Why do people behave as they do? It was probably first a practical question: How could a person anticipate and hence prepare for what another person would do? Later it would become practical in another sense: How could another person be induced to behave in a given way? Eventually it became a matter of understanding and explaining behavior. It could always be reduced to a question about causes.
We tend to say, often rashly, that if one thing follows another, it was probably caused by it—following the ancient principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Of many examples to be found in the explanation of human behavior, one is especially important here. The person with whom we are most familiar is ourself; many of the things we observe just before we behave occur within our body, and it is easy to take them as the causes of our behavior. If we are asked why we have spoken sharply to a friend, we may reply, “Because I felt angry.” It is true that we felt angry before, or as, we spoke, and so we take our anger to be the cause of our remark. Asked why we are not eating our dinner, we may say, “Because I do not feel hungry.” We often feel hungry when we eat and hence conclude that we eat because we feel hungry. Asked why we are going swimming, we may reply, “Because I feel like swimming.” We seem to be saying, “When I have felt like this before, I have behaved in such and such a way.” Feelings occur at just the right time to serve as causes of behavior, and they have been cited as such for centuries. We assume that other people feel as we feel when they behave as we behave.
But where are these feelings and states of mind? Of what stuff are they made? The traditional answer is that they are located in a world of nonphysical dimensions called the mind and that they are mental. But another question then arises: How can a mental event cause or be caused by a physical one? If we want to predict what a person will do, how can we discover the mental causes of his behavior, and how can we produce the feelings and states of mind which will induce him to behave in a given way? Suppose, for example, that we want to get a child to eat a nutritious but not very palatable food. We simply make sure that no other food is available, and eventually he eats. It appears that in depriving him of food (a physical event) we have made him feel hungry (a mental event), and that because he has felt hungry, he has eaten the nutritious food (a physical event). But how did the physical act of deprivation lead to the feeling of hunger, and how did the feeling move the muscles involved in ingestion? There are many other puzzling questions of this sort. What is to be done about them?
The commonest practice is, I think, simply to ignore them. It is possible to believe that behavior expresses feelings, to anticipate what a person will do by guessing or asking him how he feels, and to change the environment in the hope of changing feelings while paying little if any attention to theoretical problems. Those who are not quite comfortable about such a strategy sometimes take refuge in physiology. Mind, it is said, will eventually be found to have a physical basis. As one neurologist recently put it, “Everyone now accepts the fact that the brain provides the physical basis of human thought.” Freud believed that his very complicated mental apparatus would eventually be found to be physiological, and early introspective psychologists called their discipline Physiological Psychology. The theory of knowledge called Physicalism holds that when we introspect or have feelings we are looking at states or activities of our brains. But the major difficulties are practical: we cannot anticipate what a person will do by looking directly at his feelings or his nervous system, nor can we change his behavior by changing his mind or his brain. But in any case we seem to be no worse off for ignoring philosophical problems.
A more explicit strategy is to abandon the search for causes and simply describe what people do. Anthropologists can report customs and manners, political scientists can take the line of “behavioralism” and record political action, economists can amass statistics about what people buy and sell, rent and hire, save and spend, and make and consume, and psychologists can sample attitudes and opinions. All this may be done through direct observation, possibly with the help of recording systems, and with interviews, questionnaires, tests, and polls. The study of literature, art, and music is often confined to the forms of these products of human behavior, and linguists may confine themselves to phonetics, semantics, and syntax. A kind of prediction is possible on the principle that what people have often done they are likely to do again; they follow customs because it is customary to follow them, they exhibit voting or buying habits, and so on. The discovery of organizing principles in the structure of behavior—such as “universals” in cultures or languages, archetypal patterns in literature, or psychological types—may make it possible to predict instances of behavior that have not previously occurred.
The structure or organization of behavior can also be studied as a function of time or age, as in the development of a child’s verbal behavior or his problem-solving strategies or in the sequence of stages through which a person passes on his way from infancy to maturity, or in the stages through which a culture evolves. History emphasizes changes occurring in time, and if patterns of development or growth can be discovered, they may also prove helpful in predicting future events.
Control is another matter. Avoiding mentalism (or “psychologism”) by refusing to look at causes exacts its price. Structuralism and developmentalism do not tell us why customs are followed, why people vote as they do or display attitudes or traits of character, or why different languages have common features. Time or age cannot be manipulated; we can only wait for a person or a culture to pass through a developmental period.
In practice the systematic neglect of useful information has usually meant that the data supplied by the structuralist are acted upon by others—for example, by decision-makers who in some way manage to take the causes of behavior into account. In theory it has meant the survival of mentalistic concepts. When explanations are demanded, primitive cultural practices are attributed to “the mind of the savage,” the acquisition of language to “innate rules of grammar,” the development of problem-solving strategies to the “growth of mind,” and so on. In short, structuralism tells us how people behave but throws very little light on why they behave as they do. It has no answer to the question with which we began.
The mentalistic problem can be avoided by going directly to the prior physical causes while bypassing intermediate feelings or states of mind. The quickest way to do this is to confine oneself to what an early behaviorist, Max Meyer, called the “psychology of the other one”: consider only those facts which can be objectively observed in the behavior of one person in its relation to his prior environmental history. If all linkages are lawful, nothing is lost by neglecting a supposed nonphysical link. Thus, if we know that a child has not eaten for a long time, and if we know that he therefore feels hungry and that because he feels hungry he then eats, then we know that if he has not eaten for a long time, he will eat. And if by making other food inaccessible, we make him feel hungry, and if because he feels hungry he then eats a special food, then it must follow that by making other food inaccessible, we induce him to eat the special food.
Similarly, if certain ways of teaching a person lead him to notice very small differences in his “sensations,” and if because he sees these differences he can classify colored objects correctly, then it should follow that we can use these ways of teaching him to classify objects correctly. Or, to take still another example, if circumstances in a white person’s history generate feelings of aggression toward blacks, and if those feelings make him behave aggressively, then we may deal simply with the relation between the circumstances in his history and his aggressive behavior.
There is, of course, nothing new in trying to predict or control behavior by observing or manipulating prior public events. Structuralists and developmentalists have not entirely ignored the histories of their subjects, and historians and biographers have explored the influences of climate, culture, persons, and incidents. People have used practical techniques of predicting and controlling behavior with little thought to mental states. Nevertheless, for many centuries there was very little systematic inquiry into the role of the physical environment, although hundreds of highly technical volumes were written about human understanding and the life of the mind. A program of methodological behaviorism became plausible only when progress began to be made in the scientific observation of behavior, because only then was it possible to override the powerful effect of mentalism in diverting inquiry away from the role of the environment.
Mentalistic explanations allay curiosity and bring inquiry to a stop. It is so easy to observe feelings and states of mind at a time and in a place which make them seem like causes that we are not inclined to inquire further. Once the environment begins to be studied, however, its significance cannot be denied.
Methodological behaviorism might be thought of as a psychological version of logical positivism or operationism, but they are concerned with different issues. Logical positivism or operationism holds that since no two observers can agree on what happens in the world of the mind, then from the point of view of physical science mental events are “unobservables”; there can be no truth by agreement, and we must abandon the examination of mental events and turn instead to how they are studied. We cannot measure sensations and perceptions as such, but we can measure a person’s capacity to discriminate among stimuli, and the concept of sensation or perception can then be reduced to the operation of discrimination.
The logical positivists had their version of “the other one.” They argued that a robot which behaved precisely like a person, responding in the same way to stimuli, changing its behavior as a result of the same operations, would be indistinguishable from a real person, even though it would not have feelings, sensations, or ideas. If such a robot could be built, it would prove that none of the supposed manifestations of mental life demanded a mentalistic explanation.
With respect to its own goals, methodological behaviorism was successful. It disposed of many of the problems raised by mentalism and freed itself to work on its own projects without philosophical digressions. By directing attention to genetic and environmental antecedents, it offset an unwarranted concentration on an inner life. It freed us to study the behavior of lower species, where introspection (then regarded as exclusively human) was not feasible, and to explore similarities and differences between man and other species. Some concepts previously associated with private events were formulated in other ways.
But problems remained. Most methodological behaviorists granted the existence of mental events while ruling them out of consideration. Did they really mean to say that they did not matter, that the middle stage in that three-stage sequence of physical-mental-physical contributed nothing—in other words, that feelings and states of mind were merely epiphenomena? It was not the first time that anyone had said so. The view that a purely physical world could be self-sufficient had been suggested centuries before, in the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism, which held that there were two worlds—one of mind and one of matter—and that neither had any effect on the other. Freud’s demonstration of the unconscious, in which an awareness of feelings or states of mind seemed unnecessary, pointed in the same direction.
But what about other evidence? Is the traditional post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument entirely wrong? Are the feelings we experience just before we behave wholly unrelated to our behavior? What about the power of mind over matter in psychosomatic medicine? What about psychophysics and the mathematical relation between the magnitudes of stimuli and sensations? What about the stream of consciousness? What about the intrapsychic processes of psychiatry, in which feelings produce or suppress other feelings and memories evoke or mask other memories? What about the cognitive processes said to explain perception, thinking, the construction of sentences, and artistic creation? Must all this be ignored because it cannot be studied objectively?
The statement that behaviorists deny the existence of feelings, sensations, ideas, and other features of mental life needs a good deal of clarification. Methodological behaviorism and some versions of logical positivism ruled private events out of bounds because there could be no public agreement about their validity. Introspection could not be accepted as a scientific practice, and the psychology of people like Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B. Titchener was attacked accordingly. Radical behaviorism, however, takes a different line. It does not deny the possibility of self-observation or self-knowledge or its possible usefulness, but it questions the nature of what is felt or observed and hence known. It restores introspection but not what philosophers and introspective psychologists had believed they were “specting,” and it raises the question of how much of one’s body one can actually observe.
Mentalism kept attention away from the external antecedent events which might have explained behavior, by seeming to supply an alternative explanation. Methodological behaviorism did just the reverse: by dealing exclusively with external antecedent events it turned attention away from self-observation and self-knowledge. Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. It does not insist upon truth by agreement and can therefore consider events taking place in the private world within the skin. It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations.
The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer’s own body. This does not mean, as I shall show later, that introspection is a kind of physiological research, nor does it mean (and this is the heart of the argument) that what are felt or introspectively observed are the causes of behavior. An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection. At the moment we must content ourselves, as the methodological behaviorist insists, with a person’s genetic and environmental histories. What are introspectively observed are certain collateral products of those histories.
The environment made its first great contribution during the evolution of the species, but it exerts a different kind of effect during the lifetime of the individual, and the combination of the two effects is the behavior we observe at any given time. Any available information about either contribution helps in the prediction and control of human behavior and in its interpretation in daily life. To the extent that either can be changed, behavior can be changed.
Our increasing knowledge of the control exerted by the environment makes it possible to examine the effect of the world within the skin and the nature of self-knowledge. It also makes it possible to interpret a wide range of mentalistic expressions. For example, we can look at those features of behavior which have led people to speak of an act of will, of a sense of purpose, of experience as distinct from reality, of innate or acquired ideas, of memories, meanings, and the personal knowledge of the scientist, and of hundreds of other mentalistic things or events. Some can be “translated into behavior,” others discarded as unnecessary or meaningless.
In this way we repair the major damage wrought by mentalism. When what a person does it attributed to what is going on inside him, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation? For twenty-five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role led in the first place to mental fictions, and it has been perpetuated by the explanatory practices to which they gave rise.
As I noted in the Introduction, I am not speaking as the behaviorist. I believe I have written a consistent, coherent account, but it reflects my own environmental history. Bertrand Russell once pointed out that the experimental animals studied by American behaviorists behaved like Americans, running about in an almost random fashion, while those of Germans behaved like Germans, sitting and thinking. The remark may have been apt at the time, although it is meaningless today. Nevertheless, he was right in insisting that we are all culture-bound and that we approach the study of behavior with preconceptions. (And so, of course, do philosophers. Russell’s account of how people think is very British, very Russellian. Mao Tse-tung’s thoughts on the same subject are very Chinese. How could it be otherwise?)
I have not presupposed any technical knowledge on the part of the reader. A few facts and principles will, I hope, become familiar enough to be useful, since the discussion cannot proceed in a vacuum, but the book is not about a science of behavior but about its philosophy, and I have kept the scientific material to a bare minimum. Some terms appear many times, but it does not follow that the text is very repetitious. In later chapters, for example, the expression “contingencies of reinforcement” appears on almost every page, but contingencies are what the chapters are about. If they were about mushrooms, the word “mushroom” would be repeated as often.
Much of the argument goes beyond the established facts. I am concerned with interpretation rather than prediction and control. Every scientific field has a boundary beyond which discussion, though necessary, cannot be as precise as one would wish. One writer has recently said that “mere speculation which cannot be put to the test of experimental verification does not form part of science,” but if that were true, a great deal of astronomy, for example, or atomic physics would not be science. Speculation is necessary, in fact, to devise methods which will bring a subject matter under better control.
I consider scores, if not hundreds, of examples of mentalistic usage. They are taken from current writing, but I have not cited the sources. I am not arguing with the authors but with the practices their terms or passages exemplify. I make the same use of examples as is made in a handbook of English usage. (I express my regrets if the authors would have preferred to be given credit, but I have applied the Golden Rule and have done unto others what I should have wished to have done if I had used such expressions.) Many of these expressions I “translate into behavior.” I do so while acknowledging that Traduttori traditori—Translators are traitors—and that there are perhaps no exact behavioral equivalents, certainly none with the overtones and contexts of the originals. To spend much time on exact redefinitions of consciousness, will, wishes, sublimation, and so on would be as unwise as for physicists to do the same for ether, phlogiston, or vis viva.
Finally, a word about my own verbal behavior. The English language is heavy-laden with mentalism. Feelings and states of mind have enjoyed a commanding lead in the explanation of human behavior; and literature, preoccupied as it is with how and what people feel, offers continuing support. As a result, it is impossible to engage in casual discourse without raising the ghosts of mentalistic theories. The role of the environment was discovered very late, and no popular vocabulary has yet emerged.
For purposes of casual discourse I see no reason to avoid such an expression as “I have chosen to discuss …” (though I question the possibility of free choice), or “I have in mind …” (though I question the existence of a mind), or “I am aware of the fact …” (though I put a very special interpretation on awareness). The neophyte behaviorist is sometimes embarrassed when he finds himself using mentalistic terms, but the punishment of which his embarrassment is one effect is justified only when the terms are used in a technical discussion. When it is important to be clear about an issue, nothing but a technical vocabulary will suffice. It will often seem forced or roundabout. Old ways of speaking are abandoned with regret, and new ones are awkward and uncomfortable, but the change must be made.
This is not the first time a science has suffered from such a transition. There were periods when it was difficult for the astronomer not to sound like an astrologer (or to be an astrologer at heart) and when the chemist had by no means freed himself from alchemy. We are in a similar stage in a science of behavior, and the sooner the transition is completed the better. The practical consequences are easily demonstrated: education, politics, psychotherapy, penology, and many other fields of human affairs are suffering from the eclectic use of a lay vocabulary. The theoretical consequences are harder to demonstrate but, as I hope to show in what follows, equally important.