Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology

7. Faithful unto This Last

7 Faithful unto This Last The Neobehaviorist Hegemony There was once a time when an academic psychologist lived his or her professional life in a behaviorist world. Behaviorists set the agenda in departments of psychology, even for psychologists who did not belong to one of the neobehaviorist schools and who were not working in exclusively behaviorist areas (such as animal learning). This is not to say that all psychologists were behaviorists. But it is to say that academic psychologists concurred in the behav­ iorists’ refusal to grant full citizenship to their opponents. Neobehaviorism’s dominance brought to fruition a particular phi­ losophy of science whose origins I have found in Fechner’s decision to arithromorphize all his data and in two of Ebbinghaus’s innovations (characterizing all experiments as the discovery of functional rela­ tionships between independent and dependent variables and treating psychological outputs as work). Fechner’s and Ebbinghaus’s intellec­ tual heirs (the operationists Boring, Stevens, Tolman, Skinner, and Spence) captured psychology’s language and effectively robbed all nonbehaviorists of the power of speech. And, of course, the opera­ tionist says that those who cannot speak cannot think. Furthermore, the neobehaviorists completed the functionalists’ reorganization of academic psychology’s priorities. The study of sensation, perception, and cognition were pushed to psychology’s periphery, and learning and motivation moved into center stage. The neobehaviorists and their allies developed a body of knowl­ edge—or perhaps one should say, given its ephemeral nature, a set of knowledge claims. Those knowledge claims were organized around certain assumptions concerning the determinants of thoughts, feel­ ings, and actions. Just as the neobehaviorists and behaviorists treated knowledge itself instrumentally, so they treated all actions, menta­ tions, and dispositions instrumentally, but in an exceedingly narrow 179 180 | Faithful unto This Last sense. They assumed that all people and animals were automatically constrained to do that, and only that, which brought immediate ben­ efits. If a creature did do something or entertain beliefs about doing something of no immediate benefit, then that something had to be a surrogate for or have direct connections with some immediate bene­ fit. In that respect, neobehaviorists treated motives like hedonists or utilitarians would. However, both neobehaviorists and behaviorists believed that all creatures were automatically constrained to seek ben­ efits and avoid harm or disadvantage. They claimed that no creature (including human beings) actively sought or foresaw benefits, advan­ tages, or pleasures. Instead, they devised what psychologist Abraham Maslow characterized as deficit theories of motivation.1 Maslow also pointed out that Freud’s pleasure principle is, in fact, an “avoidance of pain” principle (Freud believed that the fundamental force driving human beings was fear of pain, not love of pleasure). In the same way, neobehaviorists such as Hull presumed that neither animals nor peo­ ple were motivated, in any positive sense, to act in their own interest (and, most decidedly, motives like sympathy or altruism were at best secondary). Deficit theories of motivation were one­dimensional he­ donistic theories in which pleasure had no intrinsic role (one sought pleasure, benefit, utility, or the good not for its own sake but merely to avoid deleterious consequences). Athletes compete in order to avoid the anxiety and misery resulting from losing, not from any in­ trinsic joy in using their skills; we acquire knowledge to avoid the anx­ iety aroused by our failure to do so and because knowledge is useful; young animals play not because they enjoy it but to learn certain skills. Mowrer­style deficit theories of motivation unified psychology. If both humans and animals were driven into action rather than choos­ ing actions, then humans and animals were essentially the same sorts of creatures, and one could generalize from animals to humans. I think it is far more significant that deficit theories of motivation also acted as a unifying force in psychology. They did so by affirming the value of certain basic approaches, which led psychologists to value certain subdisciplines above others. Within those subdisciplines es­ sentially the same approach to knowledge claims prevailed. Speci­ ficity, concreteness, and difference were devalued. Neobehaviorism represented functionalism’s apogee in psychology. What people thought, what people believed, what people felt did not matter. What Faithful unto This Last | 181 mattered was the instrumental value of thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. Because developmentalists, learning theorists, those studying percep­ tion or the higher...