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Radical behaviorism Reviews

Deflating neurohype

Here I shall highlight two books that I recently read which share a common theme – criticism of the improper aggrandizement and misapplication of findings in brain-imaging studies. The books are:

  1. Satel & Lilienfeld (2013) – Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience
  2. Raymond Tallis (2011) – Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

Important to note is that I have already discussed a related topic in Schizophrenia of our times – my brain and me. One shall also notice that some points covered in this post may resemble arguments in How Emotions Are (Not) Made where Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made is reviewed. The topic is worth revisiting due to the spread of “brain”, “synaptic”, “neuro-transmitter” and similar “neuro” phrases in any kind of context and in everyday language.

A pseudo-materialistic fad in psychological “science”

The main crux of both works is to express doubt regarding the applicability of brain imaging studies in explaining human behavior and reveal shortcomings thereof. Satel & Lilienfeld demonstrate a controlled and polite disagreement with conclusions derived from brain scan studies:

Scans alone cannot tell us whether a person is a shameless liar, loyal to a product brand, compelled to use cocaine, or incapable of resisting an urge to kill. In fact, brain-derived data currently add little or nothing to the more ordinary sources of information we rely on to make those determinations; mostly, they are neuroredundant. At worst, neuroscientific information sometimes distort our ability to distinguish good explanations of psychological phenomena from bad ones.

Satel & Lilienfeld (2013, p. 150) – Brainwashed

Raymond Tallis is more candid as he calls the brain-imaging trend Neuromania. In his book he also criticises the inadequacy of strictly evolutionary and genetic theories when explaining behavior – this is what he refers to as Darwinitis. One will find well-deserved jabs at famous advocates of biologism – including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett etc.

Within the secular world picture, Neuromania and Darwinitis are the biggest piles of rubbish. (p. 12)

[Neuro-talk] is often accompanied by a picture of a brain scan, that fast- acting solvent of critical faculties. (p. 73, from Crawford, “The Limits of Neuro-Talk”)

And a more recent, admirably painstaking, review concludes that “the reliability of fMRI scanning is not high compared to other scientific measures”; moreover, there is no agreement as to what would count as a measure of reliability; and, finally, reliability is even worse in studies of higher cognitive tasks (experiencing beauty, deploying wisdom, being stupid) than in the case of simple motor or sensory tasks – in short, in the case of those papers that have made the popular press go pop- eyed with excitement. (p. 81)

Unfortunately, some of these deicides – notably Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins – do indeed have their own fundamentalism, namely biologism. (p. 321)

Raymond Tallis (2011) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

Voodoo correlations

Edward Vul is best known for his work in discovering fallacious statistical methods used in fMRI studies – the results of which he initially denoted as “voodoo correlations”. His papers have caused reverberations throughout the neuroscientific community and the effect is proved by the fact that he is mentioned in both of the books:

In a “bombshell” paper, as a fellow neuroscientist put it [Jon Bardin], MIT graduate student Edward Vul concluded that something was deeply wrong with how many brain-imaging researchers were analyzing their data.

Many aspects of Vul’s critique are technical, but his basic point is easy to grasp: If you search a huge set of data— in this case, tens of thousands of voxels— for associations that are statistically significant and then do more analyses on only those associations, you are almost guaranteed to find something “good.” (To avoid this mistake, the second analysis must be truly independent of the first one.) This error is known variously as the “circular analysis problem,” the “nonindependence problem,” or, more colloquially, “double-dipping.”

Satel & Lilienfeld (2013, p. 20-21) – Brainwashed

I am not alone in questioning the validity of an approach that identifies activity in certain parts of the brain with aspects of the human psyche. In a controversial, but to me compelling, paper published in 2009 (originally provocatively entitled “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience”), the authors found serious problems with the localisations observed in such studies. The authors concluded that “in most of the studies that linked brain regions to feelings including social rejection, neuroticism and jealousy, researchers … used a method that inflates the strength of the link between a brain region and the emotion or behaviour”.

Raymond Tallis (2011, p. 80) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

The brain (dis)obeys the law?

Authors of both books notice worrying applications of neuroscience in legal matters. Lucrative opportunities arise for vested interests here, but that is not a good reason to promote shaky science, especially in such a high stakes field as law:

Along similar lines, when psychologist Deena Weisberg and colleagues inserted the phrase “brain scans show” into illogical explanations of behavior, those explanations became more compelling to neuroscience nonexperts (but not neuroscience experts). Taken together, these findings raise the possibility that neuroimagery—sometimes humorously called “brain porn”—and neurolanguage can seduce jurors and others into drawing erroneous conclusions.

Satel & Lilienfeld (2013, p. 114) – Brainwashed

If I claim that, say, balance between the activity in the frontal lobes and in the amygdala is abnormal, this must be judged against a normal population, as must always be the case when we determine the normal range for a particular measure. There has been a pitifully small amount of work done to establish norms and the numbers of subjects studied would not be sufficient to validate a clinical test. (p. 309)

The moral and legal assessment of our behaviour is, therefore, best conducted by the less glamorous process of history-taking than by brain scans that simply give snapshots of a small part of brain activity in response to very simple stimuli. (p. 312)

Raymond Tallis (2011) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

Additionally and curiously, when discussing the application of neuroscience in law, Tallis develops a similar argument to B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity regarding the praise and blame of behavior:

The philosophy behind this plea is, of course, applied patchily. “My brain made me do it” is usually invoked to excuse actions that will attract moral disapproval or legal sanction. People don’t normally deny responsibility for good actions or for neutral actions such as pouring out a cup of tea at a tea party or just getting a breath of fresh air after a long time at the computer. I am more likely to say “My brain made me do it” when I drink fourteen pints of beer in a pub and then reduce the establishment to rubble because I have been denied a fifteenth than when I have one pint of beer and talk to my friends about epistemology. In other words, there tends to be a bit of pick and mix: strong grounds, I would say, for treating this particular plea of mitigation with some suspicion – suspicion we need to keep in play when we consider recent developments in “neuro-law”.

Raymond Tallis (2011, p. 307) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

Although people object when a scientific analysis traces their behaviour to external conditions and thus deprives them of credit and the chance to be admired, they seldom object when the same analysis absolves them of blame. (p. 78)

A concern for exoneration is indicated by the fact that we are more likely to appeal to genetic endowment to explain undesirable results than positive accomplishments. (p. 80)

B.F. Skinner (1971) – Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Dismissal of behaviorism

A staple in many mainstream psychological works is to comment how the field has outgrown behaviorism in the middle of the 20th century. Both books are no exception as they dismiss behaviorism out of hand as if it was a failure:

In fact, some experts talk of neuroscience as if it is the new genetics, that is, just the latest overarching narrative commandeered to explain and predict virtually all human behavior. And before genetic determinism there was the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, who sought to explain human behavior in terms of rewards and punishments.

Satel & Lilienfeld (2013, p. xviii) – Brainwashed

The word “reward” betrays a lack of basic knowledge of Skinner’s philosophy and science – anyone sufficiently familiar with radical behaviorism in a scientific discussion will opt for the term “reinforcement”.

The computational theory is particularly associated with cognitive psychology, which arose initially as a reaction against behaviourism. Behaviourism had tried to eliminate the mind, in a bid for psychology to be taken seriously as fully fledged science. Psychology, the behaviourists argued, should confine itself to the objective and the measurable; to quantifiable inputs or stimuli and quantifiable outputs, responses or behaviour. Anything between inputs and outputs was inaccessible to proper scientific study. This methodological decision gradually drifted into the assumption that there was nothing important between inputs and outputs. (p. 40)

To be fair, cognitive psychology was a welcome corrective to the lunacy of behaviourism. Behaviourism denied that there was anything of much interest to scientific psychology in human beings between their perceptual input and their behavioural output, between stimulus and response. (p. 191)

Raymond Tallis (2011) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

Tallis also demonstrates that he is not acquainted with proper behavioral science. His criticism only applies to the methodological behaviorism of Watson. A lack of training in Skinner’s science allows the author to arrive at a comical conclusion:

Libet’s experiment illustrates how the (neuro-)determinist case against freedom is based on a very distorted conception of what constitutes an action in everyday life. If you want to make voluntary actions seem involuntary, the first thing to do is to strip away their context – the relevant portions of the self-world that make sense of, and motivate, them – and then effectively break them down into their physical elements.

Raymond Tallis (2011, p. 249) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

The opposite is in fact true – stripping away context actually results in the impression that behavior originates from the actor:

The conspicuousness of the causes is at issue when reflex behavior is called involuntary—one is not free to sneeze or not to sneeze; the initiating cause is the pepper. Operant behavior is called voluntary, but it is not really uncaused; the cause is simply harder to spot. The critical condition for the apparent exercise of free will is positive reinforcement, as the result of which a person feels free and calls himself free and says he does as he likes or what he wants or is pleased to do.

B.F. Skinner (1974, p. 52) – About Behaviorism

The distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior bears upon our changing concept of personal responsibility. We do not hold people responsible for their reflexes—for example, for coughing in church. We hold them responsible for their operant behavior— for example, for whispering in church or remaining in church while coughing. But there are variables which are responsible for whispering as well as for coughing, and these may be just as inexorable. When we recognize this, we are likely to drop the notion of responsibility altogether and with it the doctrine of free will as an inner causal agent.

B.F. Skinner (1953, p. 115-116) – Science and Human Behavior

Liberalism

Interesting criticisms of neuroscience notwithstanding, the authors suffer from a lifetime of idealistic conditioning. No wonder that politically liberal views based on “individual choice” and “free will” are espoused:

As long as human beings possess conscious mental states that can bring about behavior and self- control, then the law in particular and our moral sense in general need not be radically revised.

Satel & Lilienfeld (2013, p. 137) – Brainwashed

He [John Stuart Mill] agreed that, yes, we have to obey the laws of nature; indeed, there is no choice. But we should appreciate that, at any given juncture, there is more than one law of nature operating. By aligning ourselves with one law, we can use nature to achieve ends not envisaged in nature. (p. 259)

In other words, even in the case of clear-cut brain causes of abnormal behaviour, there is sometimes the possibility of controlling that behaviour or its consequences. This is equally true in cases of addiction. By the time you have reached the fifteenth pint, your sozzled brain may be calling the shots. But it was you who handed yourself over to your brain, either on that occasion, or on the many occasions before you became an alcoholic, when you chose to drink unwisely. (p. 311)

Raymond Tallis (2011) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

How is one to see one’s own biases?

Let’s visit a couple more exemplary problems found in psychological literature. One is regarding “untheoretical” definitions:

In the end, the most useful definition of addiction is a descriptive one, such as this: Addiction is a behavior marked by repeated use despite destructive consequences and by difficulty quitting notwithstanding the user’s resolution to do so. This “definition” isn’t theoretical; it explains nothing about why one “gets” addiction—and how could it offer a satisfying causal account when there are multiple levels at which the pro cess can be understood? Our proposed definition merely states an observable fact about the behavior generally recognized as addiction. That’s a good thing because a blank explanatory slate (unbiased by biological orientation or any other theoretical model) inspires broad- minded thinking about research, treatment, and policy.

Satel & Lilienfeld (2013, p. 70) – Brainwashed

The claim of providing an unbiased definition of addiction can be deemed as naive. First of all, it includes ambiguous concepts such as destructive and repeated. Secondly, the reified construct resolution is employed. How does one even define this word? Finally, addiction would be more usefully understood not as a behavior, but as a collection of specific environmental conditions, contingencies and behavior.

Another issue is overwhelming idealism. Tallis neatly demonstrates the inability to effectively tackle questions regarding private behavior. This results in the mystification and glorification of some concepts such as consciousness, intentionality, qualia, aboutness etc:

The complex consciousness of self-aware human beings brings tenses into the world and makes the happenings of the material world the contents of the present tense. Only by overlooking this human basis of tensed time can memory as we experience it be assimilated to learning, learning assimilated to behavioural changes and behavioural changes reduced to altered properties of a piece of matter such as a brain.

Raymond Tallis (2011, p. 132) – Aping Mankind – Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

I can only comment here that woe is Tallis for not knowing that a reinforced organism is a changed organism. He claims that consciousness explains behavioral changes. But does this also apply for genetic variation?

The king stays naked

I have to admit that the two books are a part of a useful trend of skepticism and resistance to the new orthodoxy of neuro-brain biological science. The criticisms though valid, don’t seem to guide the authors into more fruitful endeavors, i.e. towards a pragmatic philosophy of behavior. It just goes to show how little of a reach radical behavioristic philosophy has.

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Leftist thought Radical behaviorism Reviews

How Emotions Are (Not) Made

Let’s examine a book written for the wider public that discusses a common topic in psychology – emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made promotes an allegedly new and scientific outlook on the field. Following the previous post, this book will serve as an illustration of contemporary psychological literature. As with all things psychology in this blog, criticism is unavoidably imminent. Nevertheless, radical behaviorist conditioning shall always allow us to extract something useful:

Many behavioral scholars, having spent much of their professional lifetimes scrutinizing psychological literature for useful items, have grown skilled at finding them.

Lawrence Fraley & Stephen Ledoux (1997, p. 26) – Chapter 5 of Origins, Status and Mission of Behaviorology

Every sour has its sweet

The book has come to my attention while reading the 2nd quarter issue of 2020 of the Operants magazine where Joe Layng discussed a behavioral interpretation of emotions:

We experience a range of emotions which we may or may not share with others. In describing our emotions we have a problem. As B. F. Skinner pointed out, the problem lies with how we learn our emotion words. We are trained by verbal communities, that have no access to what we are privately experiencing, to use words to express our emotions. The best we can do is teach certain words occasioned by instances of observable behavior as it occurs under certain conditions.
There is no certainty that the behavior is actually accompanied by a private experience of sadness, or anxiousness, or excitement, for example. We can never know if the anger we feel is the same as what others feel, or that any particular physiological change is always experienced as anger. Since accurate discrimination training is impossible, there is no possibility of accurately tacting these inner, private events. But are there not common measurable physiological changes occurring that we can learn to describe? Neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman-Barrett in her book How Emotions are Made suggests there are not.

Joe Layng (2020) – Emotions In The Time Of A Pandemic: Beyond Cognition And Behavior. in Operants Q2 2020

As was stated in Layng’s discussion, the 3 initial chapters of How Emotions Are Made provide the main take-away for the radical behaviorist: phenomena expressed by emotion words are not fixed reactions – neither physiological, nor cerebral, nor facial. Emotional vocabulary is emitted in various conditions and reflects general patterns of contingencies:

… the emotion is part of the contingency; in a sense, it describes it.

When we tell others we fear something, they readily understand there is an event where distancing ourselves from the event is a reinforcer.

We may also experience reinforcer loss, typically described by sadness. We may find we want to drive those situations away. Where behavior is reinforced by distancing the event, rather than removing oneself, we typically report feeling angry.

To change emotions we change contingencies.

Joe Layng (2020) – Emotions In The Time Of A Pandemic: Beyond Cognition And Behavior. in Operants Q2 2020

Lisa Feldman Barrett affirms in her book that emotion words are evoked by variable conditions – this leads to the realisation of the importance of cultural conditions and individual history:

It means that on different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm. (p. 15)

An emotion word such as “anger,” therefore, names a population of diverse instances… (p. 35) <..> In our culture, one goal in “Anger” is to overcome an obstacle that someone blameworthy has put in your path. (p. 100)

Your experiences become encoded in your brain’s wiring and can eventually change the wiring, increasing the chances that you’ll have the same experience again, or use a previous experience to create a new one (p. 281)

The human brain is structured to learn many different concepts and to invent many social realities, depending on the contingencies it is exposed to. (p. 282-283)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

A long winter after a brief summer

Beyond the refutation of objective emotional reactions, the search for useful knowledge in the book is much more troublesome. As has been previously argued for psychological literature in general, Barrett’s book in particular continues the unscientific traditions – it is ignorant of proper behavioral science, overloaded with terminology, haunted with psychologisations of behavior and generally stuck in Cartesian dualism.

Behavioral ignorance

The progress of the 20th century behavioral science is overlooked and misrepresented in the discipline of psychology. Unsurprisingly, the current author is simply not aware of Skinner’s science and philosophy:

To be sure, faces are instruments of social communication. Some facial movements have meaning, but others do not, and right now, we know precious little about how people figure out which is which, other than that context is somehow crucial (body language, social situation, cultural expectation, etc.).

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 11-12) – How Emotions Are Made

More-so we find the staple demonisation of behaviorism:

Thus began the most notorious historical period in psychology, called behaviorism. Emotions were redefined as mere behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating, collectively known as the “four F’s.” To a behaviorist, “happiness” equaled smiling, “sadness” was crying, and “fear” was the act of freezing in place. And so, the nagging problem of finding the fingerprints of emotional feelings was, with the flick of a pen, defined out of existence.

Ultimately, most scientists rejected behaviorism because it ignores a basic fact: that each of us has a mind, and in every waking moment of life, we have thoughts and feelings and perceptions. These experiences, and their relation to behavior, must be explained in scientific terms.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 171) – How Emotions Are Made

It is obvious that Barrett has not been introduced to the definition of behavior and has not been acquainted with basics of verbal behavior. For the record, radical behaviorists regard emotional words such as sadness or fear as behavior, that follows the same operant principles as any other form of behavior – the evocation of a word is reinforced in particular contexts – this is what we refer to when we speak about “meaning” of a word.

Terminological flood

I’ve counted at least 40 different terms that are introduced in the book – mostly references to circular cognitive concepts and brain functioning. These include simulation, construction, priming, interoception, the clumsily named degeneracy, affect, valence, goals, concepts, mental inference etc. To discuss all the terms separately would simply be too tiresome and wouldn’t be particularly useful. A couple examples will have to suffice.

Throughout the book, Barrett discusses how your brain issues millions of predictions every second:

At the level of brain cells, prediction means that the neurons over here, in this part of your brain, tweak the neurons over there, in that part of your brain, without any need for a stimulus from the outside world. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 59) – How Emotions Are Made

To understand why the author should claim such things we have to remember her neuroscientist background. The source of control are neuro-imaging studies, which show brains “lighting up” under practically any conditions, for example. Simply, the activity of the brighter areas are identified as predictions.

Primitive teleology is displayed as well:

Yet your brain lumps all these instances into the same category because they can achieve the same goal, safety from [bee] stings. In fact, the goal is the only thing that holds together the category. <..> Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 92) – How Emotions Are Made

This analysis does not provide a clear and parsimonious account of human behavior. Perhaps it doesn’t have to? If we recognize psychology as a political tool, the introduction of further confusion for the layperson regarding behavior might just be instrumental. This is mostly advantageous for corporate behavioral control, where power depends not on idealistic or conceptual analysis but on power and the ability to gather huge amounts of data.

Reactionary psychologisation

The author expresses an overwhelmingly short-sighted and naive interpretation of world events:

Belief in the classical view [of emotions] can even start wars. The Gulf War in Iraq was launched, in part, because Saddam Hussein’s half-brother thought he could read the emotions of the American negotiators and informed Saddam that the United States wasn’t serious about attacking. The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces. (p. xiv)

As a real-world example, pick any extended conflict in the world: Israelis versus Palestinians, Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnians versus Serbs, Sunni versus Shia. Climbing out on a limb here, I’d like to suggest that no living member of these groups is at fault for the anger that they feel toward each other, since the conflicts in question began many generations ago. But each individual today does bear some responsibility for continuing the conflict, because it’s possible for each person to change their concepts and therefore their behavior. (p. 154)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

Once again, such psychologisation of social and political processes misses crucial factors in the persistence of mentioned conflicts and serves to divert attention from economical interests of the parties involved – relevant thoughts by Noam Chomsky and Marvin Harris have been previously cited.

Furthermore, Lisa Feldman Barrett praises the neurologist Helen S. Mayberg and believes that “mental health” problems can be treated by deep brain stimulation:

Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience. You are truly an architect of your experience. Believing is feeling.
These ideas are not just speculation. Scientists with the right equipment can change people’s affect by directly manipulating body-budgeting regions that issue predictions. Helen S. Mayberg, a pioneering neurologist, has developed a deep brain stimulation therapy for people suffering from treatment-resistant depression.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 78) – How Emotions Are Made

These statements prove to be ungrounded. The belief that behavioral problems are isolated in the activity of the brain is preposterous. Moreover, the cited methods have shown dubious results and may even include a conflict of interest.

After repeated babblings about the brain and the person as a creator or architect of one’s experience’s, the author unsurprisingly comes to a fitting conclusion:

When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts. (p. 154)

If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts. (p. 155)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

The implication is that changes to social conditions will never be prescribed because adults individually always can and have to “choose” their concepts themselves.

Cartesian dualism

Finally, it has already been argued that psychology is stranded in the 17th century mindset. How Emotions Are Made neatly illustrates this point where it is still possible to separate the self from the brain and from the mind:

It also demonstrates that you’re not at the mercy of emotions that arise unbidden to control your behavior. You are an architect of these experiences. Your river of feelings might feel like it’s flowing over you, but actually you’re the river’s source. (p. 57)

The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body but not the integrity of your mind, even though your body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are — your brain. Emotional harm is not considered real unless accompanied by physical harm. Mind and body are separate. (Let’s all raise a glass to René Descartes here.) (p. 241)

Natural selection favors a complex brain. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience. Your genes allow you, and others, to remodel your brain and therefore your mind. (p. 282)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

Conclusion – the bizarre impasse of psychology

To Barrett’s (or rather her individual history’s) credit, the book is an attempt to introduce a context based interpretation of emotions. Nevertheless, this movement is stunted by lifelong idealistic conditioning, by the sheer amount of cultural mentalistic notions and by the social acceptance of explanations that are mere explanatory fictions. These problems become more intelligible when psychology is understood not as a scientific endeavor, but rather a cultural and political one:

Indeed, psychology as a modern discipline of the self is a political apparatus of modern society to develop and sustain consumers. (p. 56)

Psychology has an explanation for everything because it locates the sources of everything within the self. (p. 64)

Historically, of course, psychological theories are shown to be full of inaccuracies, and new models are superimposed as corrections, only to be later discarded when the next fashionable, new theory emerges on the scene. This provisional nature of psychological ‘truth’ is not simply (as some psychologists would like to argue) a matter of improving techniques and accuracy, rather, it reflects the shifting political sense of what it is to be human and the adaptation of psychological ‘science’ to fit such shifts. Psychological theories, as we have noted, tend to mirror the political climate; for instance, cognitive ‘science’ mirrors the growing importance of information technology and the uniformity of global finance-based capitalism. (p. 64-65)

Jeremy Carrette & Richard King (2005) – Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion
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Reviews

Radical behaviorist leftist analysis of the Queen’s Gambit (2020)

Let’s try something new for this blog – a short radical behaviorist leftist analysis of the recent chess based series The Queens Gambit. I will just highlight and comment on some aspects of the series of interest, without digging too deep for this first time.

As is customary online, here’s a warning that there are SPOILERS ahead!

Background or socio-economic status

The series is based in the US and is a story about Beth Harmon – a chess prodigy and a woman chess world champion, dominating over the chessboard while at the same time grappling with various substance abuse problems.

One of the main themes of the series is the protagonist’s upbringing. After her mother’s death in a suicidal car crash, which Beth survived, she went on to live in an orphanage. Her mother and father were divorced and, as is revealed in the last episode, even though “her mother came from money and married into more of it”, Beth did not reside in a wealthy neighbourhood as she and her mother lived in a trailer. Afterwards, already in her teenage years, Beth was adopted. This already is quite unlikely, because, unfortunately, most adoptions happen up to the age of 5. Speaking about adoptions and troubled mothers, further points are provided by Jody Allen Crowe in his fine book “The Fatal Link” (2008). Though the book focuses on fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), the common denominator here is a problematic maternal context:

Adopted children, unfortunately, are at a very high risk of having been prenatally exposed to alcohol. American families, to avoid adopting a “crack baby” from the United States, many times have adopted undetected brain damaged FASD children from Romania, Bulgaria, and other middle European countries. The unsuspecting adoptive parents are then overwhelmed with the litany of problems as a result of the biological mother’s drinking that led to brain damage. Simply put, who are the mothers who abandon their babies or put their babies up for adoption? The vast majority are young mothers who don’t want or can’t take care of their babies. These unborn children are at great risk of being the victims of binge drinking by the young mothers.

Jody Allen Crowe (2008) – The Fatal Link

The main point here is that Beth has quite a challenging background which makes the wonder story of the series in the real world quite unlikely. We’ll see why in a moment.

Talent or hard work?

One strand in any “skill-based” wonder stories like in the Queen’s Gambit, will always be the explanation of the new found success. What led to high level of chess play – was it Beth Harmon’s innate talent? Was it hard work? Or was it luck? Or maybe the drugs?

In reality, we have to mind the fact that most chess Grandmasters or even somewhat weaker players start playing chess from an (sometimes extremely) early age and they probably come from at least somewhat affluent families/background where the children have adequate resources, access to chess clubs and connections. Also, excelling at chess (as in any sport) takes an extremely long time and time in childhood is generally easier found – no trivialities such as making food, providing for the family, planning for tournaments, booking/flights or hotels bother the upcoming prodigy. They are taken care by the parents while the child can focus solely on the chess.

Now, in Queen’s Gambit we have an unrealistic story in this respect – coming from somewhat non-optimal familial context chances of sport success are slim. The loss of parents makes the chances even slimmer. With Beth’s ban of playing chess in the orphanage for a few childhood years, grandmaster success becomes practically impossible. Without proper financial support, a person in Beth’s situation would have to work and even with a chess hobby grandmaster heights would be out of reach.

So this “underdog”, “from rags to riches”, “pull yourself by the bootstraps” story, even though glorified in the capitalist, individualized society, has only a miniscule probability of happening. Perhaps, we can name some genuine success stories coming from disadvantage (certainly not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos). Even so, mind the survivorship bias – if we focus on the percentage of people from similar contexts that have become successful (rich, famous etc.) and compare this to the overwhelming majority of non-success, we’ll come to a grim conclusion.

Feminism

One more, perhaps an inspiring to some, strand of the series is the gender of the protagonist. We have to mind that in the most part, chess is a very male-dominated activity. A woman chess champion never happened in real life while the series comes to this conclusion.

Beth Harmon casually the quite quiet girl, with a (traditionally speaking) deep and scarred inner life, seemingly not interested in mundane things (remember the girl tea party) and focused on one thing – chess. In the meantime, absolutely unrelenting over the chessboard with an aggressive attacking style and assertive in her relations, including sexual, with men in her life.

Even though breaking gender stereotypes, Beth is the best in regards of chess, still the typical gender roles are reflected neatly in the series. Speaking of chess, only the first opponent that Beth faces is a girl, all people related to the 64 squares from there on out are men – her opponents and seconds. Women participate in Beth’s life from traditional emotional contexts – most saliently her adoption mother with whom she develops a deep connection and also her “guardian angel” and childhood friend Jolene.

All in all, Beth may serve as a role model for girls/women who undertake activities mostly occupied by men – an inspiration to resist trivial temptations and work hard. Either way I would like to proceed with caution – “improving oneself” or “focusing on yourself”, i.e. individualized fighting with institutionalized inequalities for women might be as effective as banging a wall with one’s head. There is an argument to be made that economic inequality is based on gender inequality – arguably most labor in our societies is unpaid – domestic labor such as cooking, cleaning, taking care of relatives/nursing is mostly done by women and is not compensated. A fitting joke:

Economists sometimes joke that if a man marries his housekeeper, the GDP of the country declines.

Katrine Marçal (2015) – Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner (p. 52)

Let’s not wander from our leftist leanings – not addressing systemic problems as is not done in the series, will probably lead us nowhere.

Drugs

Perhaps the most visible and shocking aspect of the series are the substance abuse problems of Beth. These issues find parallels in the chess world. In the 20th century, alcohol problems were common among chess players, e.g. Tal or Alekhine. An interesting and rare recent-ish example is of Vladislav Tkachiev and his passing out in one 2009 chess tournament.

Due to rising competition, now most grandmasters probably have a stricter lifestyle regarding substance abuse. Articles such as “What chess grandmasters eat for peak concentration and performance” and “The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving” illustrate this neatly. Of course, we have to note that we are mostly speaking about a small number of top GMs, which have enough income for a more lavish lifestyle. Most people and even GMs can’t make enough money from simply playing chess and either have to teach chess or resort to other sources of income. We should also be aware that wealthier people have better nutrition, do sports and have an optimal body weight more often and generally live longer. As another joke goes (with credit and additional comment below):

The more random people people you see jogging for no reason, the higher the rent is going up.

The more random people you see jogging for no reason the higher the rent is going up

Returning to 1. d4 d5 2. c4, what about Beth Harmon and her tranquilizer and alcohol issues (or should we say blessings)? By the way, the tranquilizer is a non-existing drug Xanzolam which resembles real-life Librium. In the show, Beth is actually helped by the drug as it contributes to her incredible focus and play. Furthermore, given the 60s context, alcohol abuse for a top-level player is a very realistic attribute. Maybe the drug was the critical puzzle piece of the series and the component needed for Beth Harmon’s success in an otherwise disadvantaged complex of conditions as discussed earlier. Nevertheless, in no way can this be recommended to try at home. Or perhaps, the substance abuse serves as an obstacle for the prodigy to overcome as otherwise it would be too easy a story – maybe even too unrealistic?

West vs. East

This aspect in the series has perhaps only a secondary significance. The players from Soviet Russia are portrayed as the juggernaut of chess that are generally much stronger than counterparts in the US. This is obviously inspired by 20th century reality of chess. The eastern lands are not necessarily presented negatively – Russia is shown to be a favourable place for chess players. The main lesson to be learned from the Russians is that their GMs help one another in the series while Americans tend to be more hostile to each other. This moral of collective strength may appear as ironic or paradoxical – on the one hand self-sufficiency of Beth is promoted while on the other the importance of camaraderie is demonstrated.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the short series The Queen’s Gambit is a quality watch, with eye-pleasing 60s aesthetics, drama, relationships and well thought-through chess with the help of Garry Kasparov. Just don’t expect much of critical behavioural or leftist analysis in the series and do go watch the series if you have not already.

Categories
Leftist thought Radical behaviorism Reviews

Why behaviorology must be informed by leftist/socialist theory

Recently I have finished reading a very fine book by Stephen Ledoux published in 2014 – Running Out Of Time – Introducing Behaviorology To Help Solve Global Problems. The book is written in very much the same spirit as this blog – the emerging science of behavior (Behaviorology) and the philosophy informing it (Radical Behaviorism) are needed to understand and effectively tackle issues in our world.

Some of the ideas mentioned in the book evoked my behavior of writing this post. My personal history includes some leftist/socialist theory and some takes in the book struck me as inadequate. It seems to me that the science of behavior must be supplemented by leftist thought and I shall explain why.

Overpopulation

One of the problems discussed in the book is overpopulation. The sentiment echoes Malthusian thought:

Consider simply that the current level of procreative sex among humans on this planet is leading to the demise of planetary life, including humanity. As we mentioned in an earlier chapter, our human population is currently already at over 150 percent of the planet’s carrying capacity.

Ledoux (2014, p. 434)

While there is truth to this – there are almost 8 billion people in the world and Earth is not limitless but we shouldn’t focus only on the raw number of people but also on how many resources do people require. Here we will see a stark discrepancy between regions of the world. Most of the population growth on earth is concentrated in Africa and Asia and it must be attended to as a high birth rate is inextricably intertwined with atrocious women rights. Nevertheless, most resources are consumed elsewhere. In an article entitled “Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds” (BBC, Reddit) it is argued:

The wealthiest tenth of people consume about 20 times more energy overall than the bottom ten, wherever they live.

Even the poorest fifth of Britons consumes over five times as much energy per person as the bottom billion in India.

Roger Harrabin (2020-03-16) – Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds

So, only focusing on the population number is misleading as even a lifestyle of a relatively small quantity of people can be unsustainable. Not every person consumes the same amount of resources and we need both attending to the population growth and finding a sustainable lifestyle for everyone. Without this point, behaviorological analyses run the risk (in traditional terms) of western-centrism, eurocentrism and even xenophobia. We cannot frame the problem in terms of a lecherous third world that engages in procreative sex and that they need “solutions” from us “enlightened behaviorists”. We need solutions for the unsustainable lifestyle in the western world as well, for overpopulation and overconsumption.

Progressive Neural Emotional Therapy (PNET)

Another topic discussed in the book is this area of Applied Behaviorological Research:

We can define Progressive Neural Emotional Therapy (PNET) as the refined and standardized practice of what people once inadequately described as a kind of relaxation training and which we now might better describe as successive muscular–emotional re–conditioning. This practice reduces the negative effects of anxiety and stress, which are emotional and physical factors that we have long associated with numerous neuro–emotional maladaptive behaviors. (p. 380)

From examples like these, think about the extensive, health–related, preventative–medicine possibilities that PNET could provide if everyone routinely received half a dozen PNET training sessions before they finished high school, including the transfer training to continue PNET on their own regularly or as needed. (p. 384)

Ledoux (2014)

Such declarations about anxiety and stress reduction therapies that “really work” remind me of promotions regarding relaxation, mindfulness training, yoga or other spiritual activities. While scientific practice of PNET may have its uses, the danger here and a word of caution is that these procedures inevitably lead to solutions inside a person – the problem morphs from external contingencies to an individual, to internalized stress. Fortunately, we have a book that does this topic justice – it is called “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality”:

I am skeptical. Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary — it just helps people cope. However, it could also be making things worse. Instead of encouraging radical action, it says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live. And yet mindfulness zealots believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgment has the revolutionary power to transform the whole world. It’s magical thinking on steroids. (p. 6)

Mindfulness advocates, perhaps unwittingly, are providing support for the status quo. Rather than discussing how attention is monetized and manipulated by corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple, they locate the crisis in our minds. (p. 7)

The discourse of stress has ideological components, and the mindfulness movement adopts these to build a whole industry around the stressed subject. (p. 23)

In other words, there is nothing inherently wrong with our modern age. It’s just our maladaptive responses that make us unhappy. Having inherited this flawed biology, it is up to us to compensate and self-correct. (p. 27)

Ronald Purser (2019) – McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

Let’s be careful in instructing people to “fix themselves” when the environment is the problem. It does not seem beneficial to ignore structural causes, to disarm people from trying to better the world around them.

Recycling

Yet another call for action regarding recycling seems to be unnecessarily individualistic:

This success could begin with the practice of providing reinforcers for recycling, rather than charging people money for recycling, or increasing the response effort for recycling, or merely coercing people to recycle by just punishing them when they throw recyclables in the trash. (p. 375)

For example, let’s analyze and adjust our routine cultural contingencies so that they better condition the effectiveness of green values like the reinforcers of lifestyle sustainability at a lower population level. (p. 438)

Ledoux (2014)

One cannot oppose the practice of saving and reusing materials and this really is a behavior problem, but is the issue only at the lower population level? A point that this Story of Stuff video makes clear, there are multiple processes in the consumption cycle – resource extraction, production, transportation, consumption, dealing with the waste etc. Even recycling requires resources and it is not possible to recycle everything. Even if everyone would recycle it would not achieve much in a system based on endless consumption and growth. We have to be careful altering individual behavior without looking at and revamping the capitalistic neoliberal economic structure that causes an unsustainable lifestyle.

Gun violence

A peculiar point is raised in the book:

All citizens benefit when criminal activity decreases as a result of, or at least in the presence of, laws that recognize the right of responsible armed self defense, as in the right–to–carry–concealed–arms laws of most states. In such states, any potential victim could be a law–abiding citizen legally carrying a concealed self–defense firearm thereby making, through processes like generalization, all such potential victims—whether carrying or not—less evocative of the illegal behaviors of criminals or would–be criminals.

Ledoux (2014, 425-426)

While there seems to be truth in a statistic the author states that violent crime in the US has reduced since the 1990s, this issue needs a word of caution. As is stated in the quote, there is a positive sentiment regarding right-to-carry-concealed-arms laws combating violent crime. I see two problems with this view:

  1. In recent years both violent crime and gun violence in the US seem to have stopped falling and either plateaued or even increased somewhat (Wikipedia; BBC). Furthermore, when compared with other high-income countries, US statistics look quite grim – both homicide and suicide rates by guns are much higher than elsewhere.
  2. We may inadvertently demonize and put the blame on one of the most vulnerable group of society – so called criminals – whose behavior, let’s not forget, is also the result of their socio-economic conditions and contingencies. Studies do suggest that there is a relationship between poverty and crime, for example. Benediktas Gelūnas expresses the point better than I could:

Even the slightest knowledge of sociology does not allow to consider one’s social status and crime purely as a matter of individual choice (rather the opposite), and any pursuit of justice must take this into account.

Benediktas Gelūnas (2018-10-22) – “Kaip angelai sargai politikos nematė, arba Ką daryti, jei ko išsigandai” – in “Gyvenimas per brangus”

So we should not do the work of the national rifle association (NRA) in promoting “gun rights” when it already spends hefty amounts in lobbying.

Measures to stop smoking

The final topic I would like to discuss is stopping smoking. The author goes a great length in detailing a behavioristically based treatment program to help people stop smoking. The procedure includes multiple techniques addressing most aspects of having a smoke including “Satiation smoking”, “Difficult to obtain”, “Alternative behaviors”, “Pure activity”, “Anti-social chair”, “Quitter’s procedure” and others. Now what bothered me is not the procedure but another aspect regarding reducing smoking:

Presumably one or another as yet unaddressed smoking–evoking variable has momentarily raised the probability of smoking. Some of these variables are essentially unaddressable. For example, only a rare client, such as the president of a college campus, would have the authority to ban, say, cigarette vending machines from the work place. Yet such a measure would be required to minimize the smoking–evoking stimulus–control effects of these machines in this environment. Nevertheless, such measures are simply beyond normal reach.

Ledoux (2014, p. 398)

One could label this as a defeatist attitude – some variables such as a cigarette vending machine in the work place is unaddressable. I would be inclined to say that no variables that are culturally developed should be flagged as beyond reach or beyond discussion. If we follow leftist thought and strive to distribute power in the society, we should encourage and empower people to seek changes and solutions in all areas of the environment, including the workplace.

Summary

All people, including me, anyone reading this, and the author of the book Running Out Of Time – Introducing Behaviorology To Help Solve Global Problems Stephen Ledoux act according to their own personal histories. As detailed in this post, I argue that in addition to behaviorological knowledge we need contingencies including socialist and leftist thought so that we would not be led astray searching for solutions in wrong places.

But in any case, even if the author does not seem to have been influenced by leftist thought, we can see that analyzing contingencies in the real world, inevitably includes discovering bizarre (to put it mildly) practices, for example in the for-profit health care system. As the topic of dignified dying is discussed, problems arise when treating terminally ill patients against their preference statements:

Sometimes this even extends to shipping such patients off to often privately owned, for–profit “hospitals” specializing in procedures specifically designed mainly to keep patients bodily “alive” for as long as possible, regardless of their experience, while milking every possible dollar from the “health” care system.

Ledoux (2014, p. 505)

In conclusion – radical behaviorist and leftist thought complement each other and must be developed and applied having the other in mind.

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