Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [182]
Throughout the behaviorist era, some psychologists continued to explore, in broader and deeper terms, not only human memory but a number of the psychological phenomena that behaviorism had ignored, like perception, motivation, personality traits, reasoning, problem solving, creativity, child development, the interplay of hereditary tendencies and experience, and interpersonal relations. Gradually, the new data gathered about these subjects, and the questions those data raised that behaviorism could not answer, prepared the way for what Thomas Kuhn, in his famous analysis of scientific revolutions, called a “paradigm shift”—a relatively abrupt switch to a new theory encompassing and making sense of a large accumulation of data that could be accounted for only with difficulty, if at all, by the reigning theory.75
Meanwhile, research in a number of other fields was beginning to cast new light on the workings of the mind. From anthropology came studies of how preliterate peoples think; from psycholinguistics came accounts of how human beings acquire and use language; and from computer science came a wholly new way to conceive of thinking—as information processing, proceeding step by step like a computer program.
The convergence of all these forces achieved intellectual critical mass during the 1960s, resulting in a knowledge explosion and a new conception of psychology. The former cognitive specialties within psychology regained their status, and cognitive science became the hot new interdisciplinary specialty or, more accurately, aggregation of specialties. It was a mind-based science relying on experimental methods by means of which reasonable inferences could be made about mental processes. By the 1980s, cognitive science studies were going on in the psychology departments of nearly every American university, and a handful of universities had created semi-independent institutes of cognitive science. We’ll look at this more closely later in this history.
With the advent of the paradigm shift, behaviorism rapidly lost its commanding position in psychology and its claim to be a sufficient explanation of all behavior. Gregory Kimble of Duke University sums up the disenchantment of psychologists with behaviorism:
Although the classical theories were formulated and tested in terms of simple learning, behind the scenes there was always the presumption that these theories could be applied to all behavior… [and] that most of the basic laws of learning had already been discovered and all that remained was the minor problem of resolving the few systematic issues that separated the main theorists… [But] by the middle of the century it had become clear that the classic theories of learning were limited in scope and that the stature of our scientific knowledge was pre-Galilean rather than post-Newtonian, as Hull and others had thought.76
Curiously, it was only when behaviorism was in its decline that its off-shoot, behavior therapy, became a widely used and reasonably successful form of treatment for a limited range of psychological disorders.
What is true of behavior therapy—its usefulness but limited applicability—is similar to what has proved true of its parent, behaviorism. A number of its findings have been put to practical use, an example being taste-aversion learning: To inhibit coyotes from killing sheep, researchers put toxic lamb burgers, wrapped in sheep fur, on the perimeters of fenced areas of sheep ranches; coyotes that eat this bait get sick,