Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [183]
More generally, behaviorism yielded a legacy often taken for granted but considered essential in most areas of psychology: the need for rigorous experimentation and carefully defined variables. Behavior analysis continues to attract some psychologists as a field of research and application; in addition to the 4,500 members of the Association for Behavior Analysis, another 5,000 or more psychologists are members of local chapters of ABA. But their interest in it is apparently more as an adjunct to other areas of research than a primary identification, an indication being the membership of Division 25 of APA, which peaked at some 1,600 members in the early 1970s, then slid steeply downhill to a little over 600 in the last half dozen years, about 7 percent of APA membership.
In any case, the kinds of studies being performed within the field of behavior analysis these days seem strangulated to cognitivists. Here, for instance, are the titles of typical articles in the January 2006 issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior:
“The influence of prior choices on current choice.”
“Resistance to extinction following variable-interval reinforcement: Reinforcer rate and amount.”
“Second-order schedules of token reinforcement with pigeons: Implications for unit price.”
And here is a brief excerpt exemplifying much of the work being done by contemporary behaviorists:
Rats obtained food-pellet reinforcers by nose poking a lighted key. Experiment 1 examined resistance to extinction following single-schedule training with different variable-interval schedules, ranging from a mean interval of 16 min to 0.25 min. That is, for each schedule, the rats received 24 consecutive daily baseline sessions and then a session of extinction (i.e., no reinforcers). Resistance to extinction (decline in response rate relative to baseline) was negatively related to the rate of reinforcers obtained during baseline, a relation analogous to the partial-reinforcement-extinction effect. A positive relation between these variables emerged, however, when the unit of extinction was taken as the mean interreinforcer interval that had been in effect during training (i.e., as an omitted reinforcer during extinction)…81
It is time for us to move on to something more easily recognizable as psychology.
* William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century Franciscan, is supposed to have said, “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity,” although some sources claim that what he actually said was “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.” In either case, the message is that the best explanation is the simplest one.
* Observers (of their own conscious processes).
TEN
The
Gestaltists
A Visual Illusion Gives Rise to a New Psychology
On a train speeding through central Germany late in the summer of 1910, a young psychologist named Max Wertheimer stared at the landscape, intrigued by an illusion millions have taken for granted but that he felt, at that moment, required an explanation. Distant telegraph poles, houses, and hilltops, though stationary, seemed to be speeding along with the train. Why?1
The puzzle led him to think about another illusory motion—that produced by