The Genius of Dogs by Brian Hare

Author:Brian Hare
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

The Tyranny of Behaviorism

It is hard to imagine the chokehold behaviorism had on behavioral science in America for most of the twentieth century. Today, there is a whole range of approaches to studying cognition. There are ethologists, behaviorists, neuroscientists, and people like me who study cognition from an anthropological perspective. But in the United States from 1913 to 1960 and perhaps longer, there was only one approach to animal psychology—behaviorism. If you were not a behaviorist, you could not get a job, because all the hiring faculty were behaviorists. You could not get a grant, because everyone reviewing your grant was a behaviorist. You could not get published, because everyone reviewing your paper was a behaviorist.

Behaviorism started as a reaction against the introspective psychology championed by Freud and other psychologists. Their work is too vast to go into here, but if you ever flick through Freud’s Passing of the Oedipus Complex, you will find passages such as:

The little girl who wants to believe herself her father’s partner in love must one day endure a harsh punishment at his hands, and find herself hurled to earth from her cloud-castles.

It was no surprise that some psychologists were looking for a change. They began watching chicks blunder their way through mazes, then slowly get better at finding their way out over time. This was not intellect at work, but something much more elementary.

Learning would replace any need for more abstract ideas about the mental lives of animals. Having focused on a small number of species, behaviorists soon argued that all animal species learned the same way.

J. B. Watson went so far as to claim that “no new principle is needed in passing from the unicellular organisms to man.” Study learning in one animal and you understand them all.

The god in the temple of behaviorism was Burrhus Frederic Skinner. If it is hard to imagine the power of behaviorism fifty years ago, it is almost impossible to realize how famous B. F. Skinner was as the head of that movement.

Today, Americans rate their top three science role models as Bill Gates, Al Gore, and Einstein. Note that two of these people are not even scientists, and one of them is dead. In 1975, the best-known scientist in the United States was B. F. Skinner. He was on the cover of Time magazine in 1971. He was on The Phil Donahue Show and named one of Esquire’s “100 Most Important People” in 1970. His novel, Walden Two, sold two and a half million copies and his non-fiction of 1971, Beyond Freedom & Dignity, was on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-six weeks.

However, you do not make friends without making as many enemies. Skinner in his time was called the “Darth Vader of American psychology . . . the Hitler of late twentieth century science itself,” “visibly insane,” and a “fatuous opinionated ass.”

Skinner did not do much to help his image. He was the archetypical image of a scientist, complete with a white lab coat and Coke-bottle glasses, fiddling with rats in a laboratory.

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