Tag: Stephen Ledoux

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Radical behaviorism

Why do birds build nests?

A proper scientific philosophy of behavior may allow one to tackle traditionally inexplicable and impenetrable questions. One example thereof is nest building in animals – chiefly but non-exclusively in birds. How does such a seemingly complex set of behaviors arise in every generation despite no explicit learning? Radical behaviorist theory will lead the explanatory way.

Traditional notions

Judging by the first paragraph, one might get an impression that there is a dearth of explanations for nest building. Of course, that is not the case as many variations may be found. Nevertheless, after getting acquainted with widely espoused arguments, one will be left wanting for more.

Most reasoning in the current topic is fallacious and marred by teleological overtones. It might be said that birds build nests “to lay eggs and keep them safe, to protect against predators, to raise chicks, to improve survival chances”. The words “to” or “in order to” should raise alarm bells for any scientifically minded person as these are references to the future result and thus cannot possibly be an explanation for current behavior.

Another explanation is to refer to the “nest building instinct” or “nesting instinct” that the animal supposedly possesses. We will see shortly why this reasoning is circular and fictitious. A more sophisticated sounding variation here is to speak of genetic memory. Complicated as it may sound, it does only restate the initial problem in other words without invoking any explanations for the behavior. Let’s see what behaviorist theory has to offer.

Science of behavior to the fray

Let’s enjoy B.F. Skinner’s thoughts on the subject from the 1974 book About Behaviorism, in Chapter 3 Innate Behavior, section Intermingling of Contingencies of Survival and Reinforcement:

Imprinting. Operant conditioning and natural selection are combined in the so-called imprinting of a newly hatched duckling. In its natural environment, the young duckling moves toward its mother and follows her as she moves about. The behavior has obvious survival value. When no duck is present, the duckling behaves in much the same way with respect to other objects. (In Utopia, Thomas More reported, the chicks hatched in an incubator followed those who fed and cared for them.) Recently it has been shown that a young duckling will come to approach and follow any moving object, particularly if it is about the same size as a duck – for example, a shoe box. Evidently survival is sufficiently well served even if the behavior is not under the control of the specific visual features of a duck. Merely approaching and following is enough.
Even so, that is not a correct statement of what happens. What the duckling inherits is the capacity to be reinforced by maintaining or reducing the distance between itself and a moving object. In the natural environment, and in the laboratory in which imprinting is studied, approaching and following have these consequences, but the contingencies can be changed. A mechanical system can be constructed in which movement toward an object causes the object to move rapidly away, while movement away from the object causes it to come closer. Under these conditions, the duckling will move away from the object rather than approach or follow it. A duckling will learn to peck a spot on the wall if pecking brings the object closer. Only by knowing what and how the duckling learns during its lifetime can we be sure of what it is equipped to do at birth.

B.F. Skinner (1974, p. 40) – About Behaviorism

So we have to grapple with the fact that there are numerous instances of environment change that may reinforce behavior – what type of changes do so depend on the contingencies of survival of the species (or genetic history). Now, we can focus more specifically on instincts and nests. Here thoughts by Stephen Ledoux will enlighten us (published in 2013 in the Journal of Behaviorology, originally expressed in 1988):

Let me give an example. People often think of birds, and I pick another species, because it’s important to realize that we are not studying only human behavior, although that is our main concern at this point. But, for instance, people often look at birds and say gee birds have a nest–building instinct. Why do they build nests? Because they have a nest building instinct. How do you know they have a nest building instinct? Because they build nests. There is a certain circularity there, which is a problem. What we would prefer to say is that birds are pre–wired, in other words, their genetic structure is such that they are susceptible to having their actions of nest building reinforced by stimulus complexes such as those tightly intertwined twigs and weeds, which would not affect us at all. We could care less whether the weeds were intertwined. Doing the actions of building that nest is reinforced by that complex, and what that means is, the bird makes those actions more, and ends up building a nest. In a sense we would also look at the evolutionary history. Birds that didn’t build, or (no). Birds that were not adequately reinforced by the tightness of the sticks and weeds in their nests, built sloppy nests, and their eggs fell out, and that genetic pre–disposition did not get passed on. Those birds died out.

Stephen Ledoux – August 1988 Public Radio Interview of the Organizers of the First Behaviorology Convention (including Lawrence Fraley, Pat McKeown, Ernest Vargas and Julie Vargas) in Journal of Behaviorology (2013) 16(1) p. 17

At this point we know that if an organism displays any behavior, both contingencies of survival and contingencies of reinforcement affected the organism in particular ways for it to happen. As Skinner and Ledoux explained, almost any behavior might be reinforced with particular environmental changes where the organism is susceptible to reinforcement. The environmental changes might be increasing glucose levels in the bloodstream (eating), an approaching object (imprinting), building materials or intertwining twigs (nest building).

To put this point to rest, let’s visit thoughts from a couple of papers:

Paper strips served as an adequate reinforcement for the acquisition and maintenance of fixed-ratio barpressing in two pregnant rats. Prior to parturition, only a small daily nest was built and barpressing ocurred only in the dark part of the lighting cycle. Following parturition, barpressing for nesting material greatly increased, and sustained periods of responding alternated with nest-building and pup-care activities.

Oley & Slotnick (1970, p. 41) – Nesting material as a reinforcement for operant behavior in the rat

Nest building in mice has been shown to support key pressing (Roper, 1973b, 1975), but only under conditions in which the animal was able to perform the whole nest building sequence. (p. 42)

The most likely explanation of the decline in carrying is that it is inhibited by feedback from the nest or from nest building activities. It was not caused by the physical impossibility of getting more paper into the nest box, since the latter was rarely more than half filled, and I have observed the accumulation of much larger nests in pregnant animals. Since mice which have just completed a nest can be induced to recommence building immediately by removal of the nest (Roper, unpublished), it seems likely that the nest itself is a source of inhibitory feedback. (p. 53)

Roper (1976) – Self-Sustaining Activities and Reinforcement in the Nest Building Behaviour of Mice

Speaking more generally, we may acquaint ourselves with the classic 1950 paper by Paul Meehl where he provides analysis regarding the Law of Effect, which Skinner eventually named selection by consequences. Meehl argues that the idea of The Law of Effect includes no circularity and proposes both The Weak Law of Effect and The Strong Law of Effect:

e. Experimental Propositions: Sunflower seeds may be used to strengthen lever pressing, chain pulling, etc. In general, sunflower seeds may be used to strengthen all learnable responses in the rat. (This asserts the generality of the reinforcing effect of sunflower seeds and is what I am calling a trans-situational reinforcer law.)
f. Definition: A trans-situational reinforcer is a stimulus which will strengthen all learnable responses. <..> This definition with the immediately preceding experimental propositions enables us to say, “Sunflower seeds are a trans-situational reinforcer.”

g. Experimental Proposition; All reinforcers are trans-situational. (The Weak Law of Effect.)
h. Experimental Proposition: Every increment in strength involves a trans-situational reinforcer. (The Strong Law of Effect.)

Meehl (1950, p. 73) – On the Circularity of the Law of Effect

In other words:

  • The Weak Law of Effect – All reinforcers can strengthen a variety of behavior.
  • The Strong Law of Effect – All “learned” changes in behavior involve reinforcers (learned meaning behavioral change not due to trauma for example).

Conclusion

Once again, we see the value of radical behaviorist analysis. Even if we don’t know the reasons for a specific instance of behavior, we are now equipped to look at the right place – contingencies of survival and contingencies of reinforcement (or the history of the species and the individual).

Categories
Radical behaviorism

Behaviorism revisited

In 2021, we already have more than a hundred years of behavioral science and philosophy:

Behaviorism began with a 1913 article in Psychological Review by John Broadus Watson, chair of the psychology department at John Hopkins University. For the next hundred years much of the story of behaviorism has been the rise and fall and rise again in the influence of Burrhus Frederic Skinner, long-time psychology professor at Harvard University. Writing in Science in 1963, Skinner described Watson’s article as “the first clear, if rather noisy, proposal that psychology be regarded simply as the science of behavior.”

Richard Gilbert (2013, p. 3) – Behaviorism at 100 – An American History

In the latest issue of the B.F. Skinner Foundation’s magazine Operants Parvene Farhoody authored an article entitled Animal Training Revisited. Here, Farhoody asserts that behaviorism is a branch of biology and an independent science:

From the beginning, Skinner’s discovery and approach to describing behavior as a basic science has contradicted other explanations of behavior across philosophy, psychology, and theology. This is because the basic tenet of operant conditioning is that the control of all organisms lies outside the organism. (p. 10)

The experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) is a basic science that requires the same use of scientific method to separate hypothesis from validated theory and opinion from scientific fact. Therefore, it follows that those who have alternative explanations about why behavior occurs must use the same technical language set forth by EAB to demonstrate that previous findings are unsupported.
To this day, no such evidence has been brought forward to successfully refute Skinner’s basic findings that the behavior of all organisms is caused by contingencies of reinforcement and punishment that exist within environments—not within organisms. In contrast, data continue to be compiled that strengthen the fundamental principles of operant conditioning and advance our understanding of the four fundamental forces that control behavior —positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment. These forces, like the force of gravity, are neither good nor bad; they are descriptions of naturally occurring phenomena that act upon all organisms. (p. 11)

Parvene Farhoody (2021) – Animal Training Revisited in Operants, 2021 (2)

Continuing on, an overview of the contemporary status of the behavioral enterprise is provided:

Basic science often discovers things that individuals and society are not ready to hear. Most know the consequences to Galileo for stating that the earth was not the center of the universe when he lived in a culture steeped in Christian theology. To accept Galileo’s measures of the observable universe, people could no longer believe the information they had been taught from childhood. One might say that Skinner’s findings were the behavioral equivalent of Galileo’s discovery. Skinner stated that organisms are not the center of their own universe and that human and nonhuman animals are therefore not initiating agents of their own actions. This is in direct contrast to what almost every human being is taught to believe and remains in conflict with what is said in all other branches of psychology/behavior science. In his time, Galileo expressed his frustration that those who condemned him would not even look at his data. How could he argue his own innocence if people would not look at what he had found? The implications of Skinner’s findings were as expansive as Galileo’s, and this new way of looking at behavior was perhaps even more difficult to accept than altering a perception of the universe outside oneself. Should we be surprised, then, that in a mere blink of time—83 years—scientists and laymen alike continue to fight against Skinner’s discovery by ignoring the findings of a science that questions what a person believes about why they do what they do? Should we be surprised that today, most of those claiming expertise in the science of behavior disregard or circumvent Skinner’s basic scientific findings? (p. 11)

Parvene Farhoody (2021) – Animal Training Revisited in Operants, 2021 (2)

Any person aware of B.F. Skinner’s (and others) essential behaviorist findings and ideas, will have felt the frustration in seeing idealistic psychologised explanations of human behavior persist and helplessness when trying to disseminate some basic knowledge of radical behaviorist philosophy.

As I have discussed previously in Psychology is a pseudoscience, mentalism rather than retreating, has been advancing further into the understanding of animal behavior and Farhoody notices this in the context of animal training – particularly salient culprits are the words “choice” and “control”:

A fundamental misrepresentation of operant conditioning is found in the colloquial statement “giving the animal choice and control” over its environment. We can forgive the colloquial verbal behavior but not the explanatory fiction being touted as scientific fact—specifically as behavior analytic fact. Animals do not control their environment; animals are controlled by their environment. Choice is not a cause of behavior. Control is not a cause of behavior. These are cognitive explanatory fictions that do not explain why an animal exhibits behavior X and not behavior Y or Z. (p. 12)

Behavior does not change because the animal has “made a choice” or “tried to control its environment” or “feels empowered” by “making its own decision.” Such colloquial use of language has led to preposterous circular statements such as “control is a primary reinforcer.” Such a statement twists Skinner’s profound discussion of consequences as feedback from the environment into a circular, reified construct called “control.” (p. 12)

In his 1966 essay, What is the Experimental Analysis of Behavior?, Skinner stated that such cognitive circular explanations of why behavior occurs results when one “has not been able to relate the behavior to the contingencies.” (p. 12)

If a final behavior has been carefully considered by the animal’s caretakers, and training has been deemed necessary for the health and welfare of the animal, then such lack of stimulus control is the result of training failure and not animal “choice.” (p. 13)

Parvene Farhoody (2021) – Animal Training Revisited in Operants, 2021 (2)

To illustrate Farhoody’s point, one does not need look far – in the same issue of Operants, the article Behavior Analysis and the Shaping of the Modern Zoo, which ironically directly follows the article highlighted in this blog post, includes an absurd paragraph:

Thus, contemporary animal training, not unlike much of ABA, has the benefit of giving animals the ability to “choose” if they will be involved in any procedure. The focus on rewards, much in line with ABA’s philosophical and ethical underpinnings, have given zoo animals control over their environment. Animals can be asked (i.e., prompted/cued), “can you do this for me?”, and the consequences for doing so are the appetitive rewards/reinforcers that maintain all operant behavior.

Eduardo J. Fernandez (2021, p. 14) – Behavior Analysis and the Shaping of the Modern Zoo

One may recognize in the citation above another fault-ridden word in the context of behaviorism – “reward”. This word is often considered as a synonym of reinforcement, but such usage is misleading. It has many additional unscientific connotations and is preferred in the idealistic cognitive, self-help (e.g. Atomic Habits), psychological discourse. To clarify issues with the word, let’s turn to proper literature:

Interchanging the terms reinforcers and rewards presents problems, because rewards are not necessarily reinforcers. Rewards are stimuli that others think should reinforce your behavior, perhaps because these stimuli reinforce their behavior. However, a reward has not yet met the definition of reinforcers, at least with respect to the behavior of the organism of concern, possibly you. Remember, we have tested and observed reinforcers being stimuli the occurrence of which, immediately after a response, makes the evocative stimulus for that kind of response more effective across subsequent occasions. Rewards receive no such testing. Besides, if and when a reward meets this definition after testing, then we should call it a reinforcer, not a reward. Also, the concept of rewards supports the false and scientifically irrelevant notion of personal agency. How? A reward is for “you” (as the inner agent inside the particular carbon unit that others tact with your name). Furthermore a reward is for you rather than for your behavior, whereas reinforcers—as defined—do not reinforce you; they only reinforce behavior.

Stephen F. Ledoux (2014, p. 267-268) – Running Out Of Time – Introducing Behaviorology To Help Solve Global Problems

This “scientific” (or rather “pseudoscientific”) vocabulary stems from interests of the economic elite where the individualistic, liberal discourse based on “free-will” is most instrumental. No wonder widespread knowledge is still tainted by cognitive fallacies and Skinner’s science is in danger:

Colloquial language can do a great disservice to the genuine student of behavior who wishes to learn about operant conditioning and understand stimulus control. It is a frightening time for those seeking deeper knowledge in the experimental analysis of behavior and its application. When those hailed as experts at teaching operant conditioning misrepresent Skinner’s most basic findings while professing to be one of his followers, their teaching more closely resembles religious zealotry than the expansion of an elegant and far-reaching science. Only when one abandons cognitive fictions can one truly begin to learn what stimulus control means and how to teach in ways that are maximally effective and minimally restrictive; only then does one begin an education in the natural phenomenon called operant conditioning. When personal agendas become more important than scientific discovery, we can predict that those most dedicated to comprehensive scientific analysis will encounter increasing pressures to accept popular opinion. This is found in many areas of the animal-training community: Those who do not accept overly simplistic representations of a complex science encounter consequences deleterious to their professional standing. (p. 13)

The field of behavior analysis is experiencing the outcome Skinner warned against in the 1980s. The dedicated animal trainer, behavior analyst, or concerned consumer must take notice. The older hard sciences remain valid today because they have had centuries (arguably millennia) to build their foundation. Today, one is hard-pressed to find a master’s or PhD program anywhere in the world that teaches the experimental analysis of behavior as its focus rather than applied behavior analysis as a helping profession. If we value the discoveries of this science, we must return to an emphasis on teaching its basic tenets as the foundation of the technology of behavior. (p. 13)

Parvene Farhoody (2021) – Animal Training Revisited in Operants, 2021 (2)

Let’s allow Gilbert to conclude the current post with ideas needed for the acceptance of behaviorism:

At least three things stand in the way of that acceptance. One is the laxness of everyday ways of speaking about the causes of behavior, which still contaminate psychological discourse in the way Watson deplored 100 years ago. Another is the threat that coherent explanations of behavior pose to cherished notions of human freedom and dignity. (Skinner’s best-known book has the title Beyond Freedom and Dignity.) A third could be the enormity of the challenge of identifying a neurological mechanism for reinforcement equivalent to the processes of heredity whose discovery made natural selection acceptable.

Richard Gilbert (2013, p. 3) – Behaviorism at 100: An American History
Categories
Radical behaviorism

Psychology is a pseudoscience

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:

  1. Clearly defined terminology
  2. Quantifiability
  3. Highly controlled experimental conditions
  4. Reproducibility
  5. 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
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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