Behaviorism

Animal psychology had drawn attention to the importance of behavior as a clue to mind, but inferences from behavior about animal consciousness were part of the expected interpretations of experimental results. But the focus of study was changing: “There is unquestionably a widespread movement on foot in which interest is centered on the results of conscious process, rather than in the processes themselves. This is peculiarly true in animal psychology; it is only less true in
human psychology. In these cases interest [is] in what may for lack of a better term be called ‘behavior’; and the analysis of consciousness is primarily justified by the light it throws on behavior, rather than vice versa” (Angell, 1911). The proposal that psychology reject its traditional definition as the science of mind and consciousness and redefine itself as a science of behavior came from John B. Watson
(1913). Watson arrived at the University of Chicago in 1900 to begin graduate work following an undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology from Furman University (Harris, 1999; O’Donnell, 1985). H. H. Donaldson, who had moved to the University of Chicago from Clark University, brought with him his research program that investigated the relation between the development of the nervous system and the
behavior of the rat. Animal laboratories were few; in 1909, only about six laboratories were actively engaged in animal research (O’Donnell, 1985). For his dissertation, Watson chose to investigate the neurological correlates of problem
solving in the white rat and carried out additional experiments with rats to determine which sensory modalities were necessary for learning a maze by systematically eliminating one modality at a time. He removed the eyes, tympanic membrane, olfactory bulbs, and whiskers and anesthetized the feet of rats and discovered that the animals seemed to use kinesthetic feedback to reach the goal box (Carr & Watson, 1908; Goodwin, 1999; J. B. Watson, 1907). Watson’s first report of
these experiments at the annual meeting of the APA held in December 1906 in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) led to an outcry by antivivisectionists. He was publicly defended by Angell and by then APA president James Mark Baldwin (Dewsbury, 1990). Watson had become disenchanted with the language of consciousness and mind, with the method of introspection,
and was increasingly concerned about the status of animal research in psychology. Writing to fellow comparative psychologist Robert Mearns Yerkes in 1910, Watson expressed his identity problems: “I am a physiologist and I go so far as to say that I would remodel psychology as we now have it (human) and reconstruct our attitude with reference to the whole matter of consciousness. I don’t believe the psychologist
is studying consciousness any more than we are” (Watson, 1910, cited in J. A. Mills, 1998). In a series of lectures given at Columbia University in December 1912, Watson laid out his discomfort with a psychology of consciousness and proposed a psychology of behavior to take its place: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it . . . is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness” (Watson, 1913). Although this socalled “Behaviorist Manifesto” did not produce a revolution
in psychology (Leahey, 1992; Samelson, 1981), it did help to raise the status of animal research and place a greater emphasis on explaining behavior rather than mind, especially in research on animals (Watson, 1914). Watson’s notion that the goal of psychology was to predict and control behavior incorporated the vision of psychology as a tool for social control and, therefore, its application to education, industry, and other areas of applied psychology (e.g., Buckley, 1982). Titchener accused Watson of turning psychology into a technology rather than a science (Samelson, 1981). But technology or not, Watson’s view of science as requiring reliability of observations,
public and repeatable, vitiated introspection as a scientific method.Watson argued that verbal reports to a stimulus, in a psychophysical experiment, such as “I see red,” were behavioral in the same way that an animal might be trained to discriminate
the color red from other colors (Watson, 1919). J. B. Watson (1916) proposed that the conditioned motor reflex could be applied to animals and humans and thus form the building block of behavior. Like Titchener, Watson believed that science proceeded by analysis, but instead of the elements of mind, Watson sought the elements of behavior. The conditioned reflex was the elemental unit from which Watson proposed to build a science of behavior. The study of reflexes has a long history within physiology (Boakes, 1984; Fearing, 1930). The Bell-Magendie law (Boakes, 1984; Goodwin, 1999) distinguished between the sensory and motor nerves at the level of the spinal cord. This distinction set the stage for an understanding of reflex action and
stimulated research on the nature and speed of conduction of the nerve impulse that led to the studies of reaction time by Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz. Russian physiologist Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (1829–1905) demonstrated that cerebral processes could affect reflexive action by stimulating certain areas of the brain with salt crystals to decrease the intensity of reflexive movement of a frog’s leg (Boakes, 1984; Koshtoyants, 1965). Sechenov (1863–1965) argued that the cause of psychical or psychological events is in the environment; external sensory stimulation produces all acts, conscious and unconscious, through the summation of excitatory
and inhibitory activity in the brain. He suggested that a science of psychology based on introspective reports of humans is too complex and too subject to “the deceptive suggestions of the voice of our consciousness. . . . [O]nly physiology holds the key to the scientific analysis of psychical phenomena” (Sechenov, 1973 cited in Leahey, 2001; see also, Boakes, 1984).
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) was able to instantiate Sechenov’s theoretical claims (Koshtoyants, 1965). Pavlov’s research on the physiology of digestion that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1904 involved a method of “sham feeding” in which a fistula, or tube, in the esophagus prevented food placed in the mouth of the dog from reaching the stomach. A second tube inserted into the stomach was used to collect gastric juices. In the course of these experiments, Pavlov noted that gastric secretions occurred not only in response to food in the mouth but also merely to the sight of food, or of the assistant who usually fed the animal. He called these “psychic secretions.” By using a fistula that could collect salivary secretions
for the studies on digestion, Pavlov’s student Stefan Vul’fson noted that not only did the salivary glands respond differently to different substances placed in the mouth, for example, sand, wet food, dry food, but, unlike other digestive organs, they showed the identical response when the dog was teased by only the sight of the substance (Boakes, 1984; Todes, 1997). Vul’fson and Pavlov used mentalistic terms in
describing the reaction of the salivary glands to the sight of food: Dogs “judged,” “sorted out,” or “chose” their responses (Todes, 1997). Pavlov later changed “psychic reflex,” to “conditional reflex,” after experiments demonstrated the experimental
regularity of what his co-worker Tolochinov referred to as a “reflex at a distance” (Todes, 1997, p. 951). Drawing on Sechenov’s early experiments with inhibition of spinal reflexes, the work in Pavlov’s laboratory focused on the establishment (conditioning) and removal (extinction) of reflexes to a variety of stimuli and their control by excitatory and inhibitory activity in the brain. Other investigators who
explored questions of adaptation of organisms to environments paid more attention to the acquisition of new behavior than to the removal of established behaviors (Boakes, 1984). J. B. Watson attempted to demonstrate how research on conditioned reflexes could reveal the origins of complex behavior patterns. In his most famous experiment, conducted with graduate student Rosalie Rayner, he conditioned emotional responses in an 11-month-old infant, “Albert B.” By striking a steel bar with a hammer, Watson and Rayner were able to elicit crying in the infant; when they subsequently paired presentation of a white rat, to which Albert had shown no fear, with the striking of the bar, Albert showed fear to the rat. They reported successfully conditioning fear of the rat in Albert, and, further, the fear generalized to a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, and a Santa Claus mask (J. B. Watson & Rayner, 1920; see Harris, 1979). The study was more a dramatic demonstration than a carefully controlled experiment, but
nevertheless exemplified Watson’s vision for identifying the origins and development of behavior and provided an approach to the study of the growth and development of children (Mateer, 1918).