6 - Behaviorism

Summary

Chapters 6 and 7 depart from the previous discussion. Behavioral and constructivist research programs are better described as “approaches” than as “paradigms.” Partisans in both camps believe that they are carving new paths in developing international theory and in security studies. Both schools include a broad, varied, and disputatious array of scholars and analysts. The members within each camp are more linked by the methods they use and the evidence they rely on than by the assumptions they make or share about any fixed notion of human behavior or nature. The paradigms covered in the preceding chapters stipulate, implicitly or explicitly, certain, defined interests and preferences of actors and assume certain persistent tendencies or patterns in human choices and behavior. These are conceived as endemic to the make-up of individuals or actors (realists and classical liberals) or embedded in the social structures of which individuals or collective actors are members (neorealists, liberal institutionalists, and Marxists).

Although their methods could not be more at odds with each other, practitioners of behavioral or constructivist research implicitly agree that, if there is a core to being human, it remains to be discovered, not postulated. The notion of a definitive human nature is viewed either as unknowable (scientific behaviorism) or problematic, depending on the social exchanges of conceptually capable, linguistically skilled, creative, free humans and their agents who infuse meaning and significance into their relations and are the authors of their social make-up or construction (constructivists).