This paper appeared as a discussion post in PSY620: Learning and Cognition, on April 15, 2024.
Before I get into the discussion between Watson and Bandura (and by extension behaviorism versus cognitivism, respectively), I would like to revisit and clarify a point I made last week about B. F. Skinner:
In point of fact, the ethical sins that Skinner gets popularly saddled with fall more squarely on Ivar Lovaas and John Watson. Both Lovaas and Watson presented behaviorism as a method of training (I refuse to call their version “learning”) that used positive and negative forms of reinforcement (applying or denying) and applied both rewards and punishments (pleasant or unpleasant things). In Lovaas’ case especially, such averse responses included slapping children across the face and applying electroshocks as the main form of behavioral modification (Lovaas, 1987; Lovaas et al., 1973; Rekers & Lovaas, 1974).
Skinner, on the other hand, was vehemently against punishment of any sort (Millman, 2020) and observed that it only temporarily suppressed a behavior, it doesn’t affect any previously learned response. All that a person “learns” from punishment is how to avoid further punishment; the association to other behaviors is invalid and any aversion to a behavior developed from punishment will go away as soon as the punishment is removed (Holth, 2005; Skinner, 1971). He was not the only one with this position, as Murray Sidman also pointed up the failure of punishment (2001) as did Thorndike himself (1932), and it continues to be proven ineffective (Skiba & Deno, 1991) despite ongoing advocacy for it, including in the current methods of ABA that still call for “aversive methods” (Cooper et al., 2020).
This creates a great deal of difficulty for us as students to winnow the wheat from the chafe, so to speak, when major figures are misquoted and misrepresented. As I began discussing last week, I believe the important stance to begin from is to recognize that behaviorism is an observation of reflexive mechanics in humans – mechanics that can be moderately predicted and manipulated – but that it must be recognized as only a portion of what makes humans function.
J. B. Watson and his behaviorism
When we examine John B. Watson’s version of behaviorism, there is a critical context to keep: Watson was born in 1878 and received his doctorate in psychology at 1903. At this point, psychology was a nascent field that was dominated by the psychoanalysis of Freud, whose work only began in earnest in 1896. Watson and others (Jung, Adler, and so on) all recognized that there were critical errors on Freud’s original model, and they each forged their own schools in their individual attempts to resolve those errors. Jung pivoted deeper into mysticism (Cloninger, 2019a), Adler into his social and interpersonal theories (Cloninger, 2019b), and Watson, inspired by the logical positivism at the time, chose to fixate on the purely measurable and observable: behaviors. In his 1913 paper, Watson opened with the statement: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior” (p. 158).
To that point, he demonstrated through a number of experiments (with questionable ethics) that attitudes and fears could be modified through mainly averse interventions in young subjects as demonstrated with the infamous Little Albert experiment in 19201. It should be noted that this was the last significant experiment Watson performed because he was fired from John Hopkins University later that year, not for ethics violations relating to Little Albert (the Belmont Report (Adashi et al., 2018) didn’t exist until 1979) but for having an affair with his lab assistant, Rosalie Rayner. This led to his divorce from his first wife, Mary Ickes, and, having blackened his reputation in psychology beyond repair, he moved instead into a career in advertising, researching marketing methods for J. Walter Thompson Company (Gondra, 2014).
During the 1920s and 1930s, Watson turned out a remarkably large body of work to mainly to popular magazines, such as Children: the Magazine for Parents, Harper’s Monthly, and Syracuse Herald, and less so to peer-reviewed journals (see Strapasson, 2020, for a full bibliography of Watson’s work), extolling his ideas about behaviorism, extreme parenting methods, and social commentaries. He did not engage in any formal experimentation after his departure from John Hopkins but still published his personal views, including a book on child-rearing, the Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1928 where he advocated for aggressively strict parenting methods. He’d had two children, Mary (“Polly”) and John, with his first wife and two more children, William and James (“Billy” and “Jimmy”), with Rosalie Rayner, all of whom he attempted to raise with his specific brand of radical behaviorism, to the detriment of all of them: each of Watson’s children were plagued with suicidal depression, substance abuse issues, and severe social debilitation. The legacy continued on with Watson’s granddaughter, actress Mariette Hartley, from his daughter Polly, who said in her 1990 book Breaking the Silence: “Grandfather’s theories infected my mother’s life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?” (as cited by Brad, 2005).
Thus, if we wish to call Watson the “father of behaviorism,” he is either a highly abusive, quasi-absentee father (Malone, 2014) or else his version of behaviorism is not the paragon of performance it’s held up to be – and most likely a bit of both. Consider that he brought behaviorism to the general population and was taken at face value as an expert because of his credentials without the benefit of actually having to prove his premise. Looking at the whole of the scientific community, behaviorism was actually less influential and prevalent than Gestalt and cognitive perspectives as early as the 1940s (Braat et al., 2020), indicating that Watson’s pivot into marketing was a stroke of personal brilliance: he was able to popularize an incomplete practice in the public view without peer-qualified accountability.
Albert Bandura and the rise of cognitivism
Just as Freud’s early disciples felt there was something fundamentally amiss about his hypersexualized model of neuroses and, by extension, all human subconscious, those who came after behaviorism intuited a gaping hole in the understanding of the human psyche. Behaviorism is, more than anything else, reductionist; it is not incorrect, but it is incomplete when we’re attempting to explain human phenomena such as learning and memory.
Albert Bandura is considered one of the founders of cognitivism along with Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, G.A. Miller, and Jerome Bruner, as he posed the question of where agency and self-cogency played into the psychology of behavior. From this question, he eventually developed his self-efficacy theories of motivation (Lippke, 2020) as well as describing the social learning paradigm (Little, 2020). His early work focused on how aggression is transmitted with his famous Bobo Doll experiments; he demonstrated that children emulated violence against an inflatable doll in the same manner that they’d witnessed adults committing via a recording. While this did have an impact on his views of aggression transmission, the Bobo Doll experiments led naturally to the more generalized social learning theory wherein children (and adults, to a point) learn how to engage socially first passively and then actively (Artino, 2007). When direct modeling is used – demonstrating a task or skill with the intention of teaching it – the student/observer then has an opportunity to replicate that task or skill, with or without scaffolding (building skills by stages of increasing complexity), until they themselves become proficient. Natural variation in cognition, however, produces a wide variety of interpretations, proficiencies, and synthesizing new methods – something that should be impossible if learning only reflected direct behaviorist models.
Discussion
My path is focused mainly on supporting autism and neurodiversities, so these findings are highly relevant. Especially the earlier forms of applied behavior analysis (ABA) have been strongly implicated in a massively high rate of PTSD among autistic adults who underwent ABA as children (Kupferstein, 2018, 2019). Integrating a true Skinnerian method of behavior modification using only positive, loving reinforcements has a much greater chance of producing happy, even productive individuals in the short and long run, autistic and otherwise. Consider that maladaptive behaviors in neurodiverse people are reflexive sensory responses instead of willful decisions, so treating them like willful behaviors only compounds the internal discomfort that already exists. One of the errors in judgment that ABA makes is that when a “problem” behavior is stopped, they believe that the problem is solved, but instead, it has been internalized into a personal image problem that will create much worse behaviors as time goes on.
Digging down into the historical truth behind the figures that behaviorist culture has been based on gives us much more information from which to make informed and conscientious decisions. Moreover, seeing how the histories of these individuals have played out lends credence to the validity of those findings: while Watson’s four children met with comparatively horrible fates (William committed suicide two years after his father’s death in 1958), Skinner’s two daughters were both wildly successful and happy after being raised in his philosophy: Dr. Julie Vargas is a successful psychologist following in her father’s footsteps and Deborah Buzan married a professor and is an artist (Epstein, 2016; Vargas, 2004).
If behaviorists demand measurable evidence in the frame of logical positivism, I can see no greater proof than this.
— Dawn Swain
1 For the curious, the reports that “Little Albert” was actually a child by the name of Douglas Merritte who died of hydrocephalus when he was six years old (Beck et al., 2009) have been debunked. Although there’s no way to be absolutely certain, there is a great deal of evidence that the child was Albert Barger whose last name was later changed to Martin when his mother married. He lived a full life before passing away in 2007 and though he did have some dislike of dogs and animals in general, he did not exhibit the kind of debilitating phobias he was projected to have (Griggs, 2015; Powell et al., 2014).
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