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A Defense of Behaviorism
By Paul Desmarais
When MIT's Norm Choamsky reviewed his book "Verbal
Behavior" B.F. Skinner, as was his habit, ignored the critical review
except to say that Choamsky did not understand his ideas.
The view that behaviorists believe that individuals are 'glob of
clay' does not reflect the true complexity of the behaviorist
position. Much of the criticism leveled at behaviorists form this
quarter comes from the so called "Twelve Infants" quote by James B.
Watson who founded what is now thought of as behavioral
psychology.
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own
specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any
one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I
might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even
beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants,
tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am
going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of
the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of
years."(Watson, 1930)
Two important points must be made about this perspective.
One is that the quote is often used as a means of issuing a critique
of behaviorism in no small part because the last sentence is often
ignored. Second, In light of the last sentence, it is clear that Watson
was engaging in hyperbole and knew it. Watson himself states
plainly he is overstepping the bounds of his data. He is merely
saying that the evidence in support of behaviorism is no less flawed
than it is for any of the other “isms” of psychology or philosophy of
the time.
Based on Skinner's own writings, he was discussing motivation
and residual or lasting effects of conditioning. If learning is a
response to stimuli, conditioning, operant conditioning to be more
precise, is what remains when a single fact or group of facts are no
longer remembered.
Skinner’s point, one that is consistently misapplied, is that
education, that is, the process of gaining knowledge as a learned or
conditioned pattern of behavior, is what remains when any single
fact, or specific collections of facts or representations has been
forgotten. For example, an individual might forget the capital of
Idaho, they will not forget how learn the name of the city that is the
capital of Idaho.
It might be restated that learning could be defined as a
pattern of learned behavior inspired by a response to external
stimuli is the core of obtaining knowledge, not the knowledge itself.
Think of something banal, like going through the drive
through at McDonald's. Try ordering something special. A Big Mac,
say. Order it plain, and when it arrives it is served the way they
usually serve it? It happens to all the time. The guy at McDonalds is
conditioned to perform certain tasks and deliver a certain thing
based on a stimulus (the order). Some learners are more able to
respond to new stimuli faster than others. However, as most
behaviorists have shown, learning is a curve, with new knowledge
being acquired gradually. Which means that until the McDonald's
guy is wrong often enough and has another stimuli (having to redo
the orders or getting yelled at by his boss) he'll continue to make
errors in responding to out of the ordinary stimuli.
Is this the whole picture of learning? No. It isn’t. Skinner knew that.
Watson knew it as well. The founders and propagators of
behaviorism were not unaware of the complexity of the human
mind. Quite the contrary. They simply accepted that there were
things about how people learned that were not measurable to a
scientifically acceptable level, and were, therefore, not deserving of
a place in a scientific discussion. Did Skinner know that learners
created meaning? Probably. Based on his writing, almost certainly.
Did he care? Yes. Did he write about meaning making as a scientist?
No. Because he could not prove it existed objectively.
Even the staunchest constructivist would have to admit, by their
own theory, what a student takes from any given lesson, regardless
of the underlying theory, is dependent on what they arrived at the
lesson with. Therefore, a student who is equipped to learn any
given bit of knowledge may or may not have the facility to use the
information being ‘dumped' into them.
The truth is, as behaviorists consistently claimed, it is impossible to
know. Any given instruction may be wholly wasted or entirely at the
student's disposal, or somewhere in between. A class scholar might
be able to recite poetry, for example. However, the ability to recite
the poetry does not in any way indicate that she cannot use the
information contained in the poetry in the 'real world' any more
than it indicates she can. Assuming someone cannot use
information is as faulty a presumption as assuming they can.
Skinner himself was well aware that there were a great many
factors that influenced learning, including social conditions, health,
etc. Where cognitivists (then) and constructivists (now) depart is
about 'where' not what. Skinner's point was that learning was a
response to events, outside stimuli, that could be isolated and
controlled. Studied. He argued that mental states and the 'mind'
were difficult to observe and impossible to isolate, and therefore,
not valid subjects of scientific analysis.
Skinner and his fellow behaviorists weren't ignorant of the mind,
they simply "refrained from theoretical speculation regarding
"private" causes of human action that were (at the time)
unmeasurable by objective, scientifically reliable means; and wanted
empirical research to be about the effect of external stimuli on
behavior." (Overskeid, 2008).
Watson, James B. (1930) Behaviorism (Revised Edition). University of
Chicago Press
Skinner, B.F. (1953) Science and Human Behavior New York:
MacMillan
Overskeid, Geir (2008) They should have thought about the
consequences: the crisis of cognitivism and a second chance for
behavior analysis. The Psychological Record Volume 58, Number 1.