Anemone's Research Emporium

The misbehaviour of behaviourism

Anemone Cerridwen
July 28, 2009

I studied behaviourism in school. Not that that makes me an expert or anything. It was a long time ago and I only vaguely recall the difference between Pavlovian conditioning (straight associations) and Skinnerian conditioning (rewards, punishments, and other reinforcements). I think the first is called "classical conditioning" and the second is called "operant conditioning", but you'd better check Wikipedia to be sure.

What I do remember is our professor apologizing for our textbook, which was the best he could find, because most textbooks on behaviourism took the Skinner school at face value, even though it had been disproven at the time. B.F. Skinner claimed that animals were empty vessels (my words) and that their behaviour was built up from reinforcement from the environment. Animal does something, something good happens, animal does it again looking for more of same. Animal does something else, something bad happens, animal doesn't go there again. Competely mindless reinforcement. Skinner even thought that thought was the result of reinforcement. Nurture, all nurture. Skinner followed faithfully in the footsteps of John B. Watson, who claimed that he could take any child and shape him (him, not her) into any type of worker he cared. Of course, the Jesuits said it before he did, but he had a behaviourist slant to it, and he was American. (Thump chest here.)

It is true that if animals receive some sort of reinforcement that they like (food! praise!), that it can shape their behaviour in that direction. The same is true, apparently, of psychology professors. There is the tale, apparently true though I no longer remember the name of the school, where the students decided to smile and nod every time the professor moved towards the door, and frown every time he went in the other direction, and for some reason he found himself nearer and nearer the door.

However, it is also true, and always was, that animals are not mindless automatons being programmed by their environments: they are actively thinking of their environment and what is going on. A rat will run a maze successfully time and time again to get food, but every once in a while, it will take detours to check out its environment, see if the maze has changed any. This is essential behaviour in the wild, and a rat is not about to drop generations of instinctive behaviour for three meals a day when it can skip a meal every now and then and patrol the perimeter. Our professor also told us the story of how he put a rat in a radial (8-arm) maze for a demonstration. To make it more interesting, he put a roof on the centre of the maze so the students couldn't see what the rat was doing. The rat, descended from generations of lab rats, immediately switched to acting like a wild rat, taking cover as much as possible and darting out quickly and unpredictably to grab the food. Apparently it took some doing to get the rat back into lab mode.

The Brelands, former students of B.F. Skinner and successful animal trainers using his methods, described in their article The Misbehavior of Organisms how they used operant conditioning to train animals such as racoons and pigs to put coins in piggy banks for commercials. At first there was no problem, but over time the animals began to revert to species-specific behaviour, rubbing the coin as if it were food (racoons) or rooting it along the ground (pigs), even though they only got fed when they put it in the bank. Eventually some animals had to be removed from training because they weren't getting enough to eat. The Brelands found that the more they worked with animal behaviour, trying to shape it, the more they found ethology (instinctive animal behaviour) helpful in understanding what was going on.

To complicate things even further, my professor described a series of experiments on flatworms. A team of researchers were able to train these flatworms to navigate mazes using operant conditioning. So far, so good. They then put the flatworms in a blender, fed them to other flatworms, and the new flatworms didn't need to be trained - they knew how to navigate the maze right away. The researchers also did things like cut flatworms in two, wait until each half grew back another half (flatworms regenerate missing parts), then ran the new flatworms through mazes to see if they still knew what they'd known before division. They also cut flatworms lengthwise through the head, so the flatworm would grow back the missing half to each head and end up with two heads. I'm not sure if having two heads improved maze navigation or not. He described how, for some reason, political of course, these researchers were unable to get their work published in traditional journals, so they founded their own, put a drawing of a two-headed flatworm on the cover, and gave it the motto "two heads are better than one". Yes, I got to study this stuff, though I wasn't tested on it. (It wasn't in the text, but my prof. lived through this stuff and seemed trustworthy. He was fun.)

At the same time Skinnerism reigned supreme in North America, even though it had been disproved in its pure form, Piaget was taking Europe by storm with developmental psychology: the child actively interacting with the environment, taking information from the environment, interpreting it, practicing it, the whole thing increasing in sophistication in predictable patterns as development progressed. Piaget ws a biologist, and so was predisposed to think of development as having at least partly a biological basis. Skinner was a philosopher, and so perhaps was not so well grounded in biological reality. It showed.

For some reason, Americans have never taken to Piaget (I'm putting it nicely), or his predecessor Maria Montessori (although Csikszentmihalyi has discovered her method, and demonstrated that it does indeed increase the level of flow in students compared to regular classroom teaching, just as you'd expect, so maybe there's hope), even though their research was pretty solid. Watson and Skinner promoted a kind of pure behaviourism that fit with the American mythos more. This is not an abstract subject. Behaviourism is currently being marketed, sans solid academic backup, as a scientific way of treating autism. With no attempt to determine the ethology of autistics, people use applied behaviour analysis (ABA) to shape us like rats in mazes or pigeons in Skinner boxes. So far as I know, the limited research indicates it does not make any difference, and some autistics identify it as abuse. So this is a problem. A big one.

Now don't get me wrong. There is always some behaviourism in the environment. Remember the professor up top with the smiles and nods. Our behaviourism prof. described dog training as behaviourism at its best. The dog wants to know the rules. The dog training teaches the dog owner to be consistent in expectations, and to reward the dog at the moment the dog does something right, telling the dog what it's called at the same time, so the dog has a basic vocabulary of what's expected. So let's say you want to teach "sit". Every time your puppy sits, you say "sit", and reward the dog. Wait too long, until the dog jumps up on you, and you reward the wrong behaviour, since the dog associates the reward with the last behaviour, not the correct one. Eventually the dog figures out what "sit" means, and sits on cue because dogs are really slavish about following the pack leader - they're friendly that way. At the same time, the dog owner has a responsibility to protect the dog from harm. You can't expect a dog to not bite if you're not going to protect it from threats. My impression from his description of dog training is that the dog my family had when I was a kid didn't need it, but we sure did.

So behaviourism, applied to both pets and pet owners, children and parents, students and teachers, demonstrators and police, etc. etc., can have a positive effect. Design a system so that people get rewarded for doing the right thing, and if it's consistent with their instinctive behaviour, they'll behave better. But behaviourism is never a substitute for understanding the person inside the behaviour. There's an active thinking creature in there, with its own set of rules, its own set of logic. Get to know it and work with it for maximum results. Ignore it and some sort of harm is likely.

Behaviourism, as it is currently being applied to autistics and other deviants, is not science. It's ideology. Religion, if you like. You can always explain the evidence (or lack thereof) to scientific types, but ideologists remain impervious. They persist in promoting an ineffective and potentially harmful treatment (and don't forget expensive) in the face of no evidence and much protest.

What gives?

I suspect that behaviourism is some way of pretending everything's all right when it isn't.

I wonder if it has anything to do with dislocation. Almost everyone in North America is either an immigrant or descended from someone who is. People talk positively about starting over, but my own experience is that it isn't that easy to just pull up your roots and start over again somewhere else. There's a mourning process, even if you want to move to the new place, because the place you grew up wasn't good enough in some way. The same dislocation also hit the UK pretty hard, too, during the Industrial Revolution, as people migrated to slums in the cities to work in factories. So are non-English speaking countries more comfortable with biology than English-speaking countries because they're less traumatized by being uprooted? No idea. I don't know that much about the industrial/cultural history of continental Europe.

I do know that some countries are more socialist than others, because people in those countries need to pull together more to survive. The Netherlands with its dykes, and pretty much everywhere that has cold snowy winters, for example. This is why Canada is more socialist than the USA, and Scandinavia more socialist than warmer parts of Europe. I don't know what else is going on, but I sure wish I do. The USA is one of the most right-wing countries in the world, stressing rugged individualism and the self-made man more than anywhere else. Behaviourism is somehow part of this culture. And it somehow makes sense that the environment and cultural history have shaped or are shaping this pattern in some way. (Look! Behaviourism! Creating unnecessary behaviourism!)

I do know that people will continue to blindly believe in behaviourism, and Social Darwinism, and all sorts of other ridiculous and harmful ideologies, as long as the real reasons for them remain unaddressed. There is probably something there that needs to be mourned before we can move on to reality.