Today's soundtrack is Decapitated: Carnival is Forever.
This evening's reading is the first chapter of Behaviorism: Classic Studies, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (by John B. Watson).
Watson says that behaviourists see psychology as a "purely objective experimental branch of natural science" (p. 11). Behaviourists do not rely on introspection or personality tests; their tests of people are the same as their tests would be of animals. That being said, man's behaviour is not the only focus of the behaviourist.
Behaviourists see stimuli not as something interesting in themselves, but as a mere means to an end: "the production of mental states that may be 'inspected or 'observed'" (p. 11). Non-behavioural psychologists and behaviourists see their subjects differently: general psychologists think that introspection and consciousness are more important than data collected about behaviour.
Watson observes that the experiments conducted by behaviourists, both psychological and animal, have had little influence on the field of psychology. He says that there are only two options going forward: either psychology must recognize the validity of behaviourism, or behaviourism must split from general psychology. The reason for this is that if psychologists do not accept the validity of the behaviourism experiments conducted upon animals, behaviourists will need to conduct the same experiments on humans.
Watson questions the practice of psychologists needing to interpret experiments' findings through the lens of consciousness. Is a study any less valid because the experimenter did not try to interpret the subject's state of consciousness? Shouldn't the different results in behaviour caused by different environmental stimuli be sufficient to let us draw conclusions from?
Trying to differentiate "whether such and such responses are positively conscious merely indicative of consciousness, or whether they are purely 'physiological'" (p. 14) is not the behaviourist's concern. The assumption of the presence of or absence of consciousness will not affect reality in the least; however, without data on behaviours, we will not understand reality.
The problem faced by behaviourists today - of being told by everyone else that they must address the problem of consciousness before getting more data - is similar to the problem that early Darwinians faced. The only interest the public held in the Darwinians' work was whether it could prove man's evolution and whether it could prove racial superiority. But really, evolutionary biology didn't take off until zoologists started collecting data that was meaningful. Similarly, behaviourism won't get a proper start until psychologists stop looking for consciousness as the important thing, and instead realize that behaviours tell us all that we need to know.
Psychologists do not seem interested in the whole; they throw away material that is seen as merely reflex, or just psysiological. One of the biggest problems with psychology is that it is a soft science: failure to reproduce findings of a study is not seen as a problem; it apparently merely means that the subject's introspection wasn't deep enough. On the other hand, the hard sciences will see definite responses and reactions to certain things; non-replicability of an experiment is a serious problem. Behaviourism calls psychology to task and says that experiments should be repeatable if psychology is a real science.
Watson says that "behaviorism is the only consistent and logical functionalism" (p. 19). He proposes a solution: write a new psychology and ban from it the words "consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like" (p. 19), and then define it "in terms of stimulus and respons, in terms of habit formation, habit integrations and the like" (p. 19) - the sooner, the better. He says that he wishes his students were as ignorant of the hypotheses of consciousness as the students of the hard sciences are.
The psychology that Watson wanted to create would rest on the foundation that first, as is observably factual, "organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary and habit equipments" (p. 20). Second, "certain stimuli lead the organisms to make the responses" (p. 20). So we would reach a point in this new psychology that "given the response the stimuli can be predicted; given the stimuli the response can be predicted" (p. 20). The main desire of this new psychology "is to gain an accurate knowledge of adjustments and the stimuli calling them forth" (p. 21). Watson wanted the data collected by psychologists to be used "in a practical way as soon as [the data was collected]" (p. 21).
Language is fickle and subjective, believed Watson. To avoid the lack of dependability seen in studies relying on introspection and subjectivity, we should use purely objective controls in our experiments. Rather than asking a subject whether he recognizes the differences between two different shades of red lights, set up an experiment where he is rewarded for a response to one and punished for a response to the other. By doing this, we can find out whether he can recognize a difference between the two red lights.
