Control

A History of Behavioral Psychology

John A. Mills

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814761243
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Behaviorism has been the dominant force in the creation of modern American psychology. However, the unquestioned and unquestioning nature of this dominance has obfuscated the complexity of behaviorism.

Control serves as an antidote to this historical myopia, providing the most comprehensive history of behaviorism yet written. Mills successfully balances the investigation of individual theorists and their contributions with analysis of the structures of assumption which underlie all behaviorist psychology, and with behaviorism's role as both creator and creature of larger American intellectual patterns, practices, and values.

Furthermore, Mills provides a cogent critique of behaviorists' narrow attitudes toward human motivation, exploring how their positivism cripples their ability to account for the unobservable, inner factors that control behavior. Control 's blend of history and criticism advances our understanding not only of behaviorism, but also the development of social science and positivism in twentieth-century America.

1

The Birth of Psychological Behaviorism

Behaviorism derived its unity from social and institutional sources; its intellectual and conceptual cohesion was correspondingly slight. Moreover, forms of behaviorism, usually unacknowledged and unnamed, pervaded American social science from its beginning. I will address four major motivating factors in the history of behaviorism: the search for practical applications, an unacknowledged yearning for philosophical respectability, the need to generate a specifically behaviorist body of theory, and a need to provide an empirical base in animal psychology.

The search for practical applications controlled American social science from its beginning, given that it originated directly from the Progressive reform movement.1 Both the Progressives and their progeny, the American social scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, believed that science should serve the good of society, where good was defined primarily in terms of material comforts and success. They also believed that practice should shape theory and be the ultimate test of theory. By using, at first, the resources of the American Social Science Association and, from 1876 onward, the resources of new and reformed universities, the Progressives created a cadre of experts imbued with the ideals of American social pragmatism.2 As mere social scientists, they could not lay claim to the power and prestige conferred by tradition. Instead, they depicted society as an arena exhibiting the interplay of objective social forces. Crucially, they treated persons as mere foci for the reception and projection of those forces. Because those forces bore equally on all, none were automatically privileged. But anybody who had the will and the talent could understand and, above all, manipulate American society. Social leadership then became the prerogative of a meritocracy, not an aristocracy. Those tendencies appeared first in early American sociology, economics, and political science, so that is where my history of behaviorism will begin.

As in the case of the search for practical applications, the need for philosophical respectability first manifested itself outside psychology. A group of American philosophers, the New Realists, together with a like-minded trio (Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge, Edgar Arthur Singer, Jr., and Grace de Laguna), advanced overtly behaviorist doctrines very early in this century. These philosophers published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method. A perusal of the early volumes of the journal shows that several psychologists did likewise, while the New Realist group referred extensively to the psychological literature. Moreover, there are direct lines of descent between the New Realist group and the behaviorist movement. The philosophers Ralph Barton Perry and Singer both inspired and exerted a determinative influence on the thought of two behaviorists (Tolman and Guthrie respectively).

Direct intellectual ancestry, however, does not guarantee a direct influence on the creation and promulgation of inherited doctrines. The New Realists were publishing at the very time when psychology was trying to distance itself from philosophy. The first behaviorist theorists felt the need for philosophical expertise and saw the necessity for dealing with certain philosophical problems (the mind/body problem being the most prominent). But the expertise had to appear to be their own and to be used to solve purely psychological problems. So psychologists had to create a traditional body of knowledge. Because the creation of a tradition requires the passage of several decades, the mature products of two of our forces (the need for philosophical respectability and the need to create a purely psychological body of theory) did not appear until fairly recently in behaviorism’s history. Moreover, the two needs also followed relatively independent courses in behaviorism’s early years. As a result, an account of New Realist doctrine is a detour from our main story, albeit a necessary one.

A need to generate a discipline-specific body of theory was a vital driving force in all the American social sciences in their early years. That need was historically conditioned. The pragmatism endemic to Progressivism eventually produced a unique form of positivism. By the 1920s American positivism had emerged as behaviorism, which enjoyed a brief hegemony in economics, political science, and sociology and was an influential force in psychology. In the 1930s behaviorism went into retreat, reemerging in psychology in the late 1940s as behavioral science, an empirically and theoretically based endeavor claiming both scientific status and the power to overcome social and personal dysfunctions. In the 1950s behavioral science became a complex hierarchy of theories, research techniques, training programs, and professional organizations. Operationism, the intellectual core of that hierarchy, was the creation of a small group of American psychologists, several of whom were behaviorists. So American behaviorism should be interpreted not as a set of positivist theories of action but as a programmatic attempt to achieve human betterment. Within behaviorism, the very first theories (Adolph Meyer’s, Albert P. Weiss’s, and J. R. Kantor’s) were just that—pure theories. Because they lacked the life-giving link to the practical they were consigned to the margins of psychology’s history almost as soon as they were written. They are, nevertheless, very much a part of that history and must be entered into the record.

Similar considerations apply to the need to create a body of empirical work derived from the animal laboratory. In that case, animal psychologists had to develop the practical expertise needed for working with their two chosen animals, the rat and the domestic pigeon. In the absence of a body of laboratory lore, the highly sophisticated work of the midcentury would have been impossible. The generation of a methodology, closely linked to increasingly complex and sophisticated statistical theory, was equally necessary, as was the generation of a theory (“learning theory”) specifically designed as an avenue of expression for the laboratory work. The writings of Walter Samuel Hunter (1889–1954), the first behaviorist to base his theory explicitly on animal work, and of Zing-Yang Kuo (1898–1970), who was the first radical behaviorist to engage in animal work, had almost no influence on later behaviorism. Although Hunter was the first to teach a course on learning, his course material looked backward to German objectivism and to Thorndike. His only influence as an animal psychologist was to train some of those who were later to engage in work that resembled or laid the groundwork for the classical behaviorist work of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Kuo had a very brief career as an American psychologist (1918–23). Thereafter he lived much of his life in China, whose turbulent modern history ensured that he did little research.

Until the last third of the nineteenth century none of the modern social sciences were recognizable as independent disciplines.3 Disciplinary differentiation began with the emergence of modern universities and colleges in the 1870s and 1880s. The appearance in the 1880s of people with doctoral degrees in their own field constituted a major advance. All these men believed that all science had to be empirically based, deriving that idea in part from the German universities in which they were trained and in part from the successes of evolutionary biology. The American proclivity for social utility manifested itself with varying strength in the various social sciences. The most influential of the new economists placed moral and social values at the center of their enterprise, and the socialists among them pressed for more state intervention. Reform tendencies were weakest in anthropology (since the discipline offered little opportunity for their manifestation), while the political scientists tended to be relatively conservative.

As the modern American university began to emerge, it became increasingly more feasible to take up the role of pure researcher. Men with a strong motive to find social uses for knowledge were attracted to those posts, ensuring that the work of their early graduates would be strongly infused with Progressivism. However, once the universities were established, institutional pressures within them exerted a moderating influence on reform ideals. In the universities, left-wing reformers and traditionalists had to meet and cooperate on a common middle ground. At the same time, university administrators were equally anxious to demonstrate the social utility of their new areas of study and not to give offense to those who were funding the enterprise. The form taken by American positivism ensured that the universities were socially cohesive and promoted their societal influence.

In the universities positivism provided a minimal, agreed set of standards for the conduct of research and teaching. It projected the reassuring image of groups of scholars pursuing objective, disinterested research and then offering their findings to society. It also provided a cloak beneath which value assumptions could operate unseen.

Behaviorism took root early, prevailed for a long time, and was pervasive in American sociology. As early as 1897 the Columbia sociologist Franklin Henry Giddings (1855–1931) devised a scale of sympathy, postulating that sympathy would be closest among those sharing the same genetic makeup.4 In 1909 he published a more sophisticated version of the scale, which had nine points, varying from nativeborn of white parents, through various European “races,” to orientals, “civilized dark,” and finally, “uncivilized dark.”5 The position of a particular person on the scale was to be ascertained by an analysis of objective characteristics (the person’s parentage, cultural origin, and skin color). Giddings did not say so, but the new scale could be construed as an expression of prejudice. He attempted to overcome that potential criticism by constructing each scale point out of his objective characteristics. Given that he expressed the values of his day with such fidelity, he did not realize that each of his characteristics was value-laden. He knew that his scale was a scale of ranks, not an equal-interval measure; he solved his problem by deploying implicit behaviorist principles while arguing that all barely detectable differences in degree of fellow-feeling or sympathy had to be equivalent. By “barely detectable” he meant “behaviorally equivalent.” Thus, behavior became the only avenue whereby we could judge psychosocial attributes; private mental states, unseen mental causes, and the unconscious were all ruled out. By comparing the 1890 and 1900 censuses, Giddings demonstrated the social utility of his scale. He assigned various population groups to his scale points and proved (to his own satisfaction, at least) that Americans had become culturally more homogeneous during that decade.

All the features of the behaviorist enterprise existed in embryo in Giddings’s scales. First, sympathy was defined in terms of measurable behavior. Second, Giddings made no appeal to feelings or other mental constructs; the behavior was directly correlated with supposed biological forces. Third, he made no presumptions about the causal connections between biology and psychology; the establishment of a functional relationship sufficed. Fourth, the desired conclusion was stipulated in advance; had Giddings not supported his hypothesis he would have assumed an error in technique, not an error in reasoning. Fifth, the connection with the dominant social concerns in the United States at that time is obvious.

Versions of behaviorism were to be found at the University of Chicago as well as at Columbia. Chicago graduate Edward Cary Hayes opened the door to behaviorism in 1904 by insisting that sociology limit itself to the study of phenomena (rather than to the states or conditions underlying phenomena) and to the study of functional relationships between antecedent and dependent variables. Such study would be effective only if one could quantify the variables in question. In Hayes, then, we do not see just behaviorism but a particular behaviorist doctrine—that the pursuit of science is the pursuit of strictly functional relationships between objectively identifiable variables.

Hayes’s position was taken further by his colleague Luther Lee Bernard. In 1919 Bernard published an article in which he advanced a position strikingly similar to that of Watson.6 Behaviorism was to sweep away the mists of superstition that had clouded sociologists’ gaze. Superstition comprised not just witchcraft or mysticism but all metaphysics. Bernard postulated a direct connection between activity in neural substrates and mental states or in sociological phenomena, while also insisting that the primary aim of the behavior scientist was to discover statistical regularities in observed behavior. Above all, no science of human behavior could be complete unless it resulted in prescriptions for social action.

Throughout the 1920s the University of Chicago dominated American sociology. The work of the Chicago sociologists demonstrates the formative and continuing role of Progressivism and the convergence of that heritage with a behaviorist positivism. The leading figures of the Chicago school, especially Robert E. Park (1864–1944) and Ernest Burgess (1886–1966), produced eclectically empirical and problem-driven—rather than theory-driven—work. At first sight, it seems Progressivism did not control the development of sociology at Chicago. For example, Martin Bulmer has argued that Park, Burgess, and their followers wished to study sociological phenomena purely objectively. In particular, he refers to the numerous occasions on which Park repudiated the work of the social survey movement, where the intent was to collect data that could then be presented in such a way as to engender ameliorative community action. However, there are substantive continuities between Progressivism and the beginnings of empirical sociology in America. More to the point, there were formal similarities between Progressive thought and the underlying features controlling the research practices of the Chicago school.

To take Park, journalism was his first profession, an early experience that exerted a continuing influence on his work as a sociologist. After abandoning journalism Park worked for Booker T. Washington for several years; during that period he put much time and effort into publicizing the atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo. While teaching at Chicago, Park collaborated with Charles Johnson of the Chicago Commission of Race Relations and was employed by the Carnegie-funded Americanization study of 1918–19. Another Chicago faculty member, Ellsworth Faris, spent the first seven years of his working life as an African missionary. Finally, the Chicago school’s characteristic work had its origins in the work of an early faculty member, Charles Richmond Henderson, who was more of a social worker than a sociologist and had close working contacts with various community agencies. After Henderson’s resignation Burgess took over his courses.

With respect to both substance and form there are striking continuities between Progressivism and sociology. From the beginning, empirical work in sociology was supported by foundations such as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Bulmer argues that those controlling the research funds, especially Beardsley Ruml, were scrupulously careful to avoid demanding predetermined findings from ...