What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [38]
But the real reason the rest of psychology was glued to this controversy was more basic. American psychology as a whole is militantly environmentalistic, and Garcia challenged this premise. The underpinnings of American environmentalism are very deep, both intellectually and politically.
John Locke, David Hume, and the British empiricists began this tradition by arguing that all knowledge comes through the senses. These sensations are tied together by associations, they averred, and so everything we know, everything a human being is, is simply the buildup of associations. If you want to understand a person, all you need know is the details of his upbringing. Behaviorism generally, and Pavlovian conditioning in particular, captured the imagination of American psychology because it was a testable version of Locke’s environmentalism. Environmentalism is not just at the heart of behaviorism; it is the core of the dogma of human plasticity.
And make no mistake about the political side. It is no coincidence that Locke fathered both the idea that all knowledge is associations and the idea that all men are created equal. The behaviorists, scientific Lockeans all, dominated academic psychology from the end of World War I to the Vietnam era. John Watson began the behaviorist movement in the era of the melting pot. His popularity was in part the result of his covert message: The new immigrants were not inferior to the people already in America; they could be molded into the same high-quality stuff that the WASPs already were. The defeat of Hitler added fuel to American environmentalism: The genocide of the concentration camps filled my generation with determination never again to countenance genetic explanations of human psychology.
We may have been working on rats and pigeons, but in doing so we were trying to show that human beings were the product of their upbringing and their culture, not of their race. The civil rights movement, feminism, the anti-Vietnam War protests (white people killing yellow people), all fed into and fed on this sacred, covert premise of American psychology.
Militant environmentalism allowed behaviorism to dominate American academic psychology. Garcia denied its most basic premise: that we are wholly the creation of our environment, not of our genes. Viewed from afar, the message from Garcia does not seem very earthshaking. He did not claim that we are a product of our genes or that our upbringing was unimportant. He claimed only genetic predisposition. He claimed that our genes limited what we could learn. But this opened—just a crack—the door that environmentalists wanted shut forever. The door has stayed open, and it has provided a fresh way to look at the many things that are learned, among them birdsong, aggression, language, imprinting, sexual-object choice, and, not the least, phobias.
Phobia and Fears
A phobia is an intense fear that is out of proportion to the real danger of the object that causes it. In its milder form, phobia is common, afflicting about 10 percent of the adult population. In its extreme form, so intense as to keep sufferers housebound, it is rarer—well under 1 percent of adults.5 The most common kinds of phobias are agoraphobia (literally, fear of the marketplace), which is the fear of crowded places, open spaces, and travel; social phobia, the fear of humiliation and embarrassment while being observed by other people; and nosophobia, the fear of a specific illness, like AIDS or breast cancer. Also common are the object phobias, which include the fear of animals, insects, heights, airplanes, enclosure, or bad weather. There are rare phobias, like fear of thirteens (triskaidekaphobia) or snow, and I even once came across a patient who had trouble dealing with exhaust pipes (mufflerophobia).
About half of the cases of phobia begin with a traumatic incident, usually in childhood. Susan’s severe fear of cats