It is often said that a science of behavior studies the human organism but neglects the person or self. What it neglects is a vestige of animism, a doctrine which in its crudest form held that the body was moved by one or more indwelling spirits. When the resulting behavior was disruptive, the spirit was probably a devil; when it was creative, it was a guiding genius or muse. Traces of the doctrine survive when we speak of a personality, of an ego in ego psychology, of an I who says he knows what he is going to do and uses his body to do it, or of the role a person plays as a persona in a drama, wearing his body as a costume.
In a behavioral analysis a person is an organism, a member of the human species, which has acquired a repertoire of behavior. It remains an organism to the anatomist and physiologist, but it is a person to those to whom its behavior is important. Complex contingencies of reinforcement create complex repertoires, and, as we have seen, different contingencies create different persons in the same skin, of which so-called multiple personalities are only an extreme manifestation. What happens when a repertoire is acquired is the important thing. The person who asserts his freedom by saying, “I determine what I shall do next,” is speaking of freedom in or from a current situation: the I who thus seems to have an option is the product of a history from which it is not free and which in fact determines what it will now do.
A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect. As such, he remains unquestionably unique. No one else (unless he has an identical twin) has his genetic endowment, and without exception no one else has his personal history. Hence no one else will behave in precisely the same way. We refer to the fact that there is no one like him as a person when we speak of his identity. (The Latin idem means same, and when asked whether someone is really so-and-so, we may reply colloquially, “The same!” or, “Himself!” or we may say that a person who complains of being annoyed by his neighbors is “the selfsame person” who annoys others.)
A number of terms describing a person and his relation to others need to be considered.
In asking what a person can know about himself, we are led at once to another question: Who can know about whom? The answer is to be found in the contingencies which produce both a knowing self and a known. A distinction between two selves in the same skin is made when we say that a tennis player “gets mad at himself” because he misses an easy shot. He is angry because something has hurt him, and he has done the thing that hurt; hence he is mad at himself. He may even strike himself aggressively. A similar distinction is made in self-knowledge.
All species except man behave without knowing that they do so, and presumably this was true of man until a verbal community arose to ask about behavior and thus to generate self-descriptive behavior. Self-knowledge is of social origin, and it is useful first to the community which asks the questions. Later, it becomes important to the person himself—for example, in managing or controlling himself in ways to be discussed shortly.
Different communities generate different kinds and amounts of self-knowledge and different ways in which people explain themselves to themselves and others. Some produce the deeply introspective introverted, or inner-directed, person, others the outgoing extravert. Some produce people who act only after a careful consideration of the possible consequences, others the thoughtless and impulsive. Some communities produce people particularly aware of their reactions to art, music, or literature, others of their relations with the people around them. The questions asked by mentalistic psychologists and those asked by behaviorists naturally produce different kinds of self-knowledge. They first emphasize how a person feels about things.
There is little doubt of the historical priority of the inner search. It was what Socrates meant by “Know thyself.” (That injunction appears on the wall of a Roman bath beneath a mosaic of a skeleton—an anatomical version of the self.) Montaigne spoke of “spying on himself” and of “discovering the springs which set him in motion.” It is the priority enjoyed by feelings and introspectively observed states over past and present environments.
Questions about feelings tend to be closely associated with a sense of self or a self-image. They emphasize what a person is, his current state of being. Existentialists, phenomenologists, and humanistic psychologists have encouraged self-observation in this search for self. Yoga has been defined as a set of practices “by which the individual prepares for liberation of the self.” Only the liberated self can assert, “I do what I do because of what I am,” or, “What I do not do or will to do is not me.” “Because I am what I am,” said Diderot, “I write the kind of plays I do.” Buffon put it in a well-known phrase: “Le style, c’est l’homme.”
Psychoanalysis gives a person a clearer image of himself, mainly by inducing him to explore his feelings, and the self-knowledge it encourages is often called insight, a term close to “introspection.” The patient is to learn to feel his own emotions, to acknowledge feelings associated with punished behavior, and so on.
Structure is naturally emphasized in an analysis of being, and there is a related version of developmentalism which emphasizes becoming. From the present point of view any change is in a repertoire, and it must be attributed to changing contingencies. When a change is disruptive, a person may not feel that he knows himself; he is said to experience a crisis in his identity. It is difficult to maintain an identity when conditions change, but a person may conceal from himself conflicting selves, possibly by ignoring or disguising one or more of them, or by branding one a stranger, as in explaining uncharacteristic behavior by saying, “I was not myself.”
The verbal community asks, “How do you feel?” rather than, “Why do you feel that way?” because it is more likely to get an answer. It takes advantage of the available information, but it has only itself to blame if other kinds of information are not available. It has not, until recently, induced people to examine the external conditions under which they live. As the relevance of environmental history has become clearer, however, practical questions have begun to be asked, not about feelings and states of mind, but about the environment, and the answers are proving increasingly useful.
The shift from introspective to environmental evidence does not guarantee that self-knowledge will be accurate, however. We do not always observe the contingencies to which we are exposed. We may keep records of what has happened, as in a diary, but in general our information is sketchy. We are not always watching what happens as we behave, and when asked how we would behave under given circumstances, we often make a bad guess, even though we have been in similar circumstances in the past. Then, as usual, we are likely to explain the inexplicable by attributing it to genetic endowment—asserting, “I was born that way,” or, “That’s the kind of person I am.”
It is nevertheless important to examine the reasons for one’s own behavior as carefully as possible because they are essential, as I have said, to good self-management. We should not be surprised that the more we know about the behavior of others, the better we understand ourselves. It was a practical interest in the behavior of “the other one” which led to this new kind of self-knowledge. The experimental analysis of behavior, together with a special self-descriptive vocabulary derived from it, has made it possible to apply to oneself much of what has been learned about the behavior of others, including other species.
Those who seek to know themselves through an exploration of their feelings often claim an exclusive kind of knowledge. Only those who have been psychoanalyzed, for example, are said to know what psychoanalysis means, and the mystic claims experiences which cannot be communicated or known to others except through similar channels. But it may be argued as well that only those who understand an experimental analysis and its use in interpreting human behavior can understand themselves in a scientific or technological sense.
In asking why another person behaves as he does, we may also distinguish between what he feels or introspectively observes and what has happened to him. Discovering how he feels, or what he thinks, is part of learning what he is or is coming to be or becoming. A first step is to make contact with him, possibly in an “encounter” or “confrontation.” In any case, it requires good “interpersonal relations” and an ability to share feelings through sympathy, a word which once meant simply “feeling with.” Sensitivity training is designed to help. The observer is to become involved and, like the mathematician who is said to think intuitively because he has not taken the explicit steps which lead to a conclusion, he is to intuit the feelings of others—that is, to know them directly without necessarily being able to explain how he does so.
Nevertheless, one person does not make direct contact with the inner world of another, and so-called knowledge of another is often simply an ability to predict what he will do. Thus, how well the members of a training staff perceive (and hence know) their trainees has been said to be indicated by how well they can predict how the trainees will answer a set of questions. But we understand another person in part from his expression of feelings. Actors were once said to be able to “register” joy, sorrow, and so on with facial expressions, postures, and movements, and the audience read these expressions and hence understood the characters and their motives, presumably because it had learned to do so in real life with real people.
We can use an expression of feelings by asking how we would behave if we ourselves had the feelings thus expressed. Or we can ask what kinds of behavior a given expression has tended to accompany in the past. Thus, we predict what a person who looks angry will do not by stopping to ask what we would do if we looked angry but by remembering what people who look angry generally do. The attribution of feelings to others is called empathy. A person is said to “project his feelings” into another. When he projects them into an inanimate thing, he is obviously making a mistake, and his behavior has been called the pathetic fallacy. The “angry sea” behaves in an angry fashion, but we do not suppose that it feels angry. We merely infer that for a time it will continue to behave in an angry way. We can also be wrong when we project feelings onto other people. A person can “act bravely while feeling afraid,” but he does so with different parts of his body, with different repertoires. We may be able to discover how he “really” feels by altering the contingencies. If he is acting bravely because of prevailing social contingencies in which “showing fear” is punished, we may be able to change the contingencies so that he will act as if afraid. What he felt was in both cases generated by certain features of the situation rather than by the behavior which simulated bravery. A person who says he feels brave when he is really feeling afraid is like a person who acts bravely when feeling afraid, and we can discover what he “really” feels by altering the contingencies. Psychotherapy is particularly important when the contingencies responsible for a verbal report are so powerful that the person himself does not “know that he is afraid.” The therapist “helps him to discover his fear.” When he acts bravely while feeling afraid, that is the kind of person he is at that moment. We do not need to assume that there is a fearful person lurking in the depths.
We mistrust reports of feelings, especially when they conflict with other evidence. A curious example was common in the early days of anesthesia, when many people resisted a major operation on the grounds that the damage done to the body was clearly associated with pain and that it was possible that the anesthetic merely blocked the expression, together with its later recollection, rather than the pain itself.
We find it easier to know what another person is feeling if he tries to communicate or convey his feelings verbally. Convey means to transport or transmit, and communicate means to make common to both speaker and listener, but what is really conveyed or made common? It is, of course, quite inadequate to say that “man translates his experience into sound waves that another person can understand—that is, so that the listener can retranslate the sounds into a comparable experience.” The meaning of an expression is different for speaker and listener; the meaning for the speaker must be sought in the circumstances under which he emits a verbal response and for the listener in the response he makes to a verbal stimulus. At best the end product of communication could be said to be the fact that the listener’s response is appropriate to the speaker’s situation. A description of the bodily state felt by the speaker does not by itself produce a similar state to be felt by the listener. It does not make a feeling common to both.
Another technique for “communicating a feeling” is to describe a situation which arouses the same feeling. As we describe something by saying what it looks like, and thus enable the listener to respond to it as he has already responded to something else, so we can induce the listener to feel as we feel by describing a situation which creates a condition felt in the same way. We saw an example of this in Keat’s report of how he felt on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. The novelist “communicates” with the reader by describing situations which generate feelings. (The same practice is useful in “communicating ideas”: an argument is developed from which the reader comes to the same conclusion as the writer.)
Terms describing private events are necessarily inexact. This is true of the world of ideas (it does not help much to be told that “a good lecturer should communicate being”), and even more specific references to “what is in the speaker’s mind” are faulty. Not all contingencies can be replaced with rules, and some contingency-shaped behavior is beyond the reach of verbal description. Similarly, the most precise description of a state of feeling cannot correspond exactly to the state felt. The feelings of the mystic or the aesthete are “ineffable,” and there are other feelings that can be known only by passing through a relevant history. Only one who has lived in a concentration camp can really know what “it feels like,” because there is nothing like it to generate comparable feelings in others. If it is true that only those who have been psychoanalyzed can know what it feels like, then presumably there is nothing else that feels like it.
We try to discover how another person feels for many reasons. A good deal of our behavior is reinforced by its effect on others, and it is presumably more reinforcing if the effect is clear. Thus, we act to reinforce those we like or love and to avoid harming them, in part because of what they do in return. (The tendency could be innate, since there is survival value, for example, in the behavior of a mother who feeds and cares for her young and protects them from harm and who, in doing so, provides conditions which classify as positive and negative reinforcers, but social contingencies of reinforcement generate comparable behavior.) It is important that the recipient show that we have been successful, and he can do so by reporting his feelings. A person being massaged says that it feels good; a person for whom a particular piece of music is being played says that he likes it. When these “signs of feeling” are absent, we may ask or otherwise investigate how a person feels.
There may seem to be a more compelling reason for probing the feelings of others. If it is “not the behavior that counts but how a person feels about his behavior,” the discovery of feelings should be the first order of business. But how a person feels about his behavior depends upon the behavior and upon the conditions of which it is a function, and we can deal with these without examining feelings. When we are helping people to act more effectively, our first task may seem to be to change how they feel and thus how they will act, but a much more effective program is to change how they act and thus, incidentally, how they feel.
In a behavioristic analysis knowing another person is simply knowing what he does, has done, or will do and the genetic endowment and past and present environments which explain why he does it. It is not an easy assignment, because many relevant facts are out of reach, and each person is indubitably unique. But our knowledge of another person is limited by accessibility, not by the nature of the facts. We cannot know all there is to know, as we cannot know all we should like to know about the worlds of physics and biology, but that does not mean that what remains unknown is of a different nature. As in other sciences, we often lack the information necessary for prediction and control and must be satisfied with interpretation, but our interpretations will have the support of the prediction and control which have been possible under other conditions.
We can know another person in the other sense of knowing discussed in Chapter 9. We understand other people short of taking action, and the mere perception of others must be included among our responses to them. All this depends upon what others do, much more than upon what they feel or report they feel.
Self-management raises the same question as self-knowledge: Who are the managing and managed selves? And again the answer is that they are repertoires of behavior. The intellectual self-management discussed in Chapter 7 is a matter of changing a situation until a response appears which solves a problem, the problem-solving repertoire making the repertoire containing the successful solution more effective. The two repertoires are more easily distinguished in ethical self-management. The managed self is composed of what is significantly called selfish behavior—the product of the biological reinforcers to which the species has been made sensitive through natural selection. The managing self, on the other hand, is set up mainly by the social environment, which has its selfish reasons for teaching a person to alter his behavior in such a way that it becomes less aversive and possibly more reinforcing to others.
Self-management is often represented as the direct manipulation of feelings and states of mind. A person is to change his mind, use his will power, stop feeling anxious, and love his enemies. What he actually does is change the world in which he lives. In both intellectual and ethical self-management he analyzes contingencies and may extract and apply rules. But very little self-management in this sense could be learned in one lifetime. Hence the value of folk wisdom, rules of thumb, proverbs, maxims, and other rules to be followed to adjust more expediently to the contingencies they describe. An illuminating example is the Golden Rule. It would be impossible to construct a table of commandments applicable to all the things people do which affect others, but to discover whether a particular act is likely to be punished because it affects others aversively the individual is enjoined to examine the effect on himself. This is the early and negative form of the Rule, but he may also look for reinforcing effects. The joint Rule tells him to avoid acting if the effect would be aversive to himself and to act if the effect would be reinforcing. Note that he is not asked to examine his putative feelings or to predict the feelings his behavior would induce in others; he is to see whether it is the kind of consequence he would act to achieve. In examining such an effect on himself (as by recalling his history or generalizing from it), he may well respond to conditions of his own body rather than to the changes induced in his behavior. The conditions felt in association with reinforcers are salient; but self-management is concerned with consequences, many of them due to action taken by others, and the rule is more exactly applied if a person recollects not what he has felt but what he has done when others have treated him in a given way.
Some well-known techniques of self-management are designed to bring a person’s history into play in offsetting an aversive effect. For example, drinking alcoholic beverages often has two opposing consequences: an immediate reinforcement and a deferred punishment. After being punished, a person may “resolve” not to drink again. A resolution is a kind of self-made rule, designed to extend the effect of punishment into the future, but on a later occasion the immediate reinforcing effect may still take over. Recalling the resolution is a gesture of self-management, though possibly ineffective. Avoiding situations in which one is likely to drink (“avoiding temptation”) is possibly more effective.
A common technique of intellectual self-management is to arrange a situation—for example, a study or studio—in which there is little to interfere with a given kind of behavior. The cloister and the hermitage have similar effects in ethical self-management. The artist who paints photographically is under the powerful control of his model, but if he can bring his personal history into play, his work will show a kind of generality, because it will be less closely tied to one situation. He will have “extracted the essentials” by attenuating the control exerted by the current setting. The same principle underlies the practice of Zen, in which the archer, for example, learns to minimize the particular features of a single instance. Both the artist and the archer are said to “transcend” the immediate situation; they become “detached” from it.
Personal history asserts itself in self-control or self-management in other ways. The individual who refuses to “go under” in a concentration camp, who is not “broken” by efforts made to demean or destroy his dignity or identity, has transcended his current environment. To say that he is able to inject a different meaning into that environment is simply to say that he is under the more powerful control of his history.
The goal of self-management is often called self-fulfillment or self-actualization. Fulfillment seems to be concerned with achievement, with avoiding restraints and discovering positive reinforcers. Actualization seems to have more to do with maximizing genetic and environmental histories in order to free a person from immediate settings. In both cases the emphasis is clearly upon the here and now, on being or well-being or momentary becoming.
A good deal of interest has recently been shown in the so-called self-control of autonomic responses, such as changes in heart rate, or blood pressure, or blushing, or sweating. These reflex mechanisms have been called involuntary, and as we saw in Chapter 4, this would seem to set them apart from operant behavior, but the conditions needed for operant conditioning can be arranged. Autonomic behavior is usually concerned with the internal economy, and there have been few effects on the environment which would make operant conditioning relevant, but a conspicuous indicator that a response is occurring can be set up, and operant contingencies can thus be established. A given heart rate, for example, can turn on a light, which is then followed by a reinforcing consequence. But slowing or speeding the pulse is no more self-control than slowing or speeding one’s stride when walking. The only difference is that the pulse is not normally followed by reinforcing consequences which bring it under operant control. Consequences are sometimes made more conspicuous in the operant conditioning of skeletal muscles. Thus, it is easier to learn to wiggle one’s ears by looking in a mirror to improve feedback, and slight movements of a partially paralyzed limb are sometimes amplified for the same reason.
One can control one’s pulse to some extent by behaving in ways which affect it, speeding the heart rate by exercising violently and slowing it by relaxing. The direct operant control of autonomic behavior can be demonstrated only when indirect control is eliminated. Many years ago a colleague and I tried to reinforce changes in the volume of the forearm, presumably reflecting the relaxation of blood vessels. One of us would put his forearm in a water-filled jacket (called a plethysmograph), the volume of which was indicated on a dial. We found that we could move the dial in a direction which indicated that the volume of our arm had increased, but we later discovered that we were doing so by breathing more and more deeply. By holding a greater amount of residual air in our lungs, we were squeezing blood into the arm. There are ways in which these mediating responses can be eliminated, and the pure operant control of autonomic behavior may be possible. It is not, however, the self-management with which we are here concerned.
When techniques of self-management have been learned, the instructional contingencies maintained by the verbal community may no longer be needed. Behavior resulting from good self-management is more effective and hence generously reinforced in other ways. It is possible that a much more precise kind of control may begin to be exerted by private effects, in which case the problem of privacy faced by the verbal community is surmounted. Self-management then becomes as automatic in its dependence on private stimuli as the skilled movements of an acrobat, but although these contingencies may lead to effective private self-stimulation, they do not lead to self-knowledge. We may be as unconscious of the stimuli we use in self-management as of those we use in executing a handspring.
One person manages another in the sense in which he manages himself. He does not do so by changing feelings or states of mind. The Greek gods were said to change behavior by giving men and women mental states, such as pride, mental confusion, or courage, but no one has been successful in doing so since. One person changes the behavior of another by changing the world in which he lives. In doing so, he no doubt changes what the other person feels or introspectively observes.
Operant Conditioning. Everything we know about operant conditioning is relevant to making behavior more or less likely to occur upon a given occasion. This is the traditional field of rewards and punishments, but much sharper distinctions can be made in taking advantage of what we know about contingencies of reinforcement. Unfortunately, the reinforcers most often used are negative: governmental and religious control is based mainly on the threat of punishment (“power”), and noninstitutional practices are often of the same sort. Among positive reinforcers are the goods and money of economic control in agriculture, trade, and industry and, less formally, in daily life (“wealth” or “privilege”). Interpersonal contact is frequently a matter of approval (“prestige”) or censure, some forms of which are probably effective for genetic reasons (“The desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilized man”), but which usually derive their power from their exchange with other reinforcers.
In traditional terms, one person arranges positive or negative contingencies in order to create interests, provide encouragement, instill incentives or purposes, or raise consciousness in another person. In doing so, he brings him under the control of various features of his environment. He discontinues reinforcement in order to dissuade or discourage. He uses reinforcers derived from deferred consequences to “give a person something to look forward to.” In doing so, he need not promote self-knowledge, but an increase in self-knowledge is relevant (“We must make the actual pressure more pressing by adding to it the consciousness of pressure”).
Describing Contingencies. Arranging contingencies of operant reinforcement is often confused with describing them. The distinction is as important as that between contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior. When we warn a person by saying, “Come inside. It is going to rain,” or by putting up a sign at an intersection reading, “Stop,” we describe behavior (coming in or stopping) and identify or imply relevant consequences. We do not necessarily arrange the contingencies. A stop sign may simply indicate the kind of intersection at which drivers are likely to have trouble, as the sign “Thin Ice” beside a pond deters the skater without threatening punitive action by the authorities. But contrived aversive consequences are usually added. The child who stays out when told to come in will not only get wet, he will be punished for disobedience. The driver who does not stop at the intersection will not only run the risk of an accident, he will get a ticket. (The sign will be particularly effective if a punisher—a policeman—is visible.)
A warning, like the rules discussed in Chapter 8, gives explicit reasons in the form of a (possibly incomplete) description of contingencies. A person who responds because of a warning is behaving rationally, in the sense of applying a rule, and this is particularly likely to be said if, though he may have learned to respond because of past warnings, he does so now because he has analyzed the situation and, so to speak, warned himself. He describes his own behavior and the contingencies responsible for it and as a result is more likely to behave in an appropriate way on future occasions. The law makes an important point of this; the person who has weighed the consequences of his action, who knows the effect his behavior will have, is especially subject to punishment.
We also talk about consequences—we supply reasons—when we exhort a person to act or urge or persuade him to act. To urge is to make more urgent by adding conditioned aversive stimuli; to persuade is to add stimuli which form part of an occasion for positive reinforcement. A more explicit kind of rule is a contract. A labor contract specifies among other things what a worker is to do and how much he is to be paid. A contract is put in force when children are told that if they behave well, they will get a treat. The worker and the child may then behave in order to be paid or treated, respectively, but the behavior may be weak. The rule may have to be supplemented by additional contingencies, such as a supervisor’s threat of discharge or repeated signs of disapproval from a parent.
Emotional and Motivational Measures. When we are in a position to do a person good—that is, do something he calls good—we can make that something contingent on a given topography of behavior, which is then strengthened, and we can bring behavior under the control of a given stimulus. If we “do good” without respecting any contingent relation, we may satiate a person and in doing so reduce both the probability that he will engage in behavior reinforced by that good and his susceptibility to further reinforcement by it. We may also create an emotional disposition to do good to us. Contrariwise, by withholding the good, we may extinguish any behavior which has been reinforced by it, but if we withhold without respect to what is being done, we create a state of deprivation in which behavior reinforced by that good is strong and in which the good is highly reinforcing, and we create an emotional disposition to harm us. We ourselves and the object of our attention may feel or introspectively observe many relevant states of our bodies, but the management of the contingencies is the effective step.
A number of familiar fields of management may be briefly discussed.
Teaching. Everyone has suffered, and unfortunately is continuing to suffer, from mentalistic theories of learning in education. It is a field in which the goal seems to be obviously a matter of changing minds, attitudes, feelings, motives, and so on, and the Establishment is therefore particularly resistant to change. Yet the point of education can be stated in behaviorial terms: a teacher arranges contingencies under which the student acquires behavior which will be useful to him under other contingencies later on. The instructional contingencies must be contrived; there is no way out of this. The teacher cannot bring enough of the real life of the student into the classroom to build behavior appropriate to the contingencies he will encounter later. The behaviors to be constructed in advance are as much a matter of productive thinking and creativity as of plain facts and skills.
Here is a sample of what is standing in the way of effective education: It is said that “attitudes expressed in the structure of school systems affect the cognitive and creative potential of virtually every child, as do the feelings and personalities of teachers and their supervisors.” The “attitudes expressed in the structure of school systems” presumably represent the behavior of designing and constructing schools and instructional programs; the “feelings and personalities of teachers and their supervision” are presumably inferred from their behaviors; and the things which “affect the cognitive and creative potential” of a child are presumably the conditions under which the child acquires the kinds of behavior discussed in Chapter 7. A translation reads: “The intellectual and creative behavior of a child is changed by the school to which he goes, its instructional programs, and the behavior of his teachers and supervisors.” This lacks the profundity of the original, but profundity here is certainly obscurity, and the translation has the merit of telling us where to begin to do something about teaching.
Education covers the behavior of a child or person over a period of many years, and the principles of developmentalism are therefore particularly troublesome. The metaphor of growth begins in the “kindergarten” and continues into “higher” education, diverting attention from the contingencies responsible for changes in the students’ behavior.
Helping. Psychotherapy has been much more explicitly committed to mentalistic systems than has education. The illness which is the object of therapy is called mental, and we have already examined Freud’s mental apparatus and a few intrapsychic processes said to be disturbed or deranged in the mentally ill. What is wrong is usually explored in the realm of feelings. (At one time it was suggested that the psychiatrist should take LSD in order to discover what it feels like to be mentally disturbed.)
Measures taken to change feelings—as in “developing the ego” or “building a vital sense of self”—work by constructing contingencies of reinforcement, by advising a patient where favorable contingencies are to be found, or by supplying rules which generate behavior likely to be reinforced in his daily life. Behavior therapy is often supposed to be exclusively a matter of contriving reinforcing contingencies, but it quite properly includes giving a patient warnings, advice, instructions, and rules to be followed.
When a problem calling for therapy is due to a shortage of social or intimately personal reinforcers, a solution may be difficult. It may be obvious that a person would profit from reinforcement with attention, approval, or affection, but if these are not the natural consequences of his behavior—if he does not merit attention, approval, or affection—it may not be possible to contrive the needed contingencies. Simulated attention, approval, or affection will eventually cause more problems than it solves, and even the deliberate use of deserved attention cheapens the coinage.
“What is needed,” says Carl Rogers, “is a new concept of therapy as offering help, not control.” But these are not alternatives. One can help a person by arranging an environment which exerts control, and if I am right, one cannot help a person without doing so. So-called humanistic psychologists control people if they have any effect at all, but they do not allow themselves to analyze their practices. One unfortunate result is that they cannot teach them—and may even say that teaching is wrong. “Help” points to the interests of the person helped and “control” to the interests of the controller, but before we decide that the first is good and the second bad, we should ask whether the controller is affected by his own good or the good of others. We must look at why people help others, exerting control as they do so. The culture of the therapist should lead him to act in ways which are good for the person he is helping, and the problem of those who are concerned for therapy is to generate such a culture, not to find humane therapists. But this is to anticipate the argument of the following chapter.
Governing. In the broadest sense the term should include all management, but it is usually confined to governmental and religious practices, particularly those which are punitive and which are said to build a sense of responsibility. Like duty (what is due or owed to others) and obligation (what one is obliged to pay), responsibility suggests aversive consequences, and we sometimes say that a person is responsible simply in the sense that he responds to aversive contingencies. We hold him responsible by maintaining such contingencies. (We hold him accountable in the more general sense of keeping an account of his behavior to see whether it meets specifications upon which escape from punishment may be contingent.) It does not follow that he has a responsibility; the simple fact is that certain kinds of contingencies have affected him. If they have failed to do so, it is because he is uncontrollable, not irresponsible, and the term controllability has in some quarters tended to replace that of responsibility.
Entertaining. It may be said that there is one field in which what is done is not really management, although an effect on other people is extremely important. The artist, the composer, or the writer of poetry or fiction produces something which seems to be justified solely by the fact that it is reinforcing, no attention being paid to the contingencies. (Religious art, ceremonial music, and books with a message are designed to induce action, and similar reinforcing effects are used for educational, therapeutic, and other purposes. Reinforcing pictures, furnishings, and background music are used to make stores, offices, and hotel lobbies function as conditioned reinforcers, to increase the likelihood that people will come back again. But I am speaking here of “pure” art.) At best the artist, composer, or writer acts to produce something which reinforces him, and he is most likely to continue to be productive when that is the case. But we must not overlook the fact that the consumer of art, music, and literature is also reinforced. One looks at pictures, goes to galleries to see them, buys them, or buys copies of them in order to look at them because one is reinforced when one does so. One plays music which is reinforcing, goes to concerts, or buys recordings. One buys and reads books. The fact is probably not entirely irrelevant to artist, composer, or writer, but even if it were, there is no reason why a behavioristic account could not list the reinforcing effects of works of art, music, and literature and deal with them as such, rather in the manner of the contemplative knowing discussed in Chapter 9. The fact that conspicuous behavior is lacking does not mean that mental life has been demonstrated.
People used to suppose that they knew themselves better than they knew others (or than others knew them). What they meant is that they knew their own feelings and introspectively observed states better than those of others. Self-knowledge is then a matter of being in contact with oneself. When people began to discover why others behaved as they did, a different kind of self-knowledge arose, which took genetic endowment, environmental history, and current setting into account. The historical priority of self-knowledge based upon introspection gave way to knowledge of environmental contingencies.
The order of discovery was reversed in self-management. People learn rather easily to control others. A baby, for example, develops certain methods of controlling his parents when he behaves in ways leading to certain kinds of action. Children acquire techniques of controlling their peers, and they become skillful in this long before they control themselves. The early instruction they receive in changing their own feelings or introspectively observed states by exercising will power or altering emotional and motivational states is not very effective. The self-management which begins to be taught in the form of proverbs, maxims, and rules of thumb is a matter of changing the environment. The control of others, learned at an early date, comes at last to be used in self-control, and eventually a full-fledged technology of behavior leads to skillful self-management.
That it also leads to the skillful management of others raises serious problems to which we now turn.