The philosophy of radical behaviorism and the science of behavior leaves one with a major question – what is the status of psychology? What is the scientific standing of this field? How to interpret the widespread and popular explanations of behavior? In this post, I shall argue that psychology is not and cannot be considered a science.
Definition and subject matter
Let’s start at the very foundation. Psychology is defined as the study of the mind and behavior – such a definition is provided by the APA (American Psychological Association). Therein lies a major problem and we must critically evaluate the concept of the mind. Despite being the object of study, it is impossible to properly define – we cannot find a physical existence of such a thing beyond naming the conditions under which we utter the word mind.
What makes psychology pseudo-scientific is not the methods employed but it’s philosophy and subject matter. The field is marred with similar reifications, unnecessary and unworkable ideas for scientific analysis. All in all, psychology still remains in the 17th century pre-scientific Cartesian mind-body dualism.
Under closer inspection one can see, that most concepts employed in psychology are created seemingly out of thin air, while observable and measurable behavior serves as a proxy for supposed inner workings. Ideas are liberally and often uncritically borrowed from folk psychology. To illustrate the point, let us visit Chomsky’s and Mischel’s views:
Behavior is evidence. It’s not what you are studying; what you are studying is competence, capacity. If you study man’s insight you want to know what is going on in his brain; behavior gives the evidence for that. But the study of behavior is like calling physics ‘‘meter-reading science’’ because meter readings are the data. But in a serious field, you wouldn’t identify the subject with the study of the data.
Noam Chomsky in Virue´s-Ortega (2006, p. 245) – The Case Against B. F. Skinner 45 Years Later – An Encounter With N. Chomsky
Now the term “behavior” has been expanded to include virtually anything that an organism does, overtly or covertly, in relation to extremely complex social and interpersonal events. Consider, for example, “aggression,” “anxiety,” “defense,” “dependency,” “self-concepts,” “self-control,” “self-reinforcement.” Such categories go considerably beyond self-evident behavior descriptions. A category like aggression involves inferences about the subject’s intentions (e.g., harming another versus accidental injury) and abstractions about behavior, rather than mere physical description of actions and utterances.
Walter Mischel (1973, p. 268) – Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality
Both authors are conditioned to speak about things beyond behavior. Mischel seemingly does not recognize that formation of verbal behavior depends on individual history and also that nouns do not necessarily signify the physical reality of the word. Chomsky stumbles when identifying the proper subject matter of behavioral science – in a “serious field” one shouldn’t go around conjuring things. Skinner has a recommendation:
But the really great oversimplification is the traditional appeal to states of mind, feelings, and other aspects of the autonomous man which a behavioural analysis is replacing. The ease with which mentalistic explanations can be invented on the spot is perhaps the best gauge of how little attention we should pay to them.
B. F. Skinner (1971, p. 157) – Beyond Freedom And Dignity
Stated succinctly, psychology has pseudo-scientific features – non-natural phenomena are allowed, the natural history of an individual organism is not adequately considered and often ignored, teleological as well as inner agent/free-will statements are common and the sheer quantity of terminology is unmanageable. For this last point, one can simply review some studies of cognitive psychology and count the listed number of concepts, to name a few – motivation, emotions, feelings, memory, goals, personality, depression, self-efficacy, confidence, consciousness, instinct etc. No scientific philosophy is in such a milieu possible.
One must note that the application of the scientific method does not make a field a science. Astrology, for example, might employ some scientific methods, observe movements of the celestial bodies, demonstrate accurate star charts, but we are not misled by these. Besides, a part of psychology called behavior analysis that actually follows radical behaviorist principles is undeservedly undervalued – operant principles are granted only a small role in behavior explanation. This impedes the evolution of the field considerably.
Another bizarre feature of psychology is its relation to animal studies, that can fittingly be called a schism. Psychologists most often display an allergy to generalize findings found in animal studies to humans. Actually, the reverse has become more preponderant – we see a frenzy of anthropomorphisation (e.g. bees and numbers – “We’ve learned bees can understand zero and do basic math, and now a new study shows their tiny insect brains may be capable of connecting symbols to numbers.”). Furthermore, how does the idea of the mind, an anthropocentric concept, contribute in understanding animal behavior?
A science of behavior in contrast, is a subdivision of biology, and no critical problems arise when comparing animal and human behavior. One can argue that fundamental behavioral principles are not to be studied in humans because sufficient control of all the historic variables is not possible. Furthermore, genetic studies have model organisms such as e. coli bacteria, yeast, roundworms, thale cress plant, fruit fly, zebrafish, mice; correspondingly behaviorology has Thornidikian cats, Pavlovian dogs and Skinnerian mice and pigeons – animal studies help us establish general principles of both genetics and behavior.
Circularity
The importance of the following point is so great, that it has to be stressed – most psychological explanations and concepts are circular in nature. Take intelligence for example. High intelligence allegedly explains behavior such as high scores for aptitude tests, but the only way to know that a person has a high intelligence are the same aptitude tests:
Not only do psychologists describe their subject matter in non-parsimonious—mentalistic—terms, they explain the behavior they do observe as being caused by the very cognitive processes they can never observe or measure. Such explanations are circular (Skinner called them explanatory fictions) in that the only evidence of the cognitive processes is the very behaviors they are trying to explain in the first place. When we are given circular explanations, we are being bamboozled into thinking that the behavior has been explained when it hasn’t. Or as Skinner has written, such explanations function to “allay curiosity and to bring inquiry to an end.”
Henry D. Schlinger Jr. (2019) – All’s Behavior – And the Rest Is Naught in OPERANTS_Q2_2019
Criteria of science
Referring to another article, 5 criteria are named for a field to be considered a science. They are:
- Clearly defined terminology
- Quantifiability
- Highly controlled experimental conditions
- Reproducibility
- Predictability and testability
Psychology does not meet the 5 criteria for a field to be considered scientific. We already visited the terminology issues. The problem of quantifiability naturally follows the undefinable concepts. Regarding the other points, control in human studies is often limited, historical variables are not adequately considered and self-report correlational studies are generally of dubious value. Moreover, psychology and social sciences are perpetually experiencing a reproducibility crisis. The cumulative nature of science in psychology is hardly to be found.
Due to the paucity of meaningful enduring results of psychological research, psychology has never condensed into a consistent, monolithic field. Therefore no proper foundation to psychology exists and it is illustrated by lack of proper introductory materials with textbooks being hodgepodge collections of different subjects with completely different terminology e.g. David Myers – Psychology:
In the typical introductory textbook, each chapter covers one of the various subfields of psychology. Collectively, the chapters provide a broad survey of topics, but in a way that is more patchwork than coherent. There is no overarching framework to organize and integrate the chapters, no basis for treating some material as basic and other material as derivative or advanced. Each chapter is self-contained, presenting its material in terms of the distinctive conceptual language typical of the subfield. The impression one gets is that psychology is a loose federation of relatively independent subfields, each with its own theoretical concerns and conceptual language, rather than a unified scientific discipline.
Textbooks that give high priority to the most up-to-date research contribute further to the sense that psychology is fragmented. Such textbooks can be useful, certainly, in providing a sort of snapshot or status report on what researchers at a particular time find most interesting. But the material cited is not necessarily of lasting significance. It is often the case that the “hot” topics of one period become passe in the next, and the patterns of changing “hotness” do not, in retrospect, always seem like progress. Textbooks that emphasize current research interests for the sake of being current can become dated quickly, and the field they describe can appear faddish.
Richard L. Shull (1995, p. 14) – Foreword II to F. S. Keller & W. N. Schoenfeld (1950) – Principles of Psychology
Psychological research
We can visit thoughts by other authors to identify additional problems in the scientific undertaking of psychology. Firstly, regarding the replication crisis and comparisons of statistical results with other fields:
This can happen in any field, but the replication crisis has unveiled a surprising resistance to the concept of replication within psychological science. (p. 529)
However, and as the second point, even had they been meaningful statistically, they were nonetheless an “apples and oranges” comparison. Psychological research very often has to contend with “proxy” measures that estimate the actual behavior of interest. Neither laboratory measures of behavior sampled under unrealistic and unnatural circumstances nor self-report surveys are a true measure of most of the behaviors that interest us. Thus, even for the best measures of behavior, there are issues related to reliability and validity. However, many medical epidemiological studies measure mortality or pathology rates that are not proxy measures; put simply, death is a perfectly reliable and valid measure of death. Thus, overzealous comparisons between psychological and medical research are fraught and potentially do more to make the field appear desperate rather than rigorous. (p. 537)
Ferguson (2015) – “Everybody Knows Psychology Is Not a Real Science”
Secondly, regarding biases in psychological research and general shakiness of the results:
As they are not only researchers, but also ordinary people, they can easily take their participants’ role and observe their own reactions to the candidate stimuli. Such an intuitive selection process will typically favor those stimuli that happen to bring about the expected phenomenon, making mental simulation an omnipresent source of bias in behavioral research.
Although commonly treated as one of psychology’s best-established phenomena, overconfidence is largely confined to studies in which judgment items were selected intuitively, presumably with a good feeling of which tricky knowledge questions will produce the desired effect.
Running many experiments using different stimuli but only reporting a single study that yields the desired result would be certainly regarded as illegitimate. However, if the same researcher runs and reports only one ‘‘main study’’ with the intended outcome, nobody would care about ‘‘pilot testing’’ used to select the stimuli that bring about that outcome.
Fiedler (2011, p. 165) – Voodoo Correlations Are Everywhere – Not Only in Neuroscience
Theology with statistics
Psychologists might find comfort in the fact that their field is not the only one that is misleadingly called a science. Yanis Varoufakis in a chapter entitled Theology with equations contests the notion of economics as a science:
Many people will tell you that your father doesn’t know what he’s talking about; that economics is a science. That just as physics uses mathematical models to describe nature, so economics uses mathematical models to reveal the workings of the economy. This is nonsense.
Economists do make use of lovely mathematical models and an army of statistical tools and data. But this does not really make them scientists, at least not in the same way that physicists are scientists. Unlike physics, in which nature is the impartial judge of all predictions, economics can never be subjected to impartial tests.
When economists insist that they too are scientists because they use mathematics, they are no different from astrologists protesting that they are just as scientific as astronomers because they also use computers and complicated charts.
But were we to confess that we are at best worldly philosophers, it is unlikely we would continue to be so handsomely rewarded by the ruling class of a market society whose legitimacy we provide by pretending to be scientists.
Yanis Varoufakis (2013, p. 118) – Talking to My Daughter About the Economy
The argument applies with full force to psychology as well. Difficult statistical models, explanatory or confirmatory factor analyses, mediational or moderational analyses, cluster analyses, multi-level modelling cannot salvage a faulty philosophy, reified concepts, poor quality data or studies without proper variable control.
So much for statistics. Now, what about the theology part? In the aptly named book What Causes Human Behavior – Stars, Selves or Contingencies? (2017) Stephen Ledoux explains:
In addition, the agential entities in the secular mysticism of psychology merely present a scaled–down version of the agential–entity power of theological mysticisms. Supposedly, for example, our culturally common heavenly maxi–god can move mountains. However, inner–agent mini gods (e.g., souls, minds, psyches, or selves) can only move body parts (e.g., arms and legs).
Stephen Ledoux (2017, p. 122) – What Causes Human Behavior – Stars, Selves or Contingencies
We can also visit a beloved idea by New Age Atheists – the Occam’s Razor. This clique would swear by following scientific principles but come human behavior, the objective monistic outlook (quite expectedly by now) breaks down. The idea is also known as the Lloyd Morgan’s Cannon – psychology violates fundamental scientific principles of parsimony:
In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.
F. S. Keller (1958-1959, p. 31) – Supplementary Notes in F. S. Keller & W. N. Schoenfeld (1950) – Principles of Psychology
It’s cultural (isn’t everything though?)
It should be clear that psychology suffers from an inadequate philosophy, but one may look at the issue from another standpoint. Let’s not forget that scientists are also behaving organisms and the “science” done is conditioned by the wider political, ideological and social context. It won’t come as a surprise that psychological research is susceptible to private funding, wealthy interests and corporate adoption:
Yet, each of these critics and, for the most part, the majority of other critics of contemporary psychology, with few exceptions (e.g., see Gergen, 1978; Gergen & Morawski, Note 3), have failed to go beyond the threshold that their critique suggests. I believe that the step beyond has eluded them because it would demand a radical break not only with the existing tradition in psychology but also with psychology’s relation to society: This step beyond challenges some of the major value assumptions that have governed Western thought and that continue to serve particular interests and particular social arrangements and practices. (p. 733)
Furthermore, not only are these mental operations cut off from their objective roots in social and historical practice, but also, in being located within the mind of the individual, they cut off people from effective action to change their circumstances rather than their subjective understanding of these circumstances. (p. 733)
Reified cognition and reified psychological processes take what is empirically observed, abstract it from the particular sociohistorical conditions of its constitution, and grant it a timeless, objective standing. (p. 737)
Psychological reifications clothe existing social arrangements in terms of basic and inevitable characteristics of individual psychological functioning; this inadvertently authenticates the status quo, but now in a disguised psychological costume. What has been mediated by a sociohistorical process—the forms and contents of human consciousness and of individual psychological experience—is treated as though it were an “in-itself,” a reality independent of these very origins. (p. 738)
However, if psychology insistently turns its back on its reifying tendencies, it will continue uncritically to affirm existing social arrangements even while it purports simply to be discovering and describing the nature of human realities. The dual reductions of subjectivism and individualism carry the seeds of the psychological reifications that permit ideology to reign because of our ignorance of and blindness to its very presence. (p. 739)
Sampson (1981) – Cognitive Psychology as Ideology
Concluding remarks
Psychology is not a science – as was argued in this post, most of the concepts psychologists employ are hardly anything more than explanatory fictions. Transition to strict materialism in science was and always is filled with strife, bile and denial. Psychology failing to do this in the middle of the 20th century is becoming a dead-end. Even it’s contemporary philosophical ideas already belong in the faculties of history, where they will eventually end up, but due to cultural inertia and power structures likely later rather than sooner:
The manifest inability of our overspecialized scientific establishment to say anything coherent about the causes of lifestyles does not arise from any intrinsic lawlessness of lifestyle phenomena. Rather, I think it is the result of bestowing premium rewards on specialists who never threaten a fact with a theory. A proportionate relationship such as has existed for some time now between the volume of social research and the depth of social confusion can mean only one thing: the aggregate social function of all that research is to prevent people from understanding the causes of their social life.
Marvin Harris (1974, p. vii) – Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches – The Riddles of Culture
One might very well wonder how cultural idealism, which is devoid of retrodictive or predictive principles, has been selected for and become dominant in anthropology and other social sciences. The answer may be quite simple: The majority of American social scientists are paid to prove that human behavior at both the psychological and cultural level is primarily a result of will or chance. Convinced that there are no nomothetic principles to be found, they don’t bother to look for them—and hence are never in any great danger of finding any.
This behavior—to continue to speculate—has been selected for because in our own particular form of hierarchical state society, the hungry, unemployed, and otherwise frustrated and unfulfilled majority are expected to blame their losses on wrong attitudes, bad values, weak wills, and lousy luck, rather than on the Alice-in-Wonderland design of the sociocultural system which governs their lives.
Marvin Harris (1986) in Kangas (2007, p. 45) – Cultural Materialism and Behavior Analysis, An Introduction to Harris
Radical behaviorist leftist 