Has radical behaviorism reached retirement age?

Simon Baron-Cohen

The Edge.org is an online magazine of sorts which has 'conversations' instead of 'articles' that are written by some of the leading minds and academics of our time. To kick off the New Year they decided to gather a range of responses from scientists and science educators on the topic of: "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?". This is, in my opinion, quite an interesting topic to discuss and there were some thought-provoking answers. There were also some questionable ones, like Sam Harris' suggestion that we need to expand the definition of science which can be summed up by him saying he doesn't understand why his ideas on morality and free will are wrong - but that's an issue for another time.

The response that I'm interested in is the one written by Simon Baron-Cohen where he answers: Radical Behaviorism. I'll be honest, when I was first linked to this article I thought it was a very risky approach from him. His other parodies and caricatures relied on the audience having very little in the way of formal education and I thought Borat was a much funnier character than a mad scientist who attempts to criticise an idea he doesn't understand.

But then I realised I had confused Sacha with his cousin Simon. What I thought was an elaborate yet ultimately unconvincing portrayal of a bad scientist turned out to be an actual psychologist making silly claims. But why are the claims silly? Let's review:

Misunderstanding Behaviorism

Despite the fact that the title of my blog alludes to misunderstandings of behaviorism in popular thought, I've put off writing an article that elucidates and corrects these misconceptions. The reasons for this delay are varied but the main one is probably just a sense of fatigue when dealing with this issue as I've engaged people in this discussion many times over the years and rarely does it seem to change any opinions; however, recent instances of banging my head against a wall have reinvigorated my interest in the topic.

A BRIEF BACKGROUND

Behaviorism is the philosophy of science underpinning behavioral psychology, and it has taken on numerous forms over the space of a century - all of which appear to have been misunderstood or misrepresented to some degree. Arguably, the grandfather of behaviorism was Ivan Pavlov and whilst his name may not be immediately recognisable to everyone, it is likely that it rings a bell. This is because that is where the phrase came from. As a physiologist studying the salivary reflexes in dogs, Pavlov noticed that his subjects had begun to salivate even before the food had been presented – using pre-CSI investigative techniques, he reasoned that the sounds of the researchers’ footsteps as they brought the food down the hallway had become associated or paired somehow with the food. To test this experimentally, he set up conditions where he would ring a bell immediately before feeding the dogs to initially pair the two stimuli together and then later tested the bell without presenting the food. He found that the bell alone was enough to produce salivation in the dogs, and he termed this process “classical conditioning”¹.

An ethologist by the name of John B. Watson (who was studying instincts at the time) heard of the work of Pavlov and pursued it further, eventually creating what was referred to as “stimulus-response” psychology – otherwise known as methodological behaviorism. In 1913 he wrote a paper called “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”², informally known as the “Behaviorist Manifesto” and it is this article where Watson attempts to separate psychology from its philosophical roots in order to push it, willingly or not, into the realm of science. To do so, he argued that a science of psychology must be objective with no recourse to internal states that can only be discovered through introspection, thus rejecting the approaches of people like William James before him. He suggested that the future of psychology is in understanding our relation to the environment and how our behavior is affected by various stimulus-response relations. The culmination of which he described in his 1930 book simply titled, “Behaviorism”³. It is here that the beginning of misunderstanding behaviorism began.