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B. F. Skinner and the Technological Control of Social Behavior*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Meredith W. Watts
Meredith W. Watts*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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Abstract

Humanist critiques of B. F. Skinner have made valuable contributions to our understanding of his thought, but more attention needs to be paid to his work as potential empirical theory. To evaluate the theoretical merits of Skinner's approach, this paper examines his methodological postulates, his implicit epistemology, and some underlying normative assumptions. It is argued that Skinnerian behaviorism commits a serious error in allowing a methodological presupposition (reduction of the subject matter to observable behavior of the organism) to become a de facto ontology that prematurely forecloses the incorporation of potentially valuable hypothetical constructs at the level of social theory. This theoretical difficulty is critical because the inherent safeguards of science that Skinner proposes as a humane safeguard against misuse would be unlikely to apply to an actual technology of behavior control as employed by political and administrative authorities.

Type
Book Reviews and Essays
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 1975 , pp. 214 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1975

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1973 Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association meetings, Chicago, Illinois. In addition to fellow panelists who provided much valuable criticism, the author would particularly like to thank Paul Kress and Max Neiman for their invaluable substantive and editorial comments. Most of all, Elizabeth Watts has provided a constant source of ideas, constructive criticism, and support throughout the research of which this paper is a part.

References

1 Kariel, Henry A., “The Political Relevance of Behavioral and Existential Psychology,” American Political Science Review, 61 (June, 1967), 334–342CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Evans, Richard I., B. F. Skinner: The Man and His Ideas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 17Google Scholar.

3 See Rotter's, Julian B.Social Learning and Clinical Psychology (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his “Beliefs, Social Attitudes and Behavior: A Social Learning Analysis,” in Cognition, Personality and Clinical Psychology, ed. Jessor, R. and Feshbach, S. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1967), pp. 112–140Google Scholar for an introduction to Rotter's theory.

4 Bandura, Albert, Principles of Behavior Modification (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)Google Scholar. See also Bandura, Albert and Walters, R. H., Social Learning and Personality Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963)Google Scholar.

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7 Ibid., p. 201.

8 Ibid., p. 303.

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10 Ibid., pp. 134–135.

11 Osgood, Charles E., “Behavior Theory and the Social Sciences,” Behavioral Science, 1 (July, 1956), 167–185CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reprinted in Approaches to the Study of Politics, ed. Young, Roland (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1958), pp. 217–244Google Scholar.

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14 Ibid., p. 317.

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18 This process, endemic in behaviorism, bas been described by Wartofsky as an outcome of the origina revolt in psychology against the self-imposed limits of introspectionism and subjective analysis:

The attempt to go beyond this introspective-subjective limit and to introduce objective observation into psychological inquiry, in the way of establishing public or intersubjective data, turns from introspection to perceptually available outward behavior as the subject matter of psychology The sharpest expression of this turn from “mind” to “behavior” is the assertion of an ontological reduction, on the basis of the methodological shift. If consciousness is to be studied in terms of the “overt behavior of the intact organisms,” then the postulation of an invisible and unobservable “mind” or of some internal “mental” events is no longer necessary. At best, mind comes to serve only as the name given to that complex of “segments” or “elements” of behavior which we regard as the ultimate entities in terms of which consciousnes is to be described; and even consciousness is reducible, in these terms to such manifest behavior. Wartofsky, Marx, Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 372–373Google Scholar.

19 Skinner's reductionism has been widely criticized on methodological and philosophical grounds. Much of the debate has focused on whether mentalistic constructs can be expunged from a theory that seeks to account adequately for empirical reality. Some diverse sources of such criticism are Hempel, Carl G., Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood-Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 106–110Google Scholar; Scriven, Michael, A Study of Radical Behaviorism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Blanshard, Brand and Skinner, B. F., “The Problem of Consciousness—A Debate,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 27 (March, 1967), 317–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Koestler, Arthur, The Ghost in the Machine (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), pp. 3–18Google Scholar. For some other sources of the antibehaviorist critique, the reader might consult the following: Koestler, Arthur and Smythies, J. R., eds., Beyond Reductionism (Boston: Beacon, 1969)Google Scholar; von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, Robots, Men and Minds (New York: Braziller, 1967)Google Scholar; Louch, A. R., Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966)Google Scholar; and Matson, Floyd W., The Broken Image (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar. Skinner's debate with Blanshard (cited above) indicates his belief that such problems are great enough to warrant serious discussion, as do portions of the following of his writings: “Behaviorism at Fifty,” in Behaviorism and Phenomenology, ed Wann, T. W. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 79–97Google Scholar, and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971)Google Scholar.

20 Such reductionism involves the tendency for the methodological presupposition to become a subtle methodological imperative. For a less temperate statement of this tendency in behaviorism, see Koestler, . The Ghost in the Machine, p. 17Google Scholar.

21 Evans, p. 23.

22 Maslow, Abraham, The Psychology of Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 15–16Google Scholar.

23 On these points, see von Bertalanffy, p. 13, and Louch, pp. 35–36.

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29 Frye, Northrop, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Daedalus (Spring, 1965), p. 330Google Scholar.

30 Anyone who detects in Skinner's treatment of such cognitive or emotional states a trace of remission of his behaviorist program, should be chastened by Skinner's assertion, at the end of his book Verbal Behavior, that “so far as a science of behavior is concerned, Man Thinking is simply Man Behaving” or, to eliminate misunderstanding about why he devoted an entire book to verbal behavior, he says, “There is nothing exclusively or essentially verbal in the material analyzed in this book. It is all part of a field—of the behavior of the most complex creature in contact with a world of endless variety. For practical purposes a special field has been set apart in terms of characteristics imparted to it by special controlling variables.” Skinner, , Verbal Behavior, p. 452Google Scholar. [Note that the justification is practical, not theoretical or conceptual.]

31 Skinner, , Science and Human Behavior, p. 297Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., p. 298.

33 Ibid., p. 298.

34 Deutsch, Morton and Krauss, Robert M., Theories in Social Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 103Google Scholar.

35 Meehan, Eugene J., Contemporary Political Thought: A Critical Study (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1967), p. 199Google Scholar.

36 See. Beech, H. R., Changing Man's Behavior (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), chapters 13 and 14Google Scholar; Schaefer, Halmuth H. and Martin, Patrick L., Behavioral Therapy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969)Google Scholar; Mischel, Walter, Personality and Assessment (New York: Wiley, 1968), pp. 161–168Google Scholar; Ulrich, Roger, Stachnik, Thomas, and Mabry, John, Control of Human Behavior (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1970)Google Scholar; McGinnies, Elliot and Ferster, C. B., The Reinforcement of Human Behavior (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971)Google Scholar; Zajonc, Robert B., Social Psychology: An Experimental Approach (Belmont, Calif.. Wadsworth, 1966)Google Scholar.

37 Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange (London: Heinemann, 1962)Google Scholar.

38 Skinner, B. F., Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 8Google Scholar. Originally published by Macmillan in 1948. All citations are from, the 1962 paperback edition.

39 Skinner, , Science and Human Behavior, p. 4Google Scholar.

40 Skinner, , Walden Two, p. 8Google Scholar.

41 Skinner, , Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp. 4–5Google Scholar.

42 Skinner, , Walden Two, p. 14Google Scholar.

43 One critic, Bennett Berger, takes this shift of emphasis to be a commitment to the nation-state and institutionalized power, particularly since there seems to be no other agency with the potential for implementing such a momentous cultural effort. Berger argues that Skinner “wishes to persuade” men in high places to initiate effective programs of behavioral control. See that author's “Review of Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” American Journal of Sociology, 78 (November, 1972), p. 706Google Scholar. Since Skinner remains elusive about precisely who should do what to whom in order to carry out his plan, Berger's criticism remains problematic, however.

44 Skinner, , Walden Two, p. 293Google Scholar.

45 Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.. Doubleday, 1966), p. 196Google Scholar.

46 Berger and Luckmann, p. 166.

47 One means whereby Skinnerian principles might be integrated into empirical social theory is suggested in the affinity between Skinner's notion of behavior selection and broader theories of functionalism. Some authors have noted this potential linkage (Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Constructing Social Theories [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968], pp. 85–87Google Scholar; Marwell, Gerald “Review of Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” Contemporary Sociology, 1 [January, 1972], 18–29)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but that possibility seems largely unexplored at the moment.

It is possible that cultural selection of behavior (through a process of operant conditioning) might allow a melding of the behavior modification approach with current theoretical concerns. If the central argument of this paper is correct, the imperialistic claims of the Skinnerian program are to be denied but the insights retained wherever they can be demonstrated to have empirical import at the social level.

Some heuristic uses of Skinnerian and other learning approaches have recently appeared in the literature (see Anderson, Clifford and Nesvold, Betty, “A Skinnerian Analysis of Conflict Behavior,” American Behavioral Scientist, 15 [July/August, 1972] 883–909CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merelman, Richard M., “Learning and Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, 60 [September, 1966], 548–561CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cook, Thomas J. and Scioli, Frank P. Jr., “A Critique of the Learning Conception in Political Socialization Research,” Social Science Quarterly, 52 [March, 1972], 949–962)Google Scholar, but more empirical and theoretical specification will be needed before the approach is fully exploited.

48 Skinner, , Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 164Google Scholar.

49 Evans, p. 54.

50 Skinner, , Science and Human Behavior, p. 339Google Scholar.

51 Skinner, , Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 172Google Scholar.

52 Skinner, , Science and Human Behavior, p. 336Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., p. 347.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., p. 338.

57 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 33. For a more elaborate working out of the problem in the terms of Skinner's concepts, see Ferster, G. B., “Arbitrary and Natural Reinforcement,” Psychological Record, 17 (1967), 341–357Google Scholar. Reprinted in McGinnies, and Ferster, , The Reinforcement of Social Behavior, pp. 433–436Google Scholar.

58 Skinner, , Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 143Google Scholar.

59 Skinner, B. F., “Answers for My Critics,” in Wheeler, Harvey, ed., Beyond the Punitive Society (San Francisco: Freeman, 1973), p. 265Google Scholar.

60 See Fromm, Erich, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p. 40Google Scholar. Chapter 2 of that book (pp. 33–68) contains a critique of Skinner and others Fromm considers to be behaviorists or environmentalists.

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