Healing Psychology, Part H - A Crippling Misstep.

Previous episodes of Healing Psychology highlight psychology’s failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. The failure can be traced to a single source—psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. A century ago, influential theorists made a dreadful blunder. They decided that psychology would no longer study the psyche—the conscious mind, soul, or spirit. That was a strange decision, and a mystery, because the word psychology literally means “the study of the psyche.” Why did this happen?

Transcript

Part H – A Crippling Misstep 

This Episode of Healing Psychology is a reading of Chapter Seven of my upcoming book, Re-imagining Psychology.

Copyright © Thomas O. Whitehead, 2022   All rights reserved

[Introduction]

Welcome to Part H of the multi-part series, Healing Psychology. The title of this episode is “A Crippling Misstep.” Previous episodes highlight psychology’s failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. The failure can be traced to a single source—psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. But how did it get disconnected?

Here's how: A century ago, influential theorists made a dreadful blunder. They decided that psychology would no longer study the psyche—the conscious mind, soul, or spirit. That was a strange decision, because the word psychology literally means “the study of the psyche.” Nevertheless, said these theorists, the new focus of study would be behavior, because behavior was something they could measure with precision. Suddenly, it was taboo to even mention subjective experience, the conscious mind. The taboo screwed everything up, because experience is the true link between psychology and biology. With no connection to the other sciences, psychology became an orphan.

Many of the ideas in this episode aren’t mainstream psychology. But you’re invited to listen … anyway.

[Reading]

• One of my obsessions is this historical puzzle: Why did perfectly good science get lost after 1900? In the 19th century psychology was preoccupied with consciousness, and later on, around 1900, 1910, it suddenly switched to behaviorism which involved radical rejection of everything that common-sensically we believe to be true, and which in fact is true. [1]

- Bernard Baars

Since the early 1900s behavioral scientists have through careful research accumulated detailed principles of learning. This technical know-how enables the manipulation and control of behavior. This practical information has proved widely useful. But it’s a “good news / bad news” kind of story. 

The good news is that researchers committed to the systematic, detailed study of animal behavior, and to precise documentation of their observations. They reasoned that by restricting their attention only to things they could objectively quantify (measurable stimuli and overt acts) they could turn psychology into a mature science—a “hard” science like physics or chemistry. And it is true that an important part of any mature science is systematic, accurate measurement of what’s under study. [2]

Now for the bad news. And it’s really bad. In their rush to transform psychology into a precise science, the most influential of the theorists decided to ignore everything that they could not precisely measure. One thing they couldn’t measure exactly was subjective experience. So, they pretended that, as far as science is concerned, animals don’t have any experiences. In fact, they made it taboo to even mention subjective experience—such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion. [3]

Where before psychology had been “the study of mind,” it now became “the study of behavior.” This was the birth of the movement called behaviorism. Quite unfortunately, these theorists redefined the science of psychology in a way that crippled it. In casting aside subjective experiences they had thrown away the very thing that would have made psychology an actual science. Their mistake had, and continues to have, a profoundly negative impact on our ability to understand animal behavior—including our own. 

The behaviorists saw themselves as carefully controlling a stimulus and carefully measuring the animal’s response to that stimulus. They were looking to assemble “laws of learning” linking specific stimuli to specific responses. But in dismissing animals’ subjective perceptions, they discarded the actual link between stimulus and response. The behaviorists had tossed the baby out with the bathwater! Without that “baby” they would never be able to explain learning in a way that qualifies as true science.

Here’s the problem: the behaviorists tried to build their science on a flawed foundation. They assumed that animals’ responses are determined by objectively measurable stimuli. But that’s not even remotely true. What actually guides behavior is not the stimulus itself, but the animal’s subjective, drive-based interpretation of the stimulus. And all that an animal perceives, and all that it does, is shaped by its evolved drives, part of its biology.

An animal’s drives, unique to each species, reflect its natural ways of making a living in the world. And those drives are expressed through the animal’s subjective experience, which the behaviorists had decided to ignore. Shooting for precision, they shot themselves precisely in the foot. We are still suffering from the aftershocks of this dreadful misstep. 

I am dwelling upon the behaviorists’ unfortunate error because it was a true catastrophe for psychology. It led to a woefully flawed grasp of habit development. That flaw persists even now, limiting theorists’ ability to account for addictions and other diseased habits. 

The behaviorists produced admirably precise documentation of their experiments. And anyone who examines their records will learn that they witnessed, over and over and over, the emergence of strange, self-perpetuating patterns in the behavior of their experimental animals. But because they were shutting their eyes to anything they couldn’t measure, they weren’t able to see what was right in front of them. And addiction-like behavior appeared regularly, right in front of them.

It’s folly to mistake willful blindness for science. How could such a preposterous thing happen? The answer to that question is unsettling, and requires historical context. So, in the next few pages I will detail what some see as a perverse twist in the history of psychology, [4] one that today’s conventional wisdom largely ignores. 

The word psychology

The word “psychology” literally means the study of the psyche, or mind (or soul). Psychologist Robert Woodworth, very influential in the pre-behaviorist era of the early 1900s, wrote

• Modern psychology is an attempt to bring the methods of scientific investigation, which have proved immensely fruitful in other fields, to bear upon mental life and its problems... Psychology, then, is a science. It is the science of—what shall we say? “The science of the soul”—that is what the name means by derivation and ancient usage. “The science of the mind” has a more modern sound. “The science of consciousness” is more modern still. “The science of behavior” is the most recent attempt at a concise formula. [5]

Around 1900 most psychologists were working to deepen their understanding of the psyche, the mind and its functioning. True to the literal meaning of the word psychology, these scientists were keenly interested in building a science of consciousness, perception, and mental life. They were actively studying those things. Naturally, much of their research used human subjects—because humans are the only beings that can verbally report their conscious experience.

Some researchers were working with animals, though. At that time, what motivated many of them was a longing to understand the experience of animals. They were interested in the minds of animals. It was commonly believed there is a continuity between human and animal awareness. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that they were on the right track—moving toward an understanding of animal experience, and the role of that experience in turning their inherited drives into individual habits. These early researchers devised some ingenious experiments to cast light on how animals perceive and experience things. 

Russian Ivan Pavlov was one of the first researchers to systematically study habit development in animals. Today’s psychologists associate Pavlov’s work with that of the strict behaviorists. But in truth, manipulating animal behavior was not the driving force behind his research. Rather, he was trying to gain an understanding of mind, awareness—a goal in complete alignment with the literal meaning of psychology. He undertook his research on conditioned responses to increase his understanding of conscious experience, both in humans and in animals. 

Pavlov was not a very pleasant person. He had an abusive upbringing, and it showed. As Woodworth puts it, Pavlov was “a volatile child, a difficult student, and, frequently, a nasty adult. For decades, his lab staff knew to stay away, if at all possible, on his ‘angry days,’ and there were many.” [6] 

Pavlov was nevertheless genuinely interested in understanding awareness. [7] And he felt that science could approach that goal through careful experiments with animals. He assumed that animals’ conscious experience was not much different from our own. “That which I see in dogs,” he told a journalist, “I immediately transfer to myself, since, you know, the basics are identical.” [8]

Pavlov believed that his serious scientific work could open a window into the way animals perceive the world. He reasoned, for example, that if a dog could learn to respond differently to differently colors, then we could be absolutely certain dogs perceive the world in color. Author H.G. Wells visited Pavlov in his Russian laboratory, and reported he was “carrying on research of astonishing scope and ingenuity on the mentality of animals.” [9]

In 1904 Pavlov received the Nobel Prize in recognition of his contribution to physiology.[10] His acceptance speech speaks of his obsession with the mystery of conscious experience. He was convinced he had found a scientific way to study animal awareness. His speech reads, 

• Essentially, only one thing in life is of real interest to us—our psychical experience... Its mechanism, however, was and still is shrouded in profound obscurity. All human resources—art, religion, literature, philosophy, and the historical sciences—all have joined in the attempt to throw light upon this darkness. But humanity has at its disposal yet another powerful resource—natural science with its strict objective methods. [11]

He later became aware that the behaviorists saw his methods as a way to discount the reality of inner experience. He wrote, “It would be stupid to reject the subjective world. Our actions, all forms of social and personal life are formed on this basis… The question is how to analyze this subjective world.” [12] 

Given his own words, it could not be any clearer that Pavlov was working to resolve the mystery of the psyche—the very thing the behaviorists were absolutely determined to ignore. And yet, in a curious distortion of history, psychologists continue to cite his meticulous work as an early example of behaviorist psychology. What’s the reason for this strange bias? I’ll provide my interpretation a little later.

Another fan of animal awareness was trailblazing behavioral scientist Edward L. Thorndike, who achieved fame in the late 1800s for his careful research on animal behavior. Thorndike, a classmate of Robert Woodworth, was one of the first to speak clearly about the way animals assemble their habits. Thorndike postulated what he called the Law of Effect. 

Here’s Thorndike’s Law: “Behaviors that are followed by a satisfying state of affairs tend to be repeated, and those that produce an unpleasant state of affairs are less likely to be repeated.” [13] The words “satisfying” and “unpleasant” reflect Thorndike’s confidence that an animal’s subjective experience plays a critical role in the development of its habits. 

In the evolutionary terms I am using, the animal’s experience of satisfaction is the mechanism through which animals select variants of their developing habits. The selected variants, the ones most subjectively satisfying, persist to be repeated, retained for further refinement.

Thorndike’s Law was a brilliant way of explaining habit acquisition and refinement without assuming the animal had much reasoning capability. The animal’s positive or negative feelings were the key. Those experiences are value judgments that guide the selection of habit variants. The Law of Effect shows how habits can be sharpened automatically, based upon animals’ natural drives, without the animal’s needing to know how its behavior works to fulfill its drives. 

Is this important? Very important indeed. Because the Law of Effect naturally and logically extends natural selection—biology’s most important principle—into individual behavior. As we know, natural selection creates the bodies of animals without any thought or planning. Thorndike’s Law allows us to see that animals’ complex behaviors can arise in a similar way, without any thought or planning whatsoever. His Law of Effect was the foundation of much early behavioral science. 

Evolution has equipped animals with instinctive drives inherited by all members of their species. The drives contain all that is needed for an individual animal to intuit which variants of its drive-based habits will most satisfactorily fill its needs in the here and now. Evaluation criteria built into the drive itself dictate animals’ subjective experience of the value of their habits. Evolution by natural selection builds the capacity for valuation into their drives, just as evolution creates the more rigid behaviors we label “instinctual.” 

Like Pavlov, Thorndike was working to open a window into the mentality of animals. In Thorndike’s own words, he wanted to “not only tell more accurately what they do, and give the much-needed information how they do it, but also inform us what they feel while they act.” [14] His desire to cast light on animals’ subjective experience, their awareness and its role in habit development, was entirely in keeping with the interests of the psychologists of his time. Thorndike was on a path toward the extension of biological principles into mental life. In formulating his Law, he had taken a critical step toward this goal.

Off the track

Around 1900 a brilliant insight was hanging in the air—the extension of the principle of natural selection into behavioral science. [15] That deeper understanding was on the horizon, and the path toward it was clear. Suddenly, though, something strange and completely unexpected happened. Psychological science abruptly jumped off that path. 

In the early 1900s certain theorists began to express frustration with psychology’s preoccupation with conscious experience, whether it was the experience of laboratory animals or of human beings. These ambitious people said they wanted to upgrade the status of psychology to that of a more mature science—one like physics. Further, they insisted that those mature sciences had achieved their success by restricting themselves to objective measurements. [16]

This new breed of psychologists pointed out a problem with the study of experience. All such study involved introspection—examining and reporting one’s own awareness. Introspection is the practice of “looking within” one’s personal experience in a disciplined manner. It is a subjective method. The dissident scientists argued that introspection lacked the precision needed for the rigorous scientific work they envisioned. For one thing, they couldn’t use it with animals. [17]

Certain American psychologists forcefully argued that the time had come for psychology to abandon its obsession with consciousness, and to re-create itself in terms of what was directly observable—behavior. In 1913 animal researcher John B. Watson published an influential manifesto pressing this point. He wrote, 

• Either psychology must change its viewpoint so as to take in facts of behavior, whether or not they have bearings upon the problems of “consciousness”; or else behavior must stand alone as a wholly separate and independent science… I believe we can write a psychology… [and] never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like… It can be done in terms of stimulus and response, in terms of habit formation, habit integrations and the like… What we need to do is to start work upon psychology, making behavior, not consciousness, the objective point of our attack. Certainly there are enough problems in the control of behavior to keep us all working many lifetimes without ever allowing us time to think of consciousness an sich. [18]

In this and other papers Watson argued that adopting objective methods would free psychology to blossom into a “real” science. Over the next few decades, a great many American psychologists heeded Watson’s call. Behavior, rather than mind, became the focus of their studies. The researchers in this camp were called “behaviorists,” and their brand of psychology “behaviorism.” [19] They conducted tens of thousands of experiments on learning, striving to tease out abstract relationships between objective “stimuli” and measurable “responses.” 

Watson and his fellow behaviorists proclaimed that the measurement of observables was psychology’s ticket to success. So, they strictly prohibited any reference to the unmeasurable experience of their experimental animals. Because behaviorists wanted to conceive learning in terms of things they could objectively measure, they rejected Thorndike’s feeling-based model of learning. They re-defined reinforcement and punishment. A reinforcer was now “any stimulus or event that functions to increase the likelihood of the behavior that led to it.” And a punisher was now “any stimulus or event that functions to decrease the likelihood of the behavior that led to it.” [20]

These new definitions were accepted and popularized despite the fact that they don’t explain anything at all. What’s a reinforcer? Something that reinforces. And why does it reinforce? Because it is a reinforcer. This kind of circular definition is called a tautology. It’s a shell with nothing inside. The content is missing because reference to the actual mechanism of reinforcement, which is the animal’s subjective experience of value, had been declared off limits.

A culture of cruelty

Over the next few decades, the behaviorists’ devaluation of experience fostered a culture that de-legitimized any reference to subjective experience, portraying it as unscientific. Significantly, fierce criticism was directed toward those who dared violate the new taboo on awareness. Suddenly psychologists could no longer speak of awareness, even human awareness, without imperiling themselves professionally. This had the effect of making awareness seem somehow unreal.

As contemporary psychologist Charles Spearman wryly commented,

• There have come down wolf-like on the psychological fold the already mentioned behaviorists. The most extreme of these would deny to man the power of observing his own consciousness at all; and on the radical ground that, in truth, no such consciousness is known to exist! [21]

In their history of psychology, authors Daniel Schacter et al say 

• For almost two decades, psychologists dismissed the problem of the mind as an intractable fairy tale that could not be studied scientifically…. By and large, psychologists happily ignored mental processes until the 1950s… [22] 

During this period one distinguished behavioral researcher dared to publish a book entitled The Animal Mind. [23] The book reviewed what science knew about perception, learning, and memory in different animal species. The author supported the notion that non-human animals do have conscious mental experience. Watson publicly repudiated that claim “with venom.” [24] Says consciousness theorist Bernard Baars, “As a result, psychologists avoided consciousness for most of the twentieth century. The central topic in psychological science became taboo. Those with serious interest in it risked professional suicide.” [25]

Watson’s public attack pressured psychologists to adhere to the newly established norms. To be seen as “professionals,” they had to relinquish any curiosity about the experience of the animals they studied. Pioneers like Pavlov and Thorndike had been motivated by their assumption that the animals they studied possessed awareness comparable to that of humans. That assumption was specifically attacked, and forcefully discredited. 

In retrospect, we might have predicted that aggressively dismissing any concern for animal experience would lead researchers to de-emphasize the agony they often created through their experiments. [26] Across the board, behavioral scientists gradually lost interest in the subject of feelings—even where the suffering was obvious. [27] Their disregard became disdain, leading to the emergence of a culture in which abuse of experimental animals was commonplace. Some experiments performed during the reign of behaviorism were alarmingly cruel. 

This mindset persists. At present, researchers experiment upon 400 million animals each year. Ethicist Bernard Rollin called experimental psychology the enterprise most consistently guilty of mindlessly causing great suffering. [28] According to the International Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals, “Countless animals have been surgically dismembered, drugged, starved, fatigued, frozen, electrically shocked… maddened and killed in the belief that their behavior, closely observed, would cast light on the nature of humankind.” [29]

The runaway culture of cruelty did indeed cast light on humankind, but that light illuminated something disturbing. As a group, the behaviorists fell into a stereotypic, unhealthy pattern of repetitively abusive behavior that would never have been sustainable without a distortion in their perception of what they were doing. One could even say that, as a group, behaviorists became enmeshed in a culturally supported, addiction-like process. In a later chapter we will cover such malignant cultural patterns in some detail. 

The New England Anti-Vivisection Society (NEAVS) makes note of the obvious cruelty of experiments that were conceived and executed without consideration of animal experience.

• To study behaviors and experiences, psychology research typically requires animals to be conscious and aware, and as such may be considered the cruelest of animal experiments due to the high degree of pain and suffering involved. Animals can remain in distress for a long length of time, since they are often subjected to invasive procedures that they must then recover from in order for their behaviors and experiences to be studied in relation to the resulting “injury.”… For example, cats have been used in research on visual deprivation, physiology of color vision, and sleep deprivation. Past NEAVS investigations of Boston University and Harvard University revealed federally funded studies, many lasting over five years, involving kittens and older cats given brain damage, surgical alterations, such as having their eyes sewn shut, esophagal inflammation, and the implantation of electrodes in their eyes, brain, and muscles. Researchers have used dogs for depression and learned helplessness; they were placed in a cage with electrified floor bars and made to suffer extreme, repeated, and inescapable electric shocks. This resulted in the dogs experiencing fear and hopeless depression of psychotic proportion… [30]

Scientists’ lasting disregard for the misery of their experimental animals extends to the often-deplorable conditions under which they are housed and maintained—something that cannot be defended with the argument that “science demands sacrifice.”

• Animals in labs suffer not only pain from protocols, but also severe stress from day-to-day laboratory life. They spend their lives in barren cages, unable to make choices or express natural behaviors. Most never experience fresh air or sunshine, only bars and concrete. Those few facilities that provide some outside caging typically rotate the animals, giving them limited and infrequent amounts of time outdoors. Standard lab conditions, such as small, crowded cages, lack of enrichment, loud noises, and bright lights out of sync with natural lighting are all known to create stress in animals who in turn show physical symptoms of distress, including chronic inflammatory conditions. Studies show that mice are capable of empathy and become even more stressed when witnessing other mice in distress. Other research documents the long-lasting effects on chimpanzees from the stress and trauma of living in a lab and being used in research and testing. [31]

In the end, behavioral researchers accepted—and even applauded—acts of callous cruelty for which common pet owners could be criminally charged. Although scientists rationalize their creation of suffering as essential for the advancement of science, it is abundantly clear that the argument is bankrupt. 

A magical flavor

The disregard of feelings is but one part of a remarkable distortion in the thinking of behavioral scientists. If the only tool you have is distorted reasoning, it’s hard to recognize that your own reasoning is distorted. In the heyday of behaviorism, the prevailing theories described how a stimulus (S) became linked to a response (R) through reinforcement to create a learned habit (S-R). [32] In this famous formula we’ve got a stimulus and a response. But the formula defies logic, because the responding animal itself has been edited completely out of the picture. 

I’ll use a football metaphor to comment on the bizarre quality of this development. In American football, the quarterback is at the center of every play, just as an animal is at the center of every behavior. Suppose, though, that the sports commentators despise quarterbacks. In their game coverage, they refuse to even mention the quarterbacks. Instead, they describe the football sailing through the air here and there of its own accord! Ridiculous.

What were the theorists thinking when they settled on the S-R formula? It’s hard to see how a stimulus—no matter how clearly and objectively defined—could link itself directly to a response. Acts don’t sail through the air without an actor. The causal chain simply must include the animal that’s doing the behaving. A direct S-R link would require … well, some kind of magic. 

Magical thinking isn’t science. Heavily invested in their misconceptions, though, the behaviorists simply declined to deal with the specifics of the animals they studied, or their unmeasurable experience. At the time, a science flavored with sprinkles of magic was more appetizing than one that tasted anything like awareness. 

Behaviorists’ determined and seemingly inexplicable attempt to remove the psyche from psychology left more traditional theorists slack-jawed. Woodworth, for example, acknowledged that “behavior psychology” was a legitimate area of study. But he protested that it was only “a part of the subject and not the whole.” [33] In his widely used textbook, he quotes a joke circulating among contemporary non-behaviorists:  “First psychology lost its soul, then it lost its mind, then it lost consciousness…” [34]

Woodworth proposed that if behaviorists were determined to reduce learning to some simplistic formula, the formula should be “S-O-R,” not “S-R.” The central “O” would stand for all the organismic variables—the things specific to a particular animal of a particular species, the things our common sense tells us are the true and actual link between stimulus and response. [35]

It’s pretty clear that the more traditional psychologists of that era saw the behaviorist movement as whacko. And that brings us back to the truly important question: Why did this craziness appear? Was it a coincidence that the distorted perception and illogic of the behavioral movement arose at exactly the point in history that evolutionary concepts had begun to spread into the domain of psychology? 

There’s reason not to dismiss the timing as coincidental. Pathological processes are known to have been flourishing within the culture at that time. And the evolutionary concepts that were just beginning to color psychology were a threat to these pathological processes. As we have noted, disease processes respond to threat with resistance, mindlessly and automatically. [36] More on this in later chapters. 

Despite their illogical logic, there was really no stopping the behaviorists. They dominated American psychology from the 1930s to the 1950s. In the fullness of time, though, some of Watson’s younger followers decided they could no longer ignore the cracks in the foundation of the S-R model of habit acquisition. Schacter et al say,

• The strict prohibition against the mention of internal states made certain phenomena difficult to explain. For example, if all behavior is a response to an external stimulus, then why does a rat that is sitting still in its cage at 9 AM start wandering around and looking for food by noon? Nothing in the cage has changed, so why has the rat’s behavior changed? … Because the right answer obviously had something to do with internal states and because Watson had forbidden behaviorists to talk about internal states, his younger followers—the “new behaviorists”—had to use code words. The code word chosen by their leader B.F. Skinner was drive. [37]

The new behaviorists began to explain animals’ acts in terms of drive reduction rather than as simple responses to stimuli. [38] Still feeling the need to tippy-toe around any mention of experience, though, they had to be careful how they worded their explanations. 

Using the notion of drives, the new behaviorists were able to avoid reference to subjective experiences, feelings of “hunger” and “thirst,” for example. Instead, they held that depriving the animal of food or water, something that could be objectively described, “activated their drives.”  They could starve a pigeon until it was down to a measurable 80 percent of its normal weight. At that point they could define its hunger drive as “active” without using any of the taboo feeling words. This way, they could back-door the pigeon’s hunger into the picture without any tasteless references to the animal’s experience. 

An unbreachable gap

This kind of double-speak was confusing, of course. And it was ultimately self-defeating. We can credit behaviorists’ research with clarifying some important things about learning. But the exclusive focus on measurables did not make psychology into a hard science. In fact, it prevented it from becoming a science at all. 

For some years, in an impressive display of cognitive distortion, self-deception, and denial, researchers managed to blind themselves to the central role of animal experience in habit formation. Strict behaviorists seemed to actually believe they had eliminated the psyche from psychology, when all they were really doing was keeping their eyes shut. But all their evasion, distraction, and logical tap-dancing could not remove experience from its central position in the causal loop.

If somebody is spending too much money, he might try using a credit card instead of cash. He might fool himself into believing he had a solution—until the bills come in. Substituting a card for paper money is pointless because it doesn’t really address the problem. The behaviorists fooled themselves in a similar way. They pretended that avoiding experience words got rid of experience. It didn’t work. 

Ignoring animal experience just created an awkward, unbreachable gap in learning theory. Behaviorists could find nothing to replace the experiential link between stimulus and response. Soldiering on, though, they kept meticulously counting and recording behaviors. They developed effective ways to manipulate behavior, and polished their methods into to a fine art. But they were never able to explain why their methods worked. That kind of thing isn’t science. It’s a textbook example of technology.

There’s a difference between technology and science. One way of thinking about that difference is that “science is about knowing, but technology is about doing.” [39] To illustrate, around 500 AD sword-makers in the near east began producing “Damascus steel” blades, beautiful weapons of remarkable toughness. They developed their technology to a high art, achieving sublime results that even today have not been entirely replicated. [40] The blades they produced were exquisite. But the sword-makers’ methods were based on their practical experience, not a scientific understanding of the metals with which they worked. Though remarkable, admirable, their knowledge and their methods were technology, not science. 

Likewise, psychology’s research-based assembly of behavior control methods is about doing, rather than knowing. These methods are both valid and highly useful. But as doing, not knowing, this body of methods is better classified as technology, not the science it is commonly claimed to be. 

Unable to cobble together a credible theory of learning, B.F. Skinner rationalized that psychology was probably better off without one. He proposed that psychology could make genuine progress with no theory of learning whatsoever. Skinner remarked that

• Theories are fun. But it is possible that the most rapid progress toward an understanding of learning may be made by research which is not designed to test theories... An acceptable scientific program is to collect data of this sort and to relate them to manipulable variables, selected for study through a common-sense exploration of the field. [41]

Real science without real understanding? No. The program of research that Skinner describes is a sad commentary on a broken dream. According to psychologist John C. Malone, after the 1950s theorists increasingly rebelled against the behaviorist view of habit formation, coming to regard it as a cartoonish caricature of science.

• Rebellions against the gross deficiencies of the “habit caricature” began in the 1960s. On the one hand, its neglect of species-specific behavior spawned the “biological boundaries” movement…This was followed by a flurry of activity extending into the 1980s by workers studying taste aversions, auto shaping, language, and other phenomenon that did not seem to conform to “laws” associated with the caricature… [42]

The dumpster baby

Psychology had begun as the study of mind, of conscious experience. Then, proclaiming a need to make it more scientific, behaviorists had cut out and discarded the very heart of their enterprise. That’s like a father deciding he will become the best parent ever—if he can just get rid of that damn baby. Subjective experience’s central role in learning was one of several babies behaviorists pitched into the dumpster. Abandoning the proper focus of psychology turned it into a mostly empty endeavor. 

Limping along for decades without a heart, psychology wasn’t totally dead. But it wasn’t really alive either. Unsurprisingly, this lumbering “undead” movement did not deliver on its promise of greatness. Somehow the approach that Watson had argued was the ticket to “real science” had disintegrated into mindlessly accumulating data. 

Behavior theorist Kent Berridge provides some thoughtful commentary on the failure of behaviorist psychology.

• The Skinnerian hope turned out to be unfulfilled. Very few new principles of use were produced by behaviorist studies over the next 50 years… And as Skinner himself acknowledged, the radical behaviorist concept of reinforcement offered nothing at all for understanding the “why” of reward’s effect on behavior. It had no theory and no explanatory power.[43]

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious what ran the train off the tracks. The taboo on subjective experience is what moved understanding beyond theorists’ reach. The decision to focus only on measurables was misguided for many reasons. Here are three of them:

(1) From the very beginning, the rationale for putting on the blinders was all wrong. Contrary to John Watson’s assertion, none of the mature sciences had achieved their august status by ignoring everything but observables. Theories and unmeasurable constructs had been essential to the development of each of those more mature sciences. John Watson had led his fellow psychologists astray with his misguided view.

(2) Behaviorists assumed that ignoring subjective experience would somehow get rid of it. Ridiculous. If there’s a boogie man in your bedroom, pulling the covers over your head won’t make it go away. No matter how precisely experimenters controlled “the stimulus,” there could be no assurance that a lab rat would experience that stimulus consistently. Written in invisible ink between the lines of every behavioral formulation is the central role of subjective interpretation. 

George Graham summarized this flaw in the behavioral approach this way:

• One defining aspiration of traditional behaviorism is that it tried to free psychology from having to theorize about how animals and persons represent (internally, in the head) their environment… Unfortunately, for behaviorism, it’s hard to imagine a more restrictive rule for psychology than one which prohibits hypotheses about representational storage and processing. [44]

(3) One of the reasons the behaviorists were attracted to “objective measurement” was their desire to join the “real science” club. Unfortunately, ignoring animal experience had exactly the opposite effect, cutting them off from the mature sciences. Why? Because animal drives, and their manifestation through subjective experience, are psychology’s most intimate connection to biology. And it is through biology that psychology relates to all the other sciences. 

A behaviorist hangover

Schacter et al say that “Although behaviorism allowed psychologists to measure, predict, and control behavior, it did this by ignoring some important things.”[45] Among those important things were the very mental processes that had given psychology its name, evolved adaptations specific to the animals whose behavior they were trying to model. By the mid-1950s it was clear that without these important things, behaviorist theory would not be able to explain learning, and would have to be replaced with theory that took them into account. 

Before behaviorism took over, several theorists had been focusing on those important things. E.L. Thorndike, with his Law of Effect, had laid the groundwork for using evolution by natural selection to explain habit formation. With the fall of behaviorism, psychology was at last free to pick up where Thorndike left off. At long last, psychology was free to move beyond mere technology to actual science, from merely manipulating animal behavior to actually understanding it. 

Did that happen? No. In a development that should by all rights boggle the mind of any clear-thinking psychologist, theorists suddenly and inexplicably lost interest in explaining learning—something that they had for decades considered the centerpiece of psychology—and simply moved on to other things. Social psychologists Verplanken and Aarts put it this way:

• Habit and habit formation have been central topics in the behaviourist tradition … However, together with the decline of this tradition, and the upcoming interest in cognitive processes, habit also disappeared from the research agenda. [46]

Incredible! The psychological community had for decades been absolutely obsessed with building a scientific model of habit acquisition. So, their abrupt loss of interest seems pretty darn strange. But there’s something even stranger. Psychology began to act as if all the mysteries surrounding habit formation had been resolved (they hadn’t), and learning was now well understood (it wasn’t). The manipulation of habits remains a technology even now, though it is presented as science. [47]

In the post-behaviorist era, psychology productively embraced multiple theoretical perspectives and areas of interest. Cognitive psychology is one of them. That’s the study of mental processes including perception, thought, memory, and reasoning. [48] Cognitive neuroscience explores the links between cognitive processes and brain activity using such methods as functional magnetic resonance imagery. Evolutionary psychology explores how mind and behavior have been impacted by the results of natural selection.

Despite the value of these trends, today’s psychology still doesn’t comprehend habits. We can understand this as a sort of “hangover” from the days of indulgence in behaviorist thought. Learning wasn’t adequately explained then, and still hasn’t. That void in our understanding is much like the “blind spot” on our retinas. We aren’t even aware that the blind spot is there unless we do something that makes it obvious. 

Unfortunately, the blind spot in our psychology has consequences. Our failure of understanding makes us vulnerable to destructive behavioral dysfunctions, and prevents us from taking corrective action when they appear. If there were no blind spot, we could embrace psychology’s intimate connection to biology. And that would empower us to understand, and more effectively control, addictions and similar disorders.

Re-connecting with biology

How, exactly, would a connection with biology empower us? Readily available within biology are the very concepts that are missing from our currently psychology. These items can easily be transferred. Here are a few of those missing ways of thinking.

• Natural selection

Within biology, natural selection is the mechanism that shapes the development of all biological forms, including the drives we instantiate as our individual habits.

Within the realm of psychology, a process equivalent to natural selection is the mechanism through which we acquire and refine our learned habits. 

• The self 

Within biology, the self is like an inventory of all the parts of a living organism. This inventory allows the organism to distinguish itself from everything else. The distinction allows it to support activity essential for its life, and to protect itself from threats to its life and health. Over its lifetime, each higher animal further develops its inherited self into an individual self.

Within the realm of psychology, the responsibility of the individual self extends into governance of its behavior. The animal’s psychological self allows it to distinguish good habits from bad, and to reject habits that would bring it harm. 

• Immunity

Within biology, immunity is the active arm of the self. Every living thing must be able to protect itself from disease, so every living thing naturally evolves immunity. More advanced animals not only inherit basic immunity, but the ability to develop individual immunities during their lifetimes.

Within the realm of psychology, every higher animal protects itself from behavioral diseases with a form of behavioral immunity. Focal awareness is what serves as its behavioral immunity. Using their awareness, individual humans are able to develop insights that protect them from their own malignant habits.

• Parasitic disease

Within biology, parasites are so common that they vastly outnumber non-parasites. An organism’s immune system must protect it against external parasites such as harmful viruses and bacteria. But it must also protect against parasites that arise from within, forms such as cancers. Whether internal or external, every parasite is under selection pressure to discover ways to disable its host’s immunity.

Within the realm of psychology, behavioral immunity is tasked with protecting against maladaptive behaviors—destructive, self-reproducing habits. Like biological parasites, parasitic habits are under pressure to evolve the ability to disable immunity. Since focal awareness plays the role of behavioral immunity, disabling immunity means interfering with our ability to sustain awareness of the parasitic form.

There are other ideas in biology that its daughter science psychology could adapt with immediate benefit. Why, we must ask, have psychological theorists not eagerly accepted them? This question brings us back to where we began this chapter—Bernard Baars’ recognition that there’s something odd about the sudden intrusion of behaviorism into psychology. Baars says,

• A harsh critic might see the twentieth century as a time of lost opportunities. Psychologists could have built on the magnificent foundation of James’s Principles (1890/1983)—by wide consent the greatest psychological work in English. Instead, they chose to evade some of the most fundamental aspects of human existence. Today we are rediscovering the lost fundamentals. As the sciences of mind and brain come back to their natural subject matter, it will be important to set the historical record straight.

In my view, the rise of behaviorism can’t be justified or explained with logic, any more than the alcoholic’s denial and distorted perception can be justified or explained with logic. The distortion is best understood as the disease pattern’s automatic resistance to correction.

Just before we sank into behaviorism, James and others were transferring the idea of natural selection from biology into psychology. Behaviorists scurried away from James’ psychology, I believe, because it poses a distinct threat to pathological patterns running rampant through our social milieu. His psychology enables recognition of pathological habits, parasitic habits. And disease processes always respond to threats with resistance.

Summary

·    This chapter documents a momentous error made over a century ago by behavioral scientists—a decision to ignore the role of conscious experience in animal learning. 

·    Understanding their error is important, because it severed behavioral science’s connection to biology.

·    Without the deeper understanding that only a connection to biology can provide, the study of behavior was limited to technology, ensuring that it could not mature into science.

·    Until normal habit development can be understood as adaptation, comparable to biological adaptation, theorists won’t understand how a habit can escape control, becoming a self-reproducing behavior such as an addiction.

·    The rise of behaviorism, with its dismissal of subjective experience, came at a time when visionary theorists like William James were extending the principle of natural se lection into psychology. James’ psychology posed a threat to disease processes rampant in our cultural milieu, prompting an abrupt disconnect from biology.

·    Re-connecting to biology would let psychology use powerful biological ideas—concepts including natural selection, the self, immunity, and parasitic disease—to finally make sense of addictions and other baffling psychological phenomena.

[Post Episode]

Thank you for your interest in this episode, Healing Psychology Part H – A Crippling Misstep. The Healing Psychology series will continue with readings of additional chapters of the book. The title of the next part is, “Runaway Habits.” There we’ll take a closer look at habits that escape control, becoming self-reproducing rogues. Additional information is available on the website, Whiteheadbooks dot com. 

Please join us!

[Music Credits]

“Broken Science” – 
Written and arranged by Tom Whitehead. 
Guitar – Tom Whitehead. 
Piano and drums – Angel. 
Chorale – Picnic Impromptu Jazz Singers.

“Mystic River Stomp” – 
Written by Tom Whitehead. 
Guitar – Tom Whitehead. 
Drums – Angel.

[References and notes]

[1] Baars BJ, 1997. Page 19.
[2] Wallace B, Fisher LE. Consciousness and Behavior (4th Edition). Allyn and Bacon, 1999. Pages 1-2.
[3] Baars BJ. I.P. Pavlov and the Freedom Reflex. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2003, 10, 11, 19–40. Page 24.
[4] Eg. [Baars BJ, 1997. Page 19.] I will suggest an explanation for this divergence in a later chapter of this book.
[5] Woodworth RS, 1921. Kindle locations 395-398.
[6] Specter M. Drool: Ivan Pavlov's real quest (a book review). New Yorker, November 14, 2014. Available online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/drool
[7] There's reason to think that a large part of Pavlov's interest in addressing the riddle of consciousness came from his desire to come to grips with his own tortured experience. He himself referred to “consciousness and its torments.” [Specter M, 2014]
[8] Specter M, 2014.
[9] Morgulis S. Professor Pavlov (a letter to the editor). Science, 1921, 53, 1360. Page 74.
[10] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1904/pavlov/biographical/
[11] Specter M, 2014.
[12] Specter M, 2014. See also [Ivan Pavlov sought a grand theory of the mind, not drooling dogs. New York Times, published 12/23/2014. Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/science/ivan-pavlov-sought-a-grand-theory-of-the-mind-not-drooling-dogs.html]
[13] Schacter et al, 2009, page 225.
[14] Thorndike EL. Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals. New York, Macmillan Company, 1898. Page 1126.
[15] The thinking of the great psychologist William James was inspired in part by the ideas in Darwin’s 1859 book Origin of Species, newly published at that time. James reasoned that “mental abilities must have evolved because they were adaptive – that is, because they helped people solve problems and increased their chances of survival.” [Schacter et al, 2009, page 10]
[16] This element of the behaviorist argument is completely untrue. No science advances without theory concerning what lies behind observed facts.
[17] A strange conclusion, given that Pavlov had at that  time just demonstrated that his methods permit precise research on the mentality of animals.
[18] Watson JB. Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 1913, 20, 158-177.
[19] Watson himself coined the terms “behaviorist” and “behaviorism” in papers published in 1913 and 1914. Source: [Schneider SM, Morris EK. The history of the term Radical Behaviorism: From Watson to Skinner. The Behavior Analyst. 1987, 10, 27-39. Page 28.]
[20] Schacter et al, 2009, Page 226.
[21] Spearman C. Psychology Down the Ages (volume 1). Macmillan, London, 1937. Page 79.
[22] Schacter DL, Gilbert DT, Wegner DM. Psychology. Worth Publishers, 2009. Page 21.
[23] This book was authored by Margaret Floy Washburn, the first female PhD psychologist. [Schacter et al, 2009. Page 18.]
[24] Schacter et al, 2009. Page 18.
[25] Baars BJ. The Double Life of B.F. Skinner: Inner Conflict, Dissociation and the Scientific Taboo against Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2003, 10, 1, 5-25. Page 9. Available online at http://bernardbaars.pbworks.com/f/Double+Life+Skinner+JCS.pdf
[26] Watson himself led the way with experiments involving callous disregard for the suffering of his own experimental animals. Some of these abhorrent experiments will be described toward the end of this book. Watson was in this sense a trailblazer for our present culture of cruelty.
[27] Salzen EA. On the nature of emotion. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 1991, 05, 2, 47-88. Page 47.
[28] Rollin BE. Animal Rights and Human Morality. Prometheus Books (3rd edition), 2006.
[29] International Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals (IAAPEA). Psychological and Behavioral Animal Experiments and Research Testing. Online article available at www.iaapea/psychological_experiments.php.
[30] New England Anti-Vivisection Society (NEAVS). Animals in Science/Research. 2017. Article available online at http://neavs/research/cbt.
[31] NEAVS, 2017.
[32] The term “S-R psychology” as commonly used is synonymous with “behaviorism.” The online resource Psychology Dictionary notes that "S-R psychology deals with behaviour and not cognition." https://psychologydictionary.org/s-r-psychology/
[33] Woodworth RS 1921. Kindle location 395.
[34] Woodworth RS 1921. Kindle location 395.
[35] The S-O-R formula reflects the viewpoint of “Functional Psychology.” Functionalism is a philosophy that interprets consciousness and behavior as part of an active adaptation to the environment. The functionalists retained an emphasis on conscious experience. The American psychologist William James is regarded as the founder of functional psychology. James M. Cattell, Edward L. Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth were among a group at Colombia University that studied under James.
[36] Later in this book I will expand the interpretation of behaviorism as resistance.
[37] Schacter DL et al, 2009. Page 390.
[38] The new behaviorists used the word drive in a sense that is simpler than the sense we are advocating here. Their “drive” did not refer to archetypal forms or individual experience. Their concept of drive was a way to make room for organismic variables without actually explicitly referring to them.
[39] Quotation from Key Differences website. [https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-science-and-technology.html]
[40] Verhoeven JD, Pendray AH, Dauksch WE. The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades. JOM: The Journal, 1998, 50, 9, 58-64.
[41] Skinner BF. Are theories of learning necessary? Psychological Review, 1950, 57, 193-216. Page 99.
[42] Malone JC. William James and habit: A century later. Chapter in Johnson MG, Henley TB (eds). Reflections on the Principles of Psychology: William James after a Century. Psychology Press, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, publishers, Hillsdale New Jersey, 1990. Page 154.
[43] Berridge KC. Reward learning: Reinforcement, incentives, and expectations. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2001, 40, 223-278. Page 224.
[44] Graham G, 2017.
[45] Schacter DL et al 2009. Page 21.
[46] Verplanken B, Aarts H. Habit, attitude, and planned behavior: Is habit an empty construct or an interesting case of goal-directed automaticity? European Review of Social Psychology, 1999, 10, 1, 101–134. Page 102.
[47] Here are examples: [Harvey A, Armstrong C, Callaway C, Gumport N, Gasperetti C. COVID-19 Prevention via the Science of Habit Formation. Current Directions in Psychological Science,2021, 30.], [Burns C. In the Image and Likeness: Theological Reflections on the Science of Habits, 2017.], [Fritz H, Cutchin M. (). Integrating the Science of Habit: Opportunities for Occupational Therapy. OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health, 2016, 36.], [Wood W, Mazar A, Neal DT. Habits and Goals in Human Behavior: Separate but Interacting Systems. Perspectives in Psychological Science. 2022, 17, 2, 590-605.]
[48] The German psychologist Kurt Lewin was a pioneer in this field. His interest in the topic persisted, even as reference to subjective experience and mental processes was banned by behaviorists. Schacter et al say, “Lewin realized that it was not the stimulus, but rather the person’s construal of the stimulus, that determined the person’s subsequent behavior.” [Schacter DL et al, 2009. Page 22.]