Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [172]
From the 1920s to the 1960s, behaviorism (or the more complex versions of it known as neobehaviorism) was the regnant force in American psychology and the model that it exported to the rest of the psychological world. Some psychologists still clung to older schools of thought, and a number of others, among them Freudians, developers of mental testing, child development psychologists, and Gestaltists, were concerned with mental processes, but on most campuses such people had to adapt their work and language to the behaviorist paradigm. Gregory Kimble, a historian of behaviorism, says, exaggerating only a little, “In midcentury American psychology, it would have cost a career to publish on mind, consciousness, volition, or even imagery,” since to use such terms signified that one was a mentalist who believed in outdated, subjective, and mystical concepts.34
In consequence, much of the research conducted between 1920 and the 1960s dealt with minute, undeniably objective but not very enlightening topics. A few representative titles from the Psychological Bulletin and the American Journal of Psychology in 1935 were:
“Influence of Hunger on the Pecking Responses of Chickens”
“Comparison of the Rat’s First and Second Explorations of a Maze Unit”
“The Use of Maze-Trained Rats to Study the Effect on the Central Nervous System of Morphine and Related Substances”
“Differential Errors in Animal Mazes”
“Circuits Now Available for the Measurement of Electrodermal Responses”
Even when human beings were the experimental subjects, the topics and methods were constrained by behaviorist doctrine. Some typical titles from the American Journal of Psychology in 1935 were:
“The Reliability of the pH of Human Mixed Saliva as an Indicator of Physiological Changes Accompanying Behavior”
“A Comparison of the Conditioning of Muscular Responses Which Vary in Their Degree of Voluntary Control”
“Experimental Extinction of Higher Order Responses”
“The Galvanic Skin Reflex as Related to Overt Emotional Expression”
“Over-Compensation in Time Relationships of Bilateral Movements of the Fingers”
The authors of these and similar studies were not really interested in the pecking behavior of chickens or the pH of human saliva but in learning—the acquisition of behavioral responses to different kinds of stimuli. Learning was the central concern of American psychology during the behaviorist era, the assumption being that almost all behavior could be explained by S-R learning principles.35 An equally important assumption was that these principles held true of all sentient creatures, much as the principles of valence are true of all elements in chemical compounds. What one learned from chickens, cats, dogs, and especially rats applied to human beings.
Rats were the favorite experimental animal because they were relatively cheap, small, easy to handle, and fast-maturing. Countless thousands of them served the cause of research by learning to run mazes, operate levers or push buttons to get food, jump at doors of different colors, depress a bar to turn off an electric current that was making their feet tingle, and a host of other tasks. There was nothing frivolous about these experiments; they were aimed at the discovery of important universal laws of behavior. A few examples:36
—A rat is placed at the start of a simple maze that includes six choice points (each choice point is a T, one branch being a blind alley, the other an alley that continues) and ends at the goal box. The rat begins exploring and sniffing about, and runs a little; it goes into a blind alley, turns back and runs the other way, and after making three wrong choices and three right ones reaches the goal box— and is lifted out and, after a brief rest, put back in the start box. On its seventh run it finds a food pellet at the goal; the rat