Behaviourism was introduced in 1913 by John B. Watson, an American psychologist.

Watson and his followers believed that observable behaviour, not inner experience, was
the only reliable source of information. This concentration on observable events was a
reaction against the structuralists' emphasis on introspection. The behaviourists also
stressed the importance of the environment in shaping an individual's behaviour. They
chiefly looked for connections between observable behaviour and stimuli from the
environment.

The behaviourist movement was greatly influenced by the work of the Russian
physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov. In a famous study, Pavlov rang a bell each time he gave a
dog some food. The dog's mouth would water when the animal smelled the food. After
Pavlov repeated the procedure many times, the dog's saliva began to flow whenever the
animal heard the bell, even if no food appeared. This experiment demonstrated that a
reflex--such as the flow of saliva--can become associated with a stimulus other than the
one that first produced it--in this case, the sound of a bell instead of the smell of food.
The learning process by which a response becomes associated with a new stimulus is
called conditioning.

Watson and the other behaviourists realized that human behaviour could also be changed
by conditioning. In fact, Watson believed he could produce almost any response by
controlling an individual's environment.

During the mid-1900's, the American psychologist B. F. Skinner gained much attention
for behaviourist ideas. In his book Walden Two (1948), Skinner describes how the
principles of conditioning might be applied to create an ideal planned society.

Behaviorism (also called learning perspective) is a philosophy of psychology based on

the proposition that all things which organisms do—including acting, thinking and
feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors. The school of psychology maintains
that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal
physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind. Behaviorism
comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there
are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions)
and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).

From early psychology in the 19th century, the behaviorist school of thought ran
concurrently and shared commonalities with the psychoanalytic and Gestalt movements
in psychology into the 20th century; but also differed from the mental philosophy of the
Gestalt psychologists in critical ways. Its main influences were Ivan Pavlov, who
investigated classical conditioning, Edward Lee Thorndike, John B. Watson who rejected
introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to experimental methods, and
B.F. Skinner who conducted research on operant conditioning.

.
Molar versus molecular behaviorism

Skinner's view of behavior is most often characterized as a "molecular" view of behavior,

that is each behavior can be decomposed into atomistic parts or molecules. This view is
inaccurate when one considers his complete description of behavior as delineated in the
1981 article, Selection by Consequences and many other works. Skinner claims that a
complete account of behavior has involved an understanding of selection history at three
levels: biology (the natural selection or phylogeny of the animal); behavior (the
reinforcement history or ontogeny of the behavioral repertoire of the animal); and for
some species, culture (the cultural practices of the social group to which the animal
belongs). This whole organism, with all those histories, then interacts with its
environment. He often described even his own behavior as a product of his phylogenetic
history, his reinforcement history (which includes the learning of cultural practices)
interacting with the environment at the moment. Molar behaviorists, such as Howard
Rachlin argue that behavior can not be understood by focusing on events in the moment.
That is, they argue that a behavior can be understood best in terms of the ultimate cause
of history and that molecular behaviorist are committing a fallacy by inventing a
fictitious proximal cause for behavior. Molar behaviorists argue that standard molecular
constructs such as "associative strength" are such fictitious proximal causes that simply
take the place of molar variables such as rate of reinforcement. Thus, a molar behaviorist
would define a behavior such as loving someone as exhibiting a pattern of loving
behavior over time, there is no known proximal cause of loving behavior, only a history
of behaviors (of which the current behavior might be an example of) that can be
summarized as love.

Recent experimental work (see The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes-- 2004 and later) shows
quite clearly that behavior is affected both by molar variables (i.e., average rates of
reinforcement) and molecular ones (e.g. time, preceding responses). What is needed is an
understanding of the real-time dynamics of operant behavior, which will involve
processes at both short and long time scales.

Behaviorism in philosophy

Behaviorism is a psychological movement that can be compared with philosophy of

mind. The basic premise of radical behaviorism is that the study of behavior should be a
natural science, such as chemistry or physics, without any reference to hypothetical inner
states of organisms. Other varieties, such as theoretical behaviorism, permit internal
states, but do not require them to be mental or have any relation to subjective experience.
Behaviorism takes a functional view of behavior.

There are points of view within analytic philosophy that have called themselves, or have
been called by others, behaviorist. In logical behaviorism (as held, e.g., by Rudolf Carnap
and Carl Hempel), the meaning of psychological statements are their verification
conditions, which consist of performed overt behavior. W. V. Quine made use of a type of
behaviorism, influenced by some of Skinner's ideas, in his own work on language.
Gilbert Ryle defended a distinct strain of philosophical behaviorism, sketched in his book
The Concept of Mind. Ryle's central claim was that instances of dualism frequently
represented 'category mistakes,' and hence that they were really misunderstandings of the
use of ordinary language. Daniel Dennett likewise acknowledges himself to be a type of
behaviorist. [2]

It is sometimes argued that Ludwig Wittgenstein defended a behaviorist position, and

there are important areas of overlap between his philosophy, logical behaviorism, and
radical behaviorism (e.g., the beetle in a box argument).[3] However, Wittgenstein was
not a behaviorist,[citation needed] and his style of writing is sufficiently elliptical to admit of a
range of interpretations. Mathematician Alan Turing is also sometimes considered a
behaviorist, but he himself did not make this identification.

BEHAVIORISM

Behaviorism is a highly influential academic branch of psychology that

dominated the field between the two world wars. Behaviorism concerns itself
with the use of strict experimental procedures to study observable behavior
in response to environmental stimuli. It excludes ideas, emotions and inner
mental experience in general. According to behaviorist theory, an individual
simply responds to stimuli in their environment. These responses are
observable and measurable and can therefore be predicted and controlled.

Behaviorism was developed in the early twentieth century by American

psychologist John B. Watson. Watson has written: "Behaviorism claims that
'consciousness' is neither a definable nor a usable concept; that it is merely
another word for the 'soul' of more ancient times. The old psychology is thus
dominated by a subtle kind of religious philosophy" (Behaviorism , 1924).
Watson sought to make the study of psychology scientific by using only
objective procedures that produced tangible results.

Much of Watson's work was based on the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, a

Russian physiologist, who studied how animals respond to certain stimuli and
conditions. In Pavlov's famous experiment, he rang a bell as he fed some
dogs. Under normal conditions, a dog will salivate whenever food is in its
mouth. This is called an unconditioned response to an unconditioned
stimulus. Pavlov built on this naturally occurring situation to see if the dogs
could be taught to change their normal response. Pavlov devised an
experiment so that each time the dogs heard the bell, a small amount of food
was placed in the mouth. After several times, the dogs would begin to
salivate whenever they heard the bell because they had learned that food
would follow. The bell was a conditioned stimulus. Pavlov then removed the
food, the unconditioned stimulus, and only rang the bell, the conditioned
stimulus. The dogs continued to salivate (i.e. make the conditioned
response) as if the food were still being presented. They had learned to
respond by salivating to the sound of a bell ringing. This type of controlled
response to a stimulus has been labeled "classical conditioning."

More recently, another psychologist, B.F. Skinner began testing Watson's

theories in the laboratory. Skinner's studies led him to expand Watson's
views of how individuals respond to their environment. Skinner believed that
even as people respond to stimuli in their environment, they also operate on
or change their environment to obtain certain results.

Although Skinner is not the originator of the theory of "operant conditioning,"

he has been the leading proponent. Operant conditioning differs from
classical conditioning in that a reinforcement occurs only after the subject
executes a predesignated behavioral act. No unconditioned stimulus is used.
Instead, a spontaneous behavior is rewarded, or reinforced. In order to test
this theory, Skinner invented the "Skinner Box" in which a rat or pigeon is
put in an environment that requires the pressing of a lever to obtain food. At
first the animal may press the lever infrequently and receive the food
reinforcement. After a time, the animal begins to press the lever more often
and therefore receive more reinforcement. The animal "operates" on its
environment in order to receive a reward. In this way, animals can "learn" to
behave in a certain way in order to receive a reward, or to avoid punishment.
Thus, both Skinner and Watson would deny that the mind or feelings play
any part in determining behavior. Instead, only our experience of
consequences (rewards or punishments), determine our behavior.

A natural outgrowth of behaviorism is behavior therapy; a type of

intervention which focuses on modifying observable behavior as a means to
alleviate psychological suffering. Behavior therapy techniques emphasize
symptoms of emotional distress. Emotional problems are considered the
consequences of faulty acquired behavior patterns or the failure to learn
effective responses to one's environment. The aim of behavior therapy, also
known as behavior modification, is therefore to change behavior patterns.
One of the most prominent behavior techniques is systematic desensitization
or counter-conditioning which has been used successfully to treat phobias
and fears. Patients are asked to imagine anxiety-producing situations or be
presented with actual feared objects. Gradually, exposure to the feared
object is increased and the patient learns to control their reaction. Often
relaxation training is employed simultaneously in order to reduce anxiety
further. The theoretic basis of this type of therapy is that once the
appropriate overt expressions of emotions are learned, practiced and
reinforced, the correlated subjective feelings will be felt.

Education is another field that has been influenced by the theories and
concepts of Behaviorism. For example, programmed learning is based on
Skinner's theory that learning can best be accomplished in small, incremental
steps with immediate reinforcement for the learner. It is a self-paced, self-
administered educational technique in which instruction is presented in a
logical sequence. This technique can be applied through texts or computer-
aided instruction programs. No matter what the medium, the concept of
immediately reinforcing the correct response is emphasized. Behaviorism
forces us to examine the issue of control in education. In the behaviorist's
view, there is no alternative to control. It is simply a matter of who is to
control. One does not grant the child "freedom" merely by leaving him alone.
To refuse to use scientific control to shape human behavior is, for the
behaviorist, a failure in responsibility.

[Link]

BEHAVIORISM

A theory of human development initiated by American educational

psychologist Edward Thorndike, and developed by American psychologists
John Watson and B.F. Skinner.

Behaviorism is a psychological theory of human development that posits

that humans can be trained, or conditioned, to respond in specific ways to
specific stimuli and that given the correct stimuli, personalities and
behaviors of individuals, and even entire civilizations, can be codified and
controlled.
Edward Thorndike (1874-1949) initially proposed that humans and
animals acquire behaviors through the association of stimuli and
responses. He advanced two laws of learning to explain why behaviors
occur the way they do: The Law of Effect specifies that any time a
behavior is followed by a pleasant outcome, that behavior is likely to
recur. The Law of Exercise states that the more a stimulus is connected
with a response, the stronger the link between the two. Ivan Pavlov's
(1849-1936) groundbreaking work on classical conditioning also
provided an observable way to study behavior. Although most
psychologists agree that neither Thorndike nor Pavlov were strict
behaviorists, their work paved the way for the emergence of behaviorism.

The birth of modern behaviorism was championed early in the 20th

century by a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University named John
Watson. In his 1924 book Behaviorism, Watson made the notorious
claim that, given a dozen healthy infants, he could determine the adult
personalities of each one, "regardless of his talents, penchants,
tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors." While
making such a claim seems ridiculous today, at the time Watson was
reacting to emerging Freudian psychoanalytical theories of development,
which many people found threatening. Watson's scheme rejected all the
hidden, unconscious, and suppressed longings that Freudians attributed
to behaviors and posited that humans respond to punishments and
rewards. Behavior that elicits positive responses is reinforced and
continued, while behavior that elicits negative responses is eliminated.

Later, the behaviorist approach was taken up by B.F. Skinner (1904-

1990) who deduced the evolution of human behavior by observing the
behavior of rats in a maze. Skinner even wrote a novel, Waiden Two,
about a Utopian society where human behavior is governed totally by
self-interested decisions based on increasing pleasure. The book
increased Skinner's renown and led many to believe that behaviorism
could indeed produce such a society.

In the 1950s, however, the popularity of behaviorism began to decline.

The first sustained attack on its tenets was made by Noam Chomsky
(1928-), a renowned linguist, who demonstrated that the behaviorist
model simply could not account for the acquisition of language. Other
psychologists soon began to question the role of cognition in behavior.

Today, many psychologists debate the extent to which cognitive learning

and behavioral learning affect the development of personality.

[Link]

BEHAVIORISM

Behaviorism is the conceptual framework underlying the science of

behavior. The science itself is often referred to as the experimental
analysis of behavior or behavior analysis. Modern behaviorism
emphasizes the analysis of conditions that maintain and change behavior
as well as the factors that influence the acquisition or learning of
behavior. Behaviorists also offer concepts and analyses that go well
beyond the common-sense understanding of reward and punishment.
Contemporary behaviorism provides an integrated framework for the
study of human behavior, society, and culture.
Within the social sciences, behaviorism has referred to the social-learning
perspective that emphasizes the importance of reinforcement principles in
regulating social behavior (McLaughlin 1971). In addition, sociologists
such as George Homans and Richard Emerson have incorporated the
principles of behavior into their theories of elementary social interaction
or exchange (Emerson 1972; Homans 1961). The basic idea in social
exchange approaches is that humans exchange valued activities (e.g.,
giving respect and getting help) and that these transactions are "held
together" by the principle of reinforcement. That is, exchange
transactions that involve reciprocal reinforcement by the partners
increase in frequency or probability; those transactions that are not
mutually reinforcing or are costly to the partners decrease in frequency
over time. There is a growing body of research literature supporting social
exchange theory as a way of understanding a variety of social
relationships.

Some Basic Issues

The roots of behaviorism lie in its philosophical debate with

introspectionism—the belief that the mind can be revealed from a
person's reports of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Behaviorists
opposed the use of introspective reports as the basic data of psychology.
These researchers argued for a natural-science approach and showed how
introspective reports of consciousness were inadequate. Reports of
internal states and experiences were said to lack objectivity, were
available to only one observer, and were prone to error. Some
behaviorists used these arguments and also others to reject cognitive
explanations of behavior (Skinner 1974; Pierce and Epling 1984; but see
Bandura 1986 for an alternative view).

The natural-science approach of behaviorism emphasizes the search for

general laws and principles of behavior. For example, the quantitative law
of effect is a mathematical statement of how the rate of response
increases with the rate of reinforcement (Herrnstein 1970). Under
controlled conditions, this equation allows the scientist to predict precisely
and to regulate the behavior of organisms. Behavior analysts suggest that
this law and other behavior principles will eventually account for complex
human behavior (McDowell 1988).

[Link]

BEHAVIORISM
Traditional notions of the mind have tended to treat mental states
as "private" and "subjective," not accessible to the public and objective
methods of science. With the failure of an "introspectionist" psychology in
the early twentieth century, the only recourse seemed to be either to
deny that mental states had any role to play in any serious science, or to
try to find a way to understand talk of mental states that was entirely
objective. The first option is called the "eliminativist" strategy, and
Radical behaviorism was a monumental effort to realize it. The
eliminativist strategy proposed to explain all human and animal behavior
in terms of physically specified stimuli, responses, and reinforcements. It
is to be distinguished from the second, "reductionist" strategy, which
attempts not to eliminate mental phenomena, but rather to save mental
phenomena by identifying them with some or other existing physical
phenomena. Analytical behaviorism was the specific reductionist view that
mental phenomena could be identified in one way or another with
dispositions to overt behavior. Both Radical behaviorism and Analytical
behaviorism dominated Anglo-American philosophy, and especially
psychology, from roughly 1920 through 1970.

Although the two views are similarly motivated, they are

independent. As will be seen in section one, Radical behaviorism is a
specific scientific hypothesis, to be assessed according to the usual
scientific criteria of how well it predicts and explains its intended range of
phenomena. Analytical behaviorism is essentially a semantic, or
philosophical hypothesis, to be assessed according to how well it captures
the mental notions it purports to analyze (sec. 2). A person could
subscribe to one and reject the other: Strict radical behaviorists might be
skeptical of semantic proposals of analytical behaviorists; and many
analytical behaviorists might reject the scientific proposals of Radical
behaviorism.

There is also a third view, methodological behaviorism, according to

which the only evidence for any mental phenomena must be behavioral.
As a claim about evidence, this is actually independent of both the other
views, although it often accompanied them. Indeed, one of the lasting
positive contributions of the entire behaviorist movement was a much
higher standard of evidence than had been observed previously,
discouraging the kind of reliance on empathic intuitions that was
characteristic, for example, of clinical psychotherapeutic claims. Unlike
Radical behaviorism and Analytical behaviorism, methodological
behaviorism survives in some quarters to this day, although some
problems for methodological behaviorism are raised at the conclusion of
section three.

[Link]

Behaviorism

Most generally, behaviorism is a viewpoint that takes psychological

phenomena as physical activity rather than as belonging to a special
domain of mental events. For a behaviorist, then, psychology is the study
of behavior and its physical, mainly environmental, determinants rather
than of the nature of experience or of mental process. Behaviorism
originated in natural-science traditions of the late nineteenth century, and
precursors of its methods and concepts developed at the turn of the
century in the work of E. L. Thorndike and Russian physiologist I. P.
Pavlov, as well as of several other psychologists and physiologists (Day,
1980; Herrnstein, 1969).

But behaviorism as a distinct viewpoint came to be recognized with the

publication of American psychologist John B. Watson's article "Psychology
as the Behaviorist Views It" (1913). Identification of behaviorism with the
controversial Watson persists despite the fact that it developed into
several distinct traditions that bear only a family resemblance to Watson's
views and to each other (Malone, 1990; Zuriff, 1985). The leading
contemporary behaviorist position derives from the work of B. F. Skinner,
which differs from other behaviorisms in its detailed account of verbal
functioning and in its inclusion of activities such as thinking and feeling as
behavior to be accounted for, while maintaining a primary focus on
behavior-environment relations rather than upon processes inferred as
underlying those relations.

Behaviorism originated in opposition to an orthodox psychology that

attempted to analyze conscious experience by focusing upon reports by
observers who were trained to examine their own mental functions
through techniques of introspection. Watson boldly rejected this,
asserting that behavior, per se, is the proper domain of psychology. For
Watson, prediction and control of overt behavior, rather than
introspection of mental processes, formed the basis for an objective,
scientific psychology. Behavior was to be analyzed into stimulus-response
(S-R) units without appeal to hypothetical activities of brain or mind. The
units could be of widely varying size, from the relatively molecular
eyeblink elicited by a flash of light to the more "molar" shopping trip as
response to an empty cupboard. Watson emphasized the continuity
between human and nonhuman species, and he stressed the importance
of learning, in animals as well as in humans, as the fundamental basis for
understanding psychological process.

A neobehaviorism that came to the fore in the 1930s, that of Clark L. Hull
and his student Kenneth Spence, dominated until mid-century. Like
Watson, Hull described behavior as composed of S-R units, but whereas
Watson had presented S-R analyses as adjustable in scale, the Hull-
Spence approach focused on molecular building blocks that were
described as forming chains of connecting events b.....

[Link]
Behaviorism or behaviourism is an approach to psychology based on
the proposition that behavior can be researched scientifically without
recourse to inner mental states. It is a form of materialism, denying any
independent significance for the mind. A similar approach to political
science may be found in Behavioralism.

One of the assumptions of many behaviorists is that free will is illusory,

and that all behaviour is determined by a combination of forces
comprising genetic factors and the environment, either through
association or reinforcement.

The behaviorist school of thought ran concurrent with the psychoanalysis

movement in psychology in the 20th century. Its main influences were
Ivan Pavlov, who investigated classical conditioning, John B. Watson who
rejected introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to
experimental methods, and B.F. Skinner who sought to give ethical
grounding to behaviorism, relating it to pragmatism, and conducted
research on operant conditioning.

Contents
[hide]
1 Approaches
2 Versions
← 2.1 J. B. Watson
← 2.2 Methodological behaviorism
3 B.F. Skinner and radical behaviorism
← 3.1 Definition
← 3.2 Experimental and conceptual innovations
← 3.3 Relation to language
4 Molar versus molecular behaviorism
5 Behaviorism in philosophy
6 Behaviorists
7 See also
8 External links
 9 References and further reading

Approaches

Within that broad approach, there are different emphases. Some

behaviorists argue simply that the observation of behavior is the best or
most convenient way of investigating psychological and mental processes.
Others believe that it is in fact the only way of investigating such
processes, while still others argue that behavior itself is the only
appropriate subject of psychology, and that common psychological terms
(belief, objectives, etc.) have no referents and/or only refer to behavior.
Those taking this point of view sometimes refer to their field of study as
behavior analysis or behavioral science rather than psychology.

Albert Bandura's social cognitive approach grew out of this movement as

well. Bandura's approach stresses mental (cognitive) processes in
addition to observable behavior, focusing on not only the impact of the
environment but also "observation, imitation, and thought processes"
(Plotnik 8).

Versions

There is no classification generally agreed upon, and some would add to

or modify this list.

← Classical: The behaviorism of Watson; the objective study of

behavior; no mental life, no internal states; thought is covert
speech.
← Methodological: The objective study of third-person behavior; the
data of psychology must be inter-subjectively verifiable; no
theoretical prescriptions. It has been absorbed into general
experimental and cognitive psychology.
← Radical: Skinnerian behaviorism; is considered radical since it
expands behavioral principles to processes within the organism; in
contrast to methodological behaviorism; not mechanistic or
reductionist; hypothetical (mentalistic) internal states are not
considered causes of behavior, phenomena must be observable at
least to the individual experiencing them.
← Logical: Established by Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his book
The Concept of Mind (1949).
← Teleological: Post-Skinnerian, purposive, close to microeconomics.
← Theoretical: Post-Skinnerian, accepts observable internal states
("within the skin" once meant "unobservable", but with modern
technology we are not so constrained); dynamic, but eclectic in
choice of theoretical structures, emphasizes parsimony.
 ← Biological: Post-Skinnerian, centered on perceptual and motor
modules of behavior, theory of behavior systems.
← Interbehaviorism: Founded by J. R. Kantor before Skinner´s
writings and currently worked by L. Hayes; E, Ribes; and S. Bijou.
Centered in the interbehavior of organisms, field theory of
behavior; emphasis on human behavior.

Two popular subtypes are Neo-: Hullian and post-Hullian, theoretical,

group data, not dynamic, physiological, and Purposive: Tolman’s
behavioristic anticipation of cognitive psychology.

J. B. Watson

Early in the 20th century, Watson argued in his book Psychology from the
Standpoint of a Behaviorist for the value of a psychology which concerned
itself with behavior in and of itself, not as a method of studying
consciousness. This was a substantial break from the structuralist
psychology of the time, which used the method of introspection and
considered the study of behavior valueless. Watson, in contrast, studied
the adjustment of organisms to their environments, more specifically the
particular stimuli leading organisms to make their responses. Most of
Watson's work was comparative, i.e., he studied the behavior of animals.
Watson's approach was much influenced by the work of Russian
physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who had stumbled upon the phenomenon of
classical conditioning (learned reflexes) in his study of the digestive
system of the dog, and subsequently investigated the phenomena in
detail. Watson's approach emphasized physiology and the role of stimuli
in producing conditioned responses - assimilating most or all function to
reflex. For this reason, Watson may be described as an S-R (stimulus-
response) psychologist.

Methodological behaviorism

Watson's Behaviorist theory persuaded most academic researchers in

experimental psychology of the importance of studying behavior. In the
field of comparative psychology in particular, it was consistent with the
warning note that had been struck by Lloyd Morgan's canon, against
some of the more anthropomorphic work such as that of George
Romanes, in which mental states had been freely attributed to animals. It
was eagerly seized on by researchers such as Edward L. Thorndike (who
had been studying cats' abilities to escape from puzzle boxes). However,
most psychologists took up a position that is now called methodological
behaviorism: they acknowledged that behavior was either the only or
the easiest method of observation in psychology, but held that it could be
used to draw conclusions about mental states. Among well-known
twentieth-century behaviorists taking this kind of position were Clark L.
Hull, who described his position as neo-behaviorism, and Edward C.
Tolman, who developed much of what would later become the cognitivist
program. Tolman argued that rats constructed cognitive maps of the
mazes they learned even in the absence of reward, and that the
connection between stimulus and response (S->R) was mediated by a
third term - the organism (S->O->R). His approach has been called,
among other things, purposive behaviorism.

Methodological behaviorism remains the position of most experimental

psychologists today, including the vast majority of those who work in
cognitive psychology – so long as behavior is defined as including speech,
at least non-introspective speech. With the rise of interest in animal
cognition since the 1980s, and the more unorthodox views of Donald
Griffin among others, mentalistic language including discussion of
consciousness is increasingly used even in discussion of animal
psychology, in both comparative psychology and ethology; however this
is in no way inconsistent with the position of methodological
behaviorism...

B.F. Skinner and radical behaviorism

Skinner, who carried out experimental work mainly in comparative

psychology from the 1930s to the 1950s, but remained behaviorism's
best known theorist and exponent virtually until his death in 1990,
developed a distinct kind of behaviorist philosophy, which came to be
called radical behaviorism. He is credited with having founded a new
version of psychological science, which has come to be called behavior
analysis or the experimental analysis of behavior after variations on the
subtitle to his 1938 work The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental
Analysis Of Behavior.

Definition

Skinner was influential in defining radical behaviorism, a philosophy

codifying the basis of his school of research (named the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior, or EAB.) While EAB differs from other approaches to
behavioral research on numerous methodological and theoretical points,
radical behaviorism departs from methodological behaviorism most
notably in accepting treatment of feelings, states of mind and
introspection as existent and scientifically treatable. This is done by
identifying them as something non-dualistic, and here Skinner takes a
divide-and-conquer approach, with some instances being identified with
bodily conditions or behavior, and others getting a more extended
'analysis' in terms of behavior. However, radical behaviorism stops short
of identifying feelings as causes of behavior. Among other points of
difference were a rejection of the reflex as a model of all behavior and a
defense of a science of behavior complementary to but independent of
physiology.

Experimental and conceptual innovations

This essentially philosophical position gained strength from the success of

Skinner's early experimental work with rats and pigeons, summarised in
his books The Behavior of Organisms (1938) and Schedules of
Reinforcement (1957, with C. B. Ferster) and others. Of particular
importance was his concept of the operant response, of which the
canonical example was the rat's lever-press. In contrast with the idea of a
physiological or reflex response, an operant is a class of structurally
distinct but functionally equivalent responses. For example, while a rat
might press a lever with its left paw or its right paw or its tail, all of these
responses operate on the world in the same way and have a common
consequence. Operants are often thought of as species of responses,
where the individuals differ but the class coheres in its function--shared
consequences with operants and reproductive success with species. This
is a clear distinction between Skinner's theory and S-R theory.

Skinner's empirical work expanded on earlier research on trial-and-error

learning by researchers such as Thorndike and Guthrie with both
conceptual reformulations – Thorndike's notion of a stimulus-response
'association' or 'connection' was abandoned – and methodological ones –
the use of the 'free operant', so called because the animal was now
permitted to respond at its own rate rather than in a series of trials
determined by the experimenter procedures. With this method, Skinner
carried out substantial experimental work on the effects of different
schedules and rates of reinforcement on the rates of operant responses
made by rats and pigeons. He achieved remarkable success in training
animals to perform unexpected responses, and to emit large numbers of
responses, and to demonstrate many empirical regularities at the purely
behavioral level. This lent some credibility to his conceptual analysis. It is
largely his conceptual analysis that made his work much more rigorous
than his peers, a point which can be seen clearly in his seminal work Are
Theories of Learning Necessary? in which he criticizes what he viewed to
be theoretical weaknesses then common in the study of psychology.

Relation to language

As Skinner turned from experimental work to concentrate on the

philosophical underpinnings of a science of behavior, his attention
naturally turned to human language. His book Verbal Behavior (1957) laid
out a vocabulary and theory for functional analysis of verbal behavior.
The book was strongly criticized in a review by the linguist Noam
Chomsky.[1] Skinner did not himself respond in detail; he claimed that
"[Chomsky] doesn’t know what I am talking about and for some reason is
unable to understand it".[2]

What was important for a behaviorist analysis of human behavior was not
language acquisition so much as the interaction between language and
overt behavior. In an essay republished in his 1969 book Contingencies of
Reinforcement, Skinner took the view that humans could construct
linguistic stimuli that would then acquire control over their behavior in the
same way that external stimuli could. The possibility of such "instructional
control" over behavior meant that contingencies of reinforcement would
not always produce the same effects on human behavior as they reliably
do in other animals. The focus of a radical behaviorist analysis of human
behavior therefore shifted to an attempt to understand the interaction
between instructional control and contingency control, and also to
understand the behavioral processes that determine what instructions are
constructed and what control they acquire over behavior. Important
figures in this effort have been Murray Sidman, A. Charles Catania, C.
Fergus Lowe and Steven C. Hayes.

Molar versus molecular behaviorism

Skinner's view of behavior is most often characterized as a "molecular"

view of behavior, that is each behavior can be decomposed into atomistic
parts or molecules. This view is inaccurate when one considers his
complete description of behavior as delineated in the 1981 article,
Selection by Consequences and many other works. Skinner claims that a
complete account of behavior involves an understanding of selection
history at three levels: biology (the natural selection or phylogeny of the
animal); behavior (the reinforcement history or ontogeny of the
behavioral repertoire of the animal); and for some species, culture (the
cultural practices of the social group to which the animal belongs). This
whole organism, with all those histories, then interacts with its
environment. He often described even his own behavior as a product of
his phylogenetic history, his reinforcement history (which includes the
learning of cultural practices) interacting with the environment at the
moment. Molar behaviorists, such as Howard Rachlin argue that
behavior can not be understood by focusing on events in the moment.
That is, they argue that a behavior can be understood best in terms of the
ultimate cause of history and that molecular behaviorist are committing a
fallacy by inventing a fictitious proximal cause for behavior. Molar
behaviorists argue that standard molecular constructs such as
"associative strength" are such fictitious proximal causes that simply take
the place of molar variables such as rate of reinforcement. Thus, a molar
behaviorist would define a behavior such as loving someone as exhibiting
a pattern of loving behavior over time, there is no known proximal cause
of loving behavior, only a history of behaviors (of which the current
behavior might be an example of) that can be summarized as love.

Recent experimental work (see The Journal of the Experimental Analysis

of Behavior and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior
Processes-- 2004 and later) shows quite clearly that behavior is affected
both by molar variables (i.e., average rates of reinforcement) and
molecular ones (e.g. time, preceding responses). What is needed is an
understanding of the real-time dynamics of operant behavior, which will
involve processes at both short and long time scales.

Behaviorism in philosophy

Behaviorism is both a psychological movement and a philosophy of mind.

The basic premise of radical behaviorism is that the study of behavior
should be a natural science, such as chemistry or physics, without any
reference to hypothetical inner states of organisms. Other varieties, such
as theoretical behaviorism, permit internal states, but do not require
them to be mental or have any relation to subjective experience.
Behaviorism takes a functional view of behavior.

There are points of view within analytic philosophy that have called
themselves, or have been called by others, behaviorist. In logical
behaviorism (as held, e.g., by Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel), the
meaning of psychological statements are their verification conditions,
which consist of performed overt behavior. W. V. Quine made use of a
type of behaviorism, influenced by some of Skinner's ideas, in his own
work on language. Gilbert Ryle defended a distinct strain of philosophical
behaviorism, sketched in his book The Concept of Mind. Ryle's central
claim was that instances of dualism frequently represented 'category
mistakes,' and hence that they were really misunderstandings of the use
of ordinary language. Daniel Dennett likewise acknowledges himself to be
a type of behaviorist. [1]

It is sometimes argued that Ludwig Wittgenstein defended a behaviorist

position, and there are important areas of overlap between his
philosophy, logical behaviorism, and radical behaviorism (e.g., the beetle
in a box argument). However, Wittgenstein was not a behaviorist, and his
style of writing is sufficiently elliptical to admit of a range of
interpretations. Mathematician Alan Turing is also sometimes considered
a behaviorist, but he himself did not make this identification.

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