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CHAPTER 13 – FOUR
NEOBEHAVIORIST
PSYCHOLOGISTS
Dr. Nancy Alvarado
Four Neobehaviorists

The four neobehaviorists described in this chapter
(Tolman, Guthrie, Hull, Skinner) accepted Watson’s:
 Rejection
of consciousness
 His definition of psychology as the science of behavior
 His insistence on objective, observational data.


These four had similarities but also many important
differences from each other.
As a result, the Behaviorist movement was extremely
productive in terms of theory and research.
Edward Chace Tolman (1886-1959)

Tolman grew up in Newton MA and went to MIT,
graduating with a degree in electrochemistry.
 William
James “Principles of Psychology” changed his
life – he went to Harvard & studied with Munsterberg.
 Tolman was troubled by why introspection was so rarely
used in his lab, although taught as a methodology.
 A class with Yerkes focused his attention on behavior.


He spent a month in Germany with Koffka & was
influenced strongly by Lewin.
He taught at Northwestern, then at UC Berkeley.
Edward Chace Tolman
Tolman Hall at UC Berkeley
Tolman’s Cognitive Behaviorism


At Berkeley, Tolman taught comparative psych using
Watson’s book as a text.
He disagreed that rat behavior was mechanistic,
considering rats intelligent and purposeful.
 He
believed rats learned the general layout of a maze,
forming a “cognitive map.”
 He developed a “molar behaviorism” concerned with
purpose and cognition – both excluded by Watson.

However, his book “Purposive Behaviorism” began
with an attack on mentalistic psychology.
Rats Have Purpose

Tolman & his students showed that:
 Rats
have preferences and run fastest for rewards they
like better (bread and milk not sunflower seeds).
 Rats are disappointed if they get a less valued reward
previously expected due to training.
 Monkeys were similarly disappointed by a lettuce leaf
in place of a banana.

Rats use prior experience when unrewarded to
increase their behavior later when rewarded –
latent learning. What is a reward critics asked?
Latent Learning Results
Rats Have Insight

Tolman & Honzik gave unrewarded rats experience
with a complex maze, then found that they use the
shortest route when rewarded.
 Law
of least effort – given a choice of several paths,
rats use insight to find the one requiring least effort.

Rats remember where something is located, not a
series of turns (responses).
 Two
groups – one (Place) always found food in the
same place; the other (Response) always found food by
turning in the same direction. Place rats learned faster.
Tolman’s Mazes
S2
curtain
F2
F1
curtain
S1
Tolman’s Theoretical Model


Tolman published over 100 papers and 2 books.
He proposed a model of independent, intervening
and dependent variables that is widely used in
experimental psychology.
 IVs
are manipulated by the experimenter and influence
intervening variables such as appetite or motor skill.
 Subject IVs (age, heredity) are held constant.
 DVs (running speed, number of errors) are measured by
the experimenter.
Tolman’s General Concerns

Tolman tried to relate his rat-runner’s psychology to
broader human problems such as aggression or war.
 In
1949, he supported younger colleagues required to
take a loyalty oath, refusing to take it himself.


Tolman was APA President in 1937 and a member
of the National Academy of Sciences.
Tolman liberated Behaviorism from Watson’s
methodological and theoretical constraints.
 Contemporary
behaviorists no longer view animals as
passive, mechanical systems but active info processors.
Edwin Ray Guthrie (1886-1959)


McDougall classified Behaviorists as “strict, near or
purposive” types. Guthrie was “near.”
Guthrie graduated in math, then studied psychology
at Univ. of Nebraska with Wolfe. He finished his
Ph.D in philosophy with Singer at Univ. of Penn.
 He
doubted that deduction could lead to an
understanding of the human mind.

He taught math briefly then accepted a position at
Univ. of Washington, transferring to psychology in
1919 and becoming a professor in 1928.
Edwin Ray Guthrie
Learning Through Contiguity

Guthrie proposed that “Stimuli which accompany a
response tend, on their recurrence, to evoke that
response.”
 The
simplicity of this was appealing as the ideas of
other theorists became increasing complex.
 Association through contiguity goes back to Aristotle,
Bain & Hartley (British Associationists).


Reward does not cause learning – it protects it
against unlearning because the situation changes.
Guthrie also proposed single-trial learning.
Guthrie’s Approach

Guthrie was able to provide clever explanations of
a variety of learning phenomena (effects of reward
and punishment, practice, trace conditioning).
 Punishers
elicit actions – these actions are learned.
 Improved behavior occurs with practice because the
constituent movements become better with repetition.

“Learning does not disappear with lapses in time
but due to new learning which erases the old.”
 Sleep
prevents learning of new associations.
Pavlov’s Criticism of Guthrie

To explain delay & trace conditioning, Guthrie
suggested that the stimuli accompanying salivation
are not the CS (bell) but the orienting response
(listening, turning head, pricking up ears).
 In
reply, Pavlov wrote and angry response -- “The
Reply of a Physiologist to Psychologists,” his only paper
published in an American psychology journal.
 He said the “listening” response was nonexistent
because dogs were not alert during the trace gap and
because the orienting response quickly disappears –
there are no mysterious latencies in the nervous system.
Guthrie’s Examples




Dogs encountering meat with embedded
mousetraps become suspicious of the meat because
of the almost perfect contiguity.
A daughter made to re-enter and hang up her coat
changes behavior because of the new association.
Other examples of pastor’s horse trained to lunge
when he said “whoa” (which means stop); breaking
horses with successive weight on its back (contiguity).
Signals to smoke (finishing a meal, starting work).
Cats in a Puzzle Box



Performing 800 escape responses, Guthrie
observed that cat responses were highly
stereotypical (the same each time).
He suggested that cats had learned
to associate that specific movement
with escape from the box.
Critics suggested the movement
was stereotypical because it was
instinctive (species typical) to greet
others by rubbing against them.
Guthrie’s Clinical Views


Guthrie published “The Psychology of Human
Conflict” in 1938.
He translated Pierre Janet’s “Principles of
Psychotherapy” and preferred Janet’s idea of force
mentale to Freud’s ideas about the subconscious.
 Everyone
has a certain amount of energy (force).
 When it is depleted by crises, neuroses appear.
 Mental health requires maintaining a balance of mental
energy.
Clark Leonard Hull (1884-1952)

Hull was born on a farm but worked hard to
become more than a “chore boy.” He was intensely
self-critical and had poor health (polio, typhus).
 He
originally studied mining engineering but a
paralyzed leg ruled that out.

He entered grad school at Univ. of Wisconsin,
working with Joseph Jastrow, who had studied with
G. Stanley Hall.
 His
dissertation taught subjects associations to Chinese
characters. He then became a lecturer at Wisconsin.
Clark L. Hull
Research on Aptitude Testing

Assigned to teach a class on psychological testing,
he became interested in validating existing tests.
 His
attempt to develop a universal aptitude test failed.
 Hull built a correlation machine to avoid doing the
laborious calculations by hand.
 His machine predated calculators and computers and is
now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.

Without access to sufficient subjects to validate his
tests, he abandoned aptitude testing as a research
interest.
Research on Hypnosis

Teaching classes to medical students, Hull became
interested in the role of suggestibility in medical
cures. Jastrow shared that interest – as a skeptic.
 He
attempted to improve the quality of experimental
work done to investigate hypnosis, wary of fraud.
 He believed susceptibility to hypnosis was normally
distributed in the population with little correlation with
other traits or sex. Children slightly more susceptible.

He found that hypnosis did not improve memory. His
book Hypnosis & Suggestibility is still used as a text.
Hull’s Behavior System

Hull’s most significant contribution to psychology was
his development of a comprehensive behavior
system – a model of how behavior occurs.
 At
Yale, Hull intensively studied Newton’s Principia and
philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Alfred North
Whitehead, Hobbes, Lock, Hume, Kant & Leibnitz.
 Spence (Hull’s student) described his system as “a
Herculean elaboration of [Woodworth’s] S-O-R
formula” (Stimulus – Organism – Response).

He conceptualized humans as elaborate machines.
Hull’s Drive Theory

He attempted to extend the principles of classical
conditioning to instrumental trial and error learning.
 He
accepted the idea of reinforcement based on drive
reduction. His theory was presented in “Principles of
Behavior.”
 His theory had 17 postulates and 17 corollaries.
 It included intervening variables for habit strength,
stimulus intensity, drive level, incentive value of the
reward to determine output latency, reaction amplitude.

He led an impressive program of experimentation.
Evaluating Hull’s Theory


It was successful at stimulating new research.
Some questioned whether the limited range of
experimental situations used in his research could
shed light on more generalized behavior.
 Can
a theory of behavior be developed without testing
humans? Hull hoped to go on to test humans later.


The theory was better at predicting group results
than individual rat behavior.
Hilgard said “For its time, Hull’s system was the best
there was.”
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990)

Between 1945 & 1975, B.F. Skinner was the best
known psychologist in the world.
 12
major books, numerous papers, a multi-volume
autobiography, numerous works written about him.
 3 journals are devoted to a Skinnerian approach to
psychology.

He was the modern spokesperson for radical
Behaviorism – articulate, effective, opinionated and
controversial.
 He
said he would burn his kids before his books.
B.F. (Fred) Skinner
Skinner’s Early Life


His father was a conservative, small town lawyer.
He started out to become a writer and poet but
changed his mind because he had nothing to say.
 Pen


name Sir Burrhus de Beerus
Watson’s “Behaviorism,” praised by his favorite
philosopher (Bertrand Russell) inspired him to study
behavior. He was accepted to Harvard.
Skinner heard Pavlov speak & was impressed.
 He
focused on reflex as the unit of behavioral analysis.
Operant Conditioning

Skinner developed the apparatus called an operant
chamber (Skinner box).
 Operant
= the animal operates on its environment.
 In Skinner’s apparatus the animal controls the response
rate, not the experimenter. Response rate was his DV.
 Behavior could be manipulated by changing reward.

This approach was an important step toward a
scientific way of experimentally studying behavior.
 Animals
learned right before his eyes.
Skinner’s Four Principles

Skinner proposed four principles of scientific
practice:
 When
you run into something interesting, drop
everything else and study it.
 Some ways of doing research are easier than others.
 Some people are lucky.
 Apparatuses, especially complicated ones, break down.

Skinner disliked statistics and didn’t use many. He
focused on individual animals.
Schedules of Reinforcement



This approach was discovered accidentally because
he had only a few rat pellets left, so he could only
reinforce an occasional response.
Intermittent reinforcement maintained the frequency
of responding, and even increased it.
Research on schedules was a major contribution to
psychology and is the research Skinner was most
proud of.
Behavioral Control


Skinner described approaches to shaping behavior
in “How to Teach Animals” in 1951.
Shaping is a powerful procedure for establishing
and changing behavior.
 He
shaped a rat to drop a marble through a hole and
two pigeons to play ping pong.
 His students Keller & Marian Breland formed a
company to train animals for entertainment &
commercial businesses.
Skinner’s Utopia

In 1945 Skinner wrote “Walden II,” a utopian novel
describing a community based on operant principles
of behavioral control.
 He

envisioned a happy, health, productive community.
Other utopias include Plato’s “Republic,” St.
Augustine’s “City of God,” Rousseau’s “The Social
Contract,” and Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
 Huxley’s
satire warns of the threat of psychology.
Skinner’s Applied Research

Skinner built a child compartment (early version of
the incubator) to provide warmth & keep out germs.
 Called
“air cribs” or “heir conditioners.”
 Rumors that his daughter was harmed by her “baby in
a box” experiences are wrong.

Skinner developed token economies and “teaching
machines” to provide feedback, immediate
reinforcers & let kids to progress at their own rate.
 Programmed
instruction has worked for some subjects
(arithmetic and spelling) but not others.
Behavior Modification

Skinner explored possibilities for shaping psychotic
patients at Worcester State Hospital in MA.
 His
student, Fuller, trained a severely mentally disabled
man to make operant responses.

Skinner called Freud theories “explanatory fictions.”
 Two
students Lindsley & Azrin developed “behavior
modification” to change inmate behavior.
 “The Token Economy” described their procedures.

Successful techniques now exist to change a wide
variety of behaviors (smoking, shyness, autism).