Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [171]
For all that, Watson was the first and most important spokesman of a radical theory and practice that dominated American psychology for nearly half a century. Raymond Fancher, in his Pioneers of Psychology, writes that although many of the developments of behaviorism might have happened without Watson, “he certainly hastened their occurrence, and lent a vitality and power to the objective psychology movement that it might otherwise have lacked.”30
Watson died in 1958, the year after he received the gold medal. To the end, he believed that the revolution he had started, and which had so long been the leading school of psychology in America, was also the psychology of the future. He was wrong. But we’ll come to that.
The Triumph of Behaviorism
After a slow start, behaviorism rapidly gained favor among psychologists in the 1920s, particularly in America; it soon became the ruling view and, after a while, almost the only acceptable one, at least in academic circles.
The main reason for its popularity was its claim to be the first truly scientific psychology. Until the nineteenth century, psychology had consisted largely of philosophic speculation, not science. In the nineteenth century, adherents of the New Psychology had sought to turn psychology into a natural science but got no further than explaining a few simple reflexes and perceptions in physiological terms—and even to achieve that much, they had had to rely on unverifiable introspections.
Behaviorists, in contrast, said they could construct a psychology entirely from visible, measurable events—the causally connected stimulus-response units of which, they maintained, the whole range of animal and human behavior was assembled. Such a psychology would be based on reactions as specific and unvarying as those of chemistry or physics, and should enable the psychologist, in Watson’s words, “given the stimulus, to predict the response—or, seeing the reaction take place, to state what the stimulus is that has called out the reaction.”31
Another reason so many psychologists found behaviorism appealing was that by limiting themselves to visible behavior they could dispose of all those intractable questions about the mind that philosophers and psychologists had labored over for more than twenty-four hundred years. Behaviorists said that we not only cannot know what goes on in the mind, we don’t need to know in order to explain behavior. They often likened the mind to a black box containing unknown circuitry; if we know that when we push a particular button on it, the box will emit a specific signal or action, what is inside is of no consequence. Nor should what goes on in the mind even be discussed, since all talk about mental processes is tantamount to believing in some bodiless entity that runs the brain’s machinery—“the ghost in the machine,” as the English behaviorist philosopher Sir Gilbert Ryle derisively called it. (Equally derisive was the statement of an antibehaviorist: “The mere mention of the word ‘mentalism’ offends the sensibilities of a behaviorist in much the same way the word ‘masturbation’ offends polite company.”32)
There were, moreover, deep-seated social and cultural reasons for the success of behaviorism. It appealed to the twentieth-century personality, especially in America, because it was practical; it sought not ultimate explanations but commonsense knowledge that could be put to use.
At least one historian of behaviorism, David Bakan, has also linked its rise to the urbanization and industrialization of America; these social developments, he says, created an urge to master the incomprehensible and worrisome strangers all around us—exactly what behaviorism promised to help us do.33
Bakan adds two other societal reasons for the success of behaviorism. First, World War I evoked hostility to German psychology, and behaviorism served as an up-to-date and available replacement. Second,