotion of fear is purely the set of sensations arising from the bodily changes. This suggestion was sharply criticized, because some people hold that when one is afraid, there is something in consciousness as well as these sensations. Other people support the James-Lange theory: and it is probably fair to suspect the existence of a third group who get more and more confused the more they think about the question. Introspection did not seem able to solve this problem.

Another difficulty arose from the question of mixed feelings. When a rose is presented to your nostrils, you may report particular sensations of smell, and perhaps some experience of cold from the air drawn into your nose, and of strain in the chest-muscles used in sniffing. Along with these sensations there will most likely be a feeling of pleasure, which you can distinguish from the sensations themselves.

On the other hand, if you hear the squeak of chalk on a black-board, the background feeling may be one of unpleasantness. Now suppose some enquiring psychologist presents both a rose and a chalk-squeak simultaneously. The sensations may well be simply those met previously, but all arriving together and so with an altered degree of clarity. What about the feelings? Does one have pleasant and unpleasant feelings at the same time, or do the two cancel out, or do they alternate rapidly? You might perhaps describe your experience as one of pleasantness at the focus of attention with a surrounding background of unpleasantness: and there are a very large number of other possibilities. Once again, different laboratories come to rather different conclusions on the subject of mixed feelings.

But the most celebrated controversy of this sort was that about ‘imageless thought’. A group of investigators working at Würzburg claimed that some of the most important elements of thought could not be reported in terms of sensations or images. One might have the ‘bare awareness’ of a concept without even the most generalized mental picture embodying it. Possibly even more important, one might establish a ‘determining tendency’ which would decide the line that thought should follow but wouldn’t provide any clear, reportable, conscious content. As this is rather a difficult notion, perhaps we should consider an example. Suppose you say to someone, ‘I am going to give you a number. When you hear it, add two to it and give me the answer.’ Most people agree that after such a question the listener will have quite a lot going on in his mind. He may conjure up shapes which he associates with various numbers, he may hear echoes of your words, he may have feelings of nervousness and tenseness. All this confusion then settles down, according to the Würzburgers, to a fairly calm state of readiness in which there are no pictures or relevant sensations to be reported. When you say ‘six’ the answer ‘eight’ comes straight into the listener’s awareness without anything intervening that he can tell you about. Yet for the answer to be correct there must have been something important in his mind before it appeared – and he could not introspect this vital something. A particularly clear instance is provided by a rather flamboyant experiment in which the subject is hypnotized, given the instruction ‘add’, and then returned to normal consciousness and asked for the first number to come into his head on being shown, say, three and five. He says ‘eight’, but cannot tell from inspecting his own experience why he does so.

The possibility of imageless thought was keenly attacked by other introspectionists. There was always, they said, some conscious content for a really good observer to report. It might not look relevant to the topic of thought, it might simply consist of sensations of pressure in certain parts of the body or an image so unlike a real object that a good deal of literary ability was required to describe it. But a complete vacuum would never occur in the mind.

Imageless thought, then (along with mixed feelings and the existence of emotional feelings apart from bodily sensations), was a topic on which people could not agree just by examining their own experience. If we want to understand the effect which such controversies had upon Watson, it is worth emphasizing the difference between these disagreements and those in other sciences. Of course, physicists and physiologists disagree with one another, often acrimoniously, and with all the vices of obscurantism, self-interest, and authority-worship shown in human quarrels in non-scientific fields. If all psychologists thought alike it would mean that the subject was dead. But the trouble with these arguments between introspectionists was that they were not about methods of experiment or the interpretation of results, but seemed to be about the results of experiments. There is no real harm in the difference of approach between radio-astronomers and those who use optical telescopes: nor anything discreditable in the absence of agreement concerning the theory of continuous creation. But if one astronomer said that he could see Mars in one part of the sky and another that he could see it somewhere else, the controversy would obviously be very discreditable to somebody. If it went on for more than a very short time, it would be discreditable to the subject as a whole. It was in this light that many psychologists saw the disagreement between different introspectionists. They became impatient with the elaborate analysis of experience which had led to such doubtful conclusions, and were ready to join a movement which rejected it. Watson’s was the movement which resulted.

Later on in this chapter we shall look at the value of introspection more closely. For the moment it is enough to point out that these controversies were not purely about facts. The ‘determining tendency’ was not only an item in consciousness: even when it could not be reported at all it was advanced as a reason for the appearance of other items. In other words, the Würzburgers wanted causes and explanations for the emergence of certain images and feelings rather than others. Consciousness itself could not provide these causes; one cannot adequately explain by introspection why a particular number is accompanied by a visual image of, say, a half-moon, nor what it is that causes the correct answer to rise into consciousness, when one hears the question ‘Add five and three’. Psychiatrists have been known, when faced with some peculiarly distressing conscious phenomenon such as a prostrating dread of running water, to find a traumatic episode in the patient’s past life which seems to most people a reasonable explanation of the dread. Yet this explanation was quite unknown to the patient. Such exploits were beginning to become popular in the years just before behaviourism began: Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, and by 1909 he was sufficiently famous to be invited to an academic ceremony at Clark University in America. There was in fact a growing feeling that the facts of consciousness were not enough, and the ‘determining tendency’ was a symptom of that feeling. In America especially there was a school (known as functionalists) who treated the data of conscious experience against the background of evolution. The explanation for the strange loops and associations in the thought of each individual lies in the process of adjustment going on between him and his surroundings. So one needs to know facts about him other than his conscious processes, and to try and see the causal connections between these material facts and his awareness.

So far we have seen two forces at work in Edwardian psychology: the revulsion created by disagreement about the facts of consciousness, and the pressure to merge those facts in a larger biological background. There was a third force, which arose from the fact that by the 1900’s many psychologists were studying animals rather than men. They did so for obvious reasons; one of the standard techniques of science is to study simpler systems as a guide to more complex ones, and so one might legitimately hope to see more clearly in animals principles which in man are hidden by the enormous variety of his experience. In addition, one cannot for moral reasons control the surroundings, heredity, and upbringing of a child as one can those of an animal. One can even carry out operations on the nervous system of animals and study the effects, which is obviously impossible in man except when the brain is already injured. But when animals are being observed, there is no direct method of studying their consciousness. We can only see how they behave. The technique used, in the days when Watson was trained, was to infer that the animal had the experience which a man would have if he behaved in the same way. Watson himself wrote a monograph in 1907 on the bodily sensations of a rat learning to find its way through a maze. But to say the least, this is a very doubtful procedure. It was modified by the rule known as Lloyd Morgan’s Canon, that one should never assume the animal to have a higher ‘psychical faculty’ than the simplest possible to explain its behaviour. Yet how can a creature of one species possibly be sure of the experience of a member of a quite different species? Would it not be safer simply to state the behaviour of the animal under various conditions, and go no further? And if this was done, how should one compare knowledge gained from animals with that acquired from the study of human beings? Here was the third force tending to make psychologists dissatisfied with their existing methods. Introspection gave conflicting results, it did not provide the explanations for its own data, and it made comparison with animals difficult. It was not surprising that when in 1913 Watson published a paper putting forward a new creed, the idea was seized on eagerly and a complete movement leaped into being. Watson did not provide a set of strange but systematic concepts which his academic colleagues gradually thought over and found good. Rather he expressed simply and vigorously a number of unformulated attitudes which already existed, and so provided a rallying-point for many of the more productive psychologists of his time. In fact he resigned from his academic job in 1920, only seven years after his celebrated paper, and yet behaviourism continued as a large and flourishing movement. It could hardly have done so if it had rested on his contribution alone. But he was the representative and the protagonist, and it is his views (or a distorted version of them) which are usually meant when the word behaviourism is casually used in modern writings.

Watson’s Creed

As has already been implied, the first statements of behaviourism consisted of a number of assertions which were only loosely connected with one another, so that later generations can accept some and reject others. They were also largely assertions of attitude or method of procedure rather than factual propositions, so that argument about them is on a rather philosophical level. Facts were to come later, and we shall reach them in the following chapters. For the rest of this one we shall continue to be somewhat abstract, with apologies to those who are impatient of philosophizing. Such impatience is very understandable, but there is no point in giving the results of a method before the method itself is accepted: and to some people facts about behaviour may seem irrelevant to psychology if they are served up without justification.

Watson himself was clearly a person impatient of refined verbal distinctions and anxious to get on with the job. As a result his views have been anathema to many philosophers who were overaware of the weaknesses in his wording. Three points stand out in his teaching: the rejection of introspection in principle, the belief that environment rather than heredity determines human behaviour, and the assertion that this effect of environment is chiefly through a particular process of conditioning reflexes which we shall explain in a moment.

His rejection of introspection solved at one blow the difficulties mentioned in the last section. Once this unsatisfactory source of data had gone there should be no more disagreement over facts, no problem of finding causes for the occurrence of this thought rather than that, and the facts of human psychology would be of the same kind as those of animal workers. Just as the rat is observed to turn into one alley of a maze rather than another, so one can study the movements of human beings and compare the results of experiments on them with those on other species. In neither case is there any need to drag in conscious experience. This attitude has sometimes been regarded as a denial of the reality of consciousness, but it is hard to find any statement by Watson which goes so far. All he said was that science, being a public process, must ignore private awareness and deal only with those data which are available to everyone. Such a distinction between subjective and objective seems reasonable enough, although of course it remained open for anybody to value the subjective more highly: and it is likely that much of the antagonism which Watson aroused was rooted in the feeling that subjective aspects of human nature are so overwhelmingly important that no objective study at all can be appropriate. We shall return to this point when we consider how far Watson’s views have survived.

An objection of a rather different sort is that human beings are clearly much more complex than any other animal, so that such observations as ‘time taken to solve problems’ or ‘number of alleys entered in a maze’ would not give adequate information for understanding human behaviour. People spend much time sitting and thinking, rather than rushing about: what objective measures can be applied in such cases? To this Watson replied that thinking might be a process very similar to speech, but with the size of the movements so reduced that they could no longer be seen or heard. In principle such movements might be detected by very sensitive recording equipment, and so allow objective recording of thought. He also suggested that measurement of bodily change, particularly in the sexual organs, could substitute for the ‘feeling’ of the introspectionist. It will be noticed that these are suggestions about questions of fact, and so are rather different from the rejection of conscious experience, which was a rule of procedure. As facts these suggestions have been only partially successful. Certainly the muscles used in speech are active in thought, at least in some people: since Watson’s time it has become possible to detect this activity electrically. But it has not yet been shown that the muscles move in a different way for one thought rather than another, and this is essential if they are to provide us with an improvement on introspection. In the same way bodily changes do undoubtedly occur in emotion, as was known well before Watson. But no pattern of bodily changes has yet been shown to characterize any particular emotion: people turn white with rage and also with fear, that is, the blood vessels in their skin contract and so force the blood to the muscles to provide fuel for violent action. In both those emotions, and in others too, sweating may occur and so assist the body to keep its temperature constant even though the muscles are generating heat. But one cannot (at least as yet) look at the records of the bodily changes and say which of the possible emotions the man has experienced. It is still open for future research to show subtle differences of pattern, both in emotional response and in the activity of the speech muscles during thought, but neither is yet established. To Watson, however, these possibilities offered a way ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orginal Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• 1 WHY BEHAVIOUR?
• 2 THE EVOLUTIONARY VIEW
• 3 ANXIETY AND CONFLICT
• 4 REASONING IN THE WHITE RAT
• 5 FACT AND THEORY
• 6 A SCALPEL IN THE WORKS
• 7 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION
• 8 THE NEXT STEP
• APPENDIX
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
• Index