Chapter 9
Behaviorism: Antecedent Influences
In the early 1900’s, Clever Hans the wonder horse was famous worldwide. Clever Hans purportedly had the numerical reasoning ability of a 14-year-old boy: he could add, subtract, spell, and recognize and identify a number of objects as well as answer questions on a variety of topics. The horse’s owner, William Von Osten, was a retired math teacher and never accepted money to exhibit Clever Hans. The horse was a mystery; the puzzle was eventually solved by a psychologist.
When psychology moved from its beginnings to functionalism and then to applied psychology, the movement was not deliberate or directed—rather was more of an evolution. This is not the case with Behaviorism, which formally began with “a declaration of war” published by John Watson in 1913 in which he declares that psychology should study only overt behavior, rejecting any ideas regarding consciousness and/or mind. The foundation of Watson’s behaviorism was not new—its precursors were the philosophical school of positivism, animal psychology, and functionalism. Positivism was founded by Comte, and it “emphasized positive knowledge (facts), the truth of which was not debatable.”
Although Romanes and Morgan had begun the animal psychology movement, they both were interested in the animal mind. Jacques Loeb’s approach was different, in that he built on the concept of tropism (“involuntary forced movement”) wherein he “believed that an animal’s reaction to a stimulus is direct and automatic.” Even so, he did discuss “animal consciousness” with the idea of associative memory in animals, which is the cognitive mechanism for animals to learn the connection between stimulus and response. Loeb taught for a time at the U. of Chicago and had John Watson as a student.
In the early 1900’s there were a number of breakthroughs in animal psychology. Robert Yerkes used a variety of animals, Willard Small (Clark U.) used a rat maze for the first time, comparative psychology labs were being set up (8 by 1910), and Washburn published Animal Mind (1908). Up until Washburn’s book it was common to discuss animal consciousness, but her book demarcates the acceptability of such anthropomorphizing. Subsequent literature dealt with animal behavior rather than animal mind. During this time, it was difficult to be a comparative psychologist because the field was seen as not practical. Universities were unlikely to support the required labs and equipment (and faculty).
In 1906, a lecture by Pavlov was printed in Science, more of his work was published in English in 1909, and by 1911 the Journal of Animal Behavior began being published. The field was slowly becoming established and objective. In 1904 the German government established a committee to investigate Clever Hans, with Carl Stumpf as a member. He appointed Oskar Pfungst to investigate, who found that Hans’ owner and onlookers would unwittingly give subtle visual cues as to how to respond. In essence, there was no evidence of Hans having extraordinary cognitive abilities, rather only evidence of Hans learning how to respond to people’s tiny head movements. Thus, comparative psychology proved itself to be useful.
Edward Lee Thorndike “fashioned a mechanistic, objective learning theory that focused on overt behavior.” He received all of his education in the United States, which was unusual at the time. He became interested in psychology after reading William James’ The Principles of Psychology and went to Harvard for graduate work. While there, he devised mazes for learning and studied chicks (because children were controversial). Believing he was rejected by a woman, he left the Boston area and completed his Ph.D. under Cattell at Columbia University. While there, he devised the puzzle boxes to work with cats and dogs.
After this line of research, he secured a teaching job at Columbia and “worked with human subjects on problems of learning, adapting his animal research techniques for children and young people.” He became vastly successful, as evidenced by his becoming president of APA and by his high yearly income of $70,000.
Thorndike called his approach connectionism: the idea that situations and responses become connected over time, and that an individual contains a large collection of these connections. Although there is “a mentalistic tinge to Thorndike’s work,” particularly when he discusses “satisfaction, annoyance, and discomfort,” his work is mechanistic, arguing that behavior can be reduced to stimulus and response.
In the puzzle boxes Thorndike made, hungry cats had to learn to escape the box using levers to get to food. The first time they escape, Thorndike said, it is an accident. In repeated trials, the response gets “stamped in” with trial-and-error learning. Thorndike named his discoveries the “law of effect,” where a favorable consequence is associated with a particular situation, and the “law of exercise,” where the more frequently an animal responds in a particular way, the more the response is associated with a particular situation. Thorndike has been hailed as “one of psychology’s most productive and influential figures.”
As an example of independent simultaneous discovery, another key figure was conducting research on the same issues in Russia. Ivan Pavlov’s work brought responses to the physiological level: “glandular secretions and muscular movements.” Pavlov is the eldest of 11 children and intended to enter the seminary, but after reading Darwin’s theory he changed his mind. He received his degree in St. Petersburg, where he began his “fanatic devotion to pure science and to experimental research.” He spent much of his life in poverty and seemed uninterested in money. On one occasion his students collected money on his behalf under the pretext of paying for lectures. H then spent the money on dogs and lab supplies. He was famous for his tirades and tempers, although once this rage was expressed he moved on. “He tried to be as humane as possible with the dogs,” particularly given that they had to undergo surgical procedures. He was one of the few Russian scientists that allowed both women and Jews to work in his lab. He was critical of the 1917 Russian revolution and of Stalin, although he continued to receive financial support from the government, and was allowed to conduct his research without government interference.
Pavlov’s most relevant work to psychology is on conditioned reflexes. He was working on problems of digestion by collecting dogs’ saliva. He then noticed that they began to salivate before food was placed in their mouths. At first he tried to explain the phenomenon by “imagining the subjective state of the animal,” which proved fruitless. He then began his objective experimentation to investigate the phenomenon. He found that dogs salivate when food is in their mouth, which is a reflex and not learned behavior; Pavlov called this the unconditioned reflex. Salivating at the sight of food is learned through association between food and sight: he calls this the conditional reflex (which was mistranslated as “conditioned”). He and his assistants discovered that a variety of stimuli can be conditioned to cause salivation without food being present in the mouth (e.g., light, whistle, buzzer). Because Pavlov was so concerned about having pristine experimental conditions, he eventually builds a “three-story research building, known as the ‘tower of silence.’ ” The text authors include an excerpt from Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes (1927) in which he discusses the conditioning process.
Pavlov’s discovery about conditioned reflexes had been found independently on two other occasions. In the U.S., Edwin Burket Twitmyer presented a paper at the 1904 APA conference about conditioning the knee-jerk reflex, but because it received no interest from conference-goers he abandoned the idea.
Much earlier, in 1896, an Austrian named Alois Kreidl noted that goldfish “learned to anticipate feedings from the stimuli associated with the laboratory attendant walking toward their tank.” In any case, Pavlov’s work had a great impact on psychology in its search to become more objective and mechanistic.
Another contributor to animal psychology was Vladimir Bekhterev, another Russian physiologist. Like Pavlov he was critical of the politics in Russia, and like Pavlov he accepted women and Jews as students in his lab. He received some, but not all, of his training under Wundt. He and Pavlov were sworn enemies and apparently could not be at the same place without exchanging insults. Unfortunately, Bekhterev was summoned by Stalin to give a medical diagnosis. After giving a diagnosis of paranoia, Bekhterev was suspiciously found dead that day. Stalin then made sure his work was suppressed. Bekhterev contributed to animal psychology with research on motor responses, whose conditioning he called associated reflexes. He found that reflexes (like drawing back one’s finger after an electric shock) could be elicited by the original stimuli (electric shock) and also by an associated stimuli (light, sound, etc.). In addition, “Bekhterev argued for a completely objective approach to psychological phenomena and against the use of mentalistic terms and concepts.”
With the contributions of the aforementioned researchers, animal psychology became the foundation for Behaviorism. In addition, Cattell and other functionalists, with their emphasis on behavior and objectivity, helped shape the methods and study of Behaviorism. This new trend in psychology marks a distinct move away for introspection and the study of consciousness, and towards a science of behavior.
Outline
I. Hans the Wonder Horse—Math Genius?
A. Early 1900’s, Hans was world famous
B. Lived in Berlin, Germany
C. Advertisers used his likeness to sell products
D. He “inspired songs, magazine articles, and books”
E. Judged to have numeric reasoning of 14-year-old boy
F. Purportedly did a variety of cognitive tasks
1. add and subtract
2. use fractions and decimals
3. read
4. identify coins
5. play card games
6. spell
7. recognize objects and colors
8. perform feats of memory
G. answered questions by tapping hoof, swaying head
H. Owner is Willhelm von Osten, retired schoolteacher
1. taught Hans, had been unsuccessful with a cat and bear
2. never took fee for exhibitions
3. wanted to prove Darwin correct: humans and animals have similar mind
4. believed animals had insufficient education
I. There were skeptics, a psychologist “finally solved the puzzle”
II. Toward a Science of Behavior
A. Background
1. 2nd decade of 20th Century: disagreement within psychology
a. on value of introspection
b. on existence of mental elements
c. on the need to remain a pure science
2. functionalism movement: evolutionary, not revolutionary
3. 1913: behaviorism declares war (Watson)
a. protest against both structuralism and functionalism
b. deliberately abrupt
c. designed to shatter the two dominant schools
4. Behaviorism
a. rejects consciousness and introspection
b. scientific
c. dealt solely with observable behavioral acts
d. objective descriptions of the data
e. rejection of mentalistic concepts and terms
f. consciousness comparable to soul, introspection irrelevant
5. Watson not the originator; organized and promoted already existing ideas
a. philosophical tradition of objectivism and mechanism
b. animal psychology
c. functional psychology
6. appreciation of the need for objectivity had lengthy history
a. Descartes (mechanistic description of the body)
b. Comte (positivism; emphasis on undebatable facts)
c. positivism became part of the Zeitgeist in science
7. resulting science of behavior viewed human beings as machines
III. The Influence of Animal Psychology on Behaviorism
A. Background
1. Watson: “Behaviorism is a direct outgrowth of studies in animal behavior....”
2. animal psychology product of evolutionary theory
3. the most important antecedent of behaviorism
4. influenced by Romanes (anecdotal method) and Morgan (law of parsimony; experimental method)
B. Jacques Loeb (1859-1924)
1. significant step toward objectivity in animal psychology
2. tropism (“involuntary forced movement”) as basis for theory of animal behavior: consciousness not necessary
3. completely mechanistic approach to behavior
4. did not totally reject consciousness for more evolved species (i.e., humans)
5. consciousness revealed by associative memory (an association between stimulus and response, taken to indicate evidence of consciousness)
6. taught Watson at Chicago
C. Rats, ants, and the animal mind
1. Yerkes: strengthened comparative psychology
2. Willard Small
a. 1900: introduced the rat maze to study learning
b. used mentalistic terms (rat’s ideas and images)
3. John Watson
a. early career: also interested in mental concepts
b. 1903 dissertation: “Animal Education: The Psychical Development of the White Rat”
c. 1907: discussed conscious experience of sensation in rats
4. Charles Henry Turner: 1906 paper on ant behavior
a. article favorably reviewed by Watson in Psychological Bulletin
b. 1st time Watson used term behavior
c. Turner
(1) African American
(2) 1907: Ph.D. magna cum laude, University of Chicago, zoology
(3) some claimed him as psychologist
(4) teaching opportunities limited by discrimination
(5) despite being a high school science teacher, made important discoveries in insect learning and behavior
5. 1910: 8 comparative labs in U.S.; many departments offered courses
6. Margaret Floy Washburn
a. Titchener’s first doctoral student
b. taught animal psychology at Cornell
c. 1908: The Animal Mind
(1) 1st comparative psychology book published in U.S.
(2) attribution of consciousness to animals
(3) method of introspection by analogy
7. textbooks after Washburn’s were behavioristic, focused on learning
D. On becoming an animal psychologist
1. lack of funding for comparative psychologists
a. Harvard president: “no future in Yerkes’s...comparative psychology”
b. Yerkes advised to take up educational psychology
c. his students took up applied jobs when none available in comparative
d. in academia, first to be fired were comparative psychologists
e. result: very few comparative psychologists
f. Watson: no place to keep animals and no funding
g. 1908: only 6 animal studies had been published in journals (4% of the research that year)
h. meeting of all animal psychologists in 1909: only 9
i. 1910: 6/218 psychologists active in animal research
2. 1911: Journal of Animal Behavior (later Journal of Comparative Psychology) published
3. 1906: Pavlov lecture reprinted in Science
4. 1909: description of Pavlov’s work published by Yerkes and Morgulis in Psychological Bulletin