Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [175]
An example: By means of the following equation one can calculate the extent to which any given number of repetitions of a reinforced act increases the strength of the learned habit:42
The equation says that the strength of the learned habit depends on the number of reinforced trials (N), the relationship between the afferent and efferent nerve impulses in the specific act (SHR), the physiologically maximum strength of that particular habit (M) minus—well, it goes on and on.
Hull’s work was a major attempt to model neobehaviorist psychology on the physical sciences and thereby have it achieve intellectual respectability. His calculus of learning, appearing piecemeal during the 1930s and in systematic form in his Principles of Behavior (1943), was greatly admired and hugely influential. In the late 1940s and the 1950s thousands of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations were based on one or more of his postulates; he became the most frequently cited psychologist in the literature of psychological research and the leading figure in the psychology of learning.43
But during the 1960s, the unwieldiness of his theory and the dwindling of behaviorism’s status made Hull’s name and work fade rapidly from sight. By 1970 he was rarely quoted, and today there is virtually no research based on his theory. When Hull died, in 1952, he seemed assured of scientific immortality; now he is a figure of minor historical interest, and few young psychologists and very few people outside the profession know his name.44
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), another leading neobehaviorist, had a very different fate. He became, and remained until his death at eighty-six, the best-known psychologist in the world,45 and his ideas are in wide use today in psychological research, education, and psychotherapy.46
So he must have been one of the great contributors to humankind’s quest for self-understanding, right?
Far from it.
Human self-understanding, at least as sought by philosophers and psychologists for so many centuries, was no part of Skinner’s aim or contribution. Throughout his long life he held fast to his extreme behaviorist view that “subjective entities” such as mind, thought, memory, and reasoning do not exist but are only “verbal constructs, grammatical traps into which the human race in the development of language has fallen,” “explanatory entities” that themselves are unexplainable.47 Skinner’s goal was not to understand the human psyche but to determine how behavior is created by external causes. He had no doubt about the correctness of his views; as he wrote in a short autobiography—he also wrote a three-volume one—“[Behaviorism] may need to be clarified, but it does not need to be argued.”48
Nor did he add much to psychological theory; he considered theories of learning unnecessary and claimed not to have one. Such theory as he did hold can be summed up in the statement that everything we do and are is determined by our history of rewards and punishments; the details of the theory, as he developed them through research, consisted of such principles as the partial reinforcement effect described above, concerning the circumstances that cause behavior to be acquired and those that cause it to be extinguished.
What, then, made him so well known?
Like Watson he was by nature a controversial man, a provocateur, and a superb publicist. On his very first TV appearance he posed a dilemma originally propounded by Montaigne—“Would you, if you had to choose, burn your children or your books?”—and said that he himself would burn his children, since his contribution to the future would be greater through his work than through his genes.49 Predictably, he elicited outrage—and many invitations for further appearances.
At other times he seemed to take pleasure in offending thoughtful people by deriding the terms in which they talked about and comprehended human behavior:
Behavior…is still attributed to human nature, and there is an extensive “psychology of individual differences