Kaiwen Lian
Recently, a compelling argument happened around me. My friends Arya and Sansa, who are taking the Introduction to Cognitive Science class, discussed behaviorism. Arya is quite convinced by B.F. Skinner’s theory of behaviorism. She argued psychology is a genuine science, and to be science; it should contain no talk of minds and internal states at all. However, Sansa and I both disagreed with Arya. In my opinion, behaviorism can’t give a successful explanation for all human activity because it has limitations in its historical background, practical application, and theoretical system.
In my paper, I will introduce the historical background of behaviorism, including its origin and what it is about at the beginning. Within my body paragraphs, I will prove behaviorism can’t explain all human activities by pointing out problems in its historical background, practical application, and theoretical system. There will be three paragraphs supporting my claim. First, historical background – behaviorism has historical and philosophical limitations. Second, the practical application – certain behaviors can’t be explained under behaviorism. Last but not least, the theoretical system – behaviorism has flaws in its reward and punishment system.
The theoretical system of behaviorism was greatly influenced by the 20th century’s times, so knowing its historical background can significantly help us understand its limitations. Behavioral psychology was born in the early 20th century in America. The representatives are John Watson and B.F. Skinner. To understand behaviorism, we first need to introduce Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B. Titchener’s structuralism. Structuralism studies purely subjective exploration, such as consciousness. Titchener and Wundt advocated that psychological phenomena should be gradually broken up into elements and analyze them. For example, when studying what is angry, the subjects were asked to decompose their anger into components and report them one by one, and this method is called introspection. Using introspection brings significant constraints to structuralism. In the psychology field, there had always been fights against structuralism. One of the most striking statements was that psychology should only study behaviors instead of consciousness. This theory is the well-known behaviorism. Structuralism and behaviorism constitute two extremes of psychology. The former only analyze subjective internal feelings, while the latter only focus on external behaviors.
In the early 20th century, behaviorism came out and took an opposite position against structuralism. John Watson, one of the founders of behaviorism, concluded that there is no qualitative difference between human and animal psychology after doing lots of animal psychology research. Therefore, He advocated the study of human psychology like animal psychology. According to SimplePsychology.org (2020), behaviorism is a theory of learning which states all behaviors are learned through interaction with the environment through a process called conditioning. In other words, behaviorists believe no matter how complex human behaviors are; they can be divided into two simplest elements: stimulus and response. For example, when you are happy and laugh out loud, behaviorists will ignore how happy feels like but only study which part of the outside environment stimulates you to laugh. This is called the S-R (stimulus-response) method. Behaviorists think the S-R method can kick subjective feelings, such as consciousness, beliefs, and minds out of psychology and then create a law like scientific rules that explain all human behaviors. Unfortunately, this theory is still not free from the limitations of his times. In the following context, I will explain what adverse effects the historical background brings to behavioral psychology and causes so many related flaws.
First of all, behavioral psychology has limitations due to its historical background and philosophical foundations. The essence of behavioral psychology is just a synthesis of various factors scattered in the ideological and academic circles at the beginning of the 20th century. The rise of urbanization and industrialization in the United States brought about a growing tendency of dehumanization, which means the control of behaviors was urgently needed by society. At the same time, sciences, especially physics, were striding forward and causing many people to hold the belief that living things don’t have anything special but are just like steam engines with more complicated structures. This view is called the mechanism, which became the foundation of a “new biology” that sought to establish the life sciences on the same solid and rigorous foundation as the physical sciences (Allen, 2005). We can’t deny that behaviorism had been influenced by the mechanism and had an intense color of it as a philosophical foundation. That’s why behavioralists extend the activity rules found in animal experiments to human beings and try to use observable behaviors to predict future performances. However, treating human beings like robots doesn’t seem to be a reasonable way of explaining things. Behaviorism brings the spirit of science to old psychology but also abandons the human mind, which science should face up to.
Another philosophical ontology or the foundation behind behaviorism was pragmatism. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870. It holds the belief that a claim is valid if and only if it is useful. In other words, behaviorists were trying to create a set of rules to replace studying traditional subjective concepts in psychology because their rules would be more successful in practical application. For example, if we compare humans to a TV, then in a behaviorist’s view, knowing that pressing a button on a TV can turn it on will be sufficient, so learning the internal circuit structure of a TV is unnecessary and should be abandoned. This idea is in line with the United States’ needs to control people’s behaviors during the industrial age. To summarize, Waston’s revolutionary theory was just a synthesis of different advocation in the ideological and academic circles at the beginning of the 20th century. The most significant defect is that combining mechanisms and pragmatism gives behavioral psychology an overly materialistic position and causes it to deny the human mind’s considerable value in biological evolution. It’s wrong that behaviorism’s philosophical positions regard the human brain, the most complicated thing in the world making us different from other animals, as a just pure black box object. Behaviorists can’t study people from “inside” but only from “outside” because it denies the existence of mind. This inherent defect will lead to my next reason – why certain things can’t be explained by behaviorism.
Second, certain things like human language can’t be explained by behaviorism. In verbal behavior, behavioral psychology believes that how newborns learn a language can also be explained by stimulus and response. Based on the S-R method, Skinner created his reinforcement theory, which states that to achieve a particular purpose, people or animals will take specific actions on the environment, and when the consequences of such behavior are favorable, it will be repeated in the future, vice versa. Learning a language by newborns, in behaviorists view, happens when a baby accidentally pronounce a certain word, such as mama, and its mother will act positively back to this behavior as a reward, which forms a reinforcement to encourage babies to repeat words and then eventually babies will know how to speak a language. Skinner’s theory is reasonable to a certain extent regarding the external environment as an input role in language development but still has many shortcomings. Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, in his book review “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” (Chomsky, 1967), states that Skinner’s reinforcement theory is too simple to explain complicated human verbal behavior.
Chomsky believes the human brain has the function of reasoning, generalization, and so on, which is innate ability determined genetically. To study human language behavior, we should look at the external stimulus and reactions that can be observed and explore the unique role of the internal structure of the human body. One of the examples Chomsky raises to support his claim is how children learn grammar. According to Chomsky, “the fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or ‘hypothesis-formulating’ ability of unknown character and complexity. (Chomsky, 1959)” In other words, when children learn to speak, there won’t be enough information to form complex grammatical practices that help kids to generate infinity combinations of words and sentences. Therefore, how children learn grammar should be considered an inner ability instead of a simple environmental stimulus. Skinner’s theory may never be sufficient to interpret language due to the elimination of mind in behavioral psychology. The research method of objectifying and materializing human beings, to some degree, was the progress of traditional psychology, but we still can’t deny it is a dead end. The same dilemma also occurs in behaviorism psychology’s basic methods, which is the so-called S-R method we will discuss next.
Finally, the traditional behavior’s S-R theory is flawed because it ignored the human mind. Behavioral psychology trusts every behavior can be reduced to the result of stimulus and response. However, as behaviors become more complex, some realize that the S-R theory may not meet its promise. William T. Powers (1973) pointed out this phenomenon in his paper Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism. Powers (1973) enumerated pigeon walking in figure-eight as one example. He noticed that even though a pigeon is trained to walk in figure eight, its walking movements changed in pattern every single time. Powers (1973) concluded that “variable acts produce a consistent result. In this case, the variations may not be striking, but they exist.” Due to the natural flaws in behaviorism, the S-R method can’t define what stimulus and response are and can’t capture similar behavior patterns. At this point, Powers raised his revolutionary idea: Behavior is not a simple response of stimulus; instead, to behave is actually to control perception. Based on his thoughts, Powers created his perceptual control theory (PCT) to question the traditional S-R method. I will use the rest of my paper to explain this thought-provoking idea.
To understand why the S-R method is wrong, we need to understand what PCT is. As a control engineer, William T. Powers brought in a lot of engineering terminology to the PCT. The core behind PCT is a closed loop; in contrast, the S-R method has an open loop. The close loop and open loop are two specific systems of a control system in engineering. According to tutorialspoint.com, a control system is a system that provides the desired response by controlling the output. In other words, a control system is a box, people put in inputs, and it produces certain outputs. The open-loop systems do not monitor or measure the condition of its output. In contrast, closed-loop systems use feedback to adjust itself against the environment’s disturbs to reduce errors and improve outputs’ stability. For example, vehicles with open-looped cruise control systems will have a constant engine power during both flat and uphill road, so its speed will go down when driving uphill. In contrast, when vehicles with closed-looped systems go uphill, the sensor will measure that the speed is slowing down and increase the engine power to reach the same speed rate as driving flat.
Using the information given above, we can easily compare the S-R method of behaviorism to the open-looped system, which regards the human brain as a black box; put in specific input will produce a certain output. The pigeon walking as a figure eight is an example. Behaviorists believe that with adequate training, the pigeon will always walk like a figure of eight under human’s order. However, Power (1973) considered this was a misleading conclusion because behaviorists kicked out subjective feelings. What behaviorists all omitted was the purpose of actions. The human brain should be a close loop instead of an open loop, which can always adjust to reach specific desired outputs. The PCT states that when anything from the environment disturbs the desired state(s), the individual strives to counteract these effects. For example, we can use various other behaviors to control the light intensity – turning our eyes away, turning our heads, moving into the shade, or wearing designer sunglasses. In this case, it is more reliable to study the perceptual outcomes of behavior (light intensity) than study behavior itself. (The Psychologist, p896-899, vol.28, 2015). Back to the pigeon walking case, PCT explains why its walking movements changed in patterns all the time. It’s because this pigeon is walking against the outside environment (sometimes the cage is tipped) to produce the figure of eight. Contrary to behaviorism’s S-R theory, PCT proves that there was typically little correlation between the order to walk like an eight from human to pigeon (input) and how the pigeon walks in different patterns (output). Power (1973) proved that behavior itself is not a simple result of stimulus and response but should be self-determined in a specific and highly meaningful sense. This influential theory calls into serious doubt about the feasibility of operant conditioning in human beings.
In conclusion, behaviorism can never successfully explain every human activity because it has limitations in its historical background, practical application, and theoretical system. As a revolutionary theory in psychology, it has been overcorrected, so it certainly has shortcomings. The mechanism and pragmatism formed under industrialization’s influence brought an extreme materialistic position to behavioral psychology: ignoring the human mind’s existence. This neglect further causes its malfunction in interpreting certain behaviors, like human languages. Similarly, there are also flaws in the way it studies stimulus and responses. The traditional S-R theory can’t give a satisfying answer to explain complex behaviors because of the lack of subjective feelings. However, we should know that there is no perfect thing in the world, and the historical significance of behaviorism is undeniable. Behaviorism brought the scientific spirit to psychology, expanded the research field of psychology, and promoted psychology’s applied research. Today, a hundred years later, behaviorism is still hanging as a gem in the distant sky, shining brightly and illuminating the road of psychology.
Reference
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The british psychological society. (2015, November). A perceptual control revolution? Retrieved October 26, 2020, from https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-28/november-2015/perceptual-control-revolution
Chomsky, N. (1967). A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Retrieved October 26, 2020, from https://chomsky.info/1967____/
Electronics-tutorials. (2018, March 04). Closed-loop System and Closed-loop Control Systems. Retrieved October 26, 2020, from https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/systems/closed-loop-system.html
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Powers, W. (1973, January 26). Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism. Retrieved October 26, 2020, from https://science.sciencemag.org/content/179/4071/351