Are We Just a “Tabula Rasa”?

Whatever Happened to Behaviorism?

By: THEODORE MILLON and

      Seth Grossman

      Carrie Millon

      Sarah Meagher

      Rowena Ramnath

The duality between empiricism and rationalism has a long history in philosophy and psychology.

Empiricism is most often identified with the English philosophers John Locke and David Hume. Locke emphasized the role of direct experience in knowledge, believing that knowledge must be built up from collections of sensations. Locke’s position became known as associationism. Here, learning is seen as occurring through a small collection of processes that associate one sensation with another.

Empiricism found a counterpoint in the rationalism of continental philosophers, notably the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, the French philosopher Descartes, and the German philosopher Leibniz. In contrast, the empiricists held that innate ideas could not exist. Locke, for example, maintained that the mind was a tabula rasa, or blank slate, on which experience writes. Eventually, however, the elements of learning were recast in the language of stimulus and response.

The foundations of behaviorism are perhaps more associated with J. B. Watson than with any other psychologist, though Watson was preceded by other important figures in the history of learning theory, notably Thorndike and Pavlov. Although a variety of learning theories eventually developed, behaviorism as a formal dogma is most associated with the views of B. F. Skinner.

According to Skinner’s strict behaviorism, it is unnecessary to posit the existence of unobservable emotional states or cognitive expectancies to account for behavior and its pathologies. Hypothetical inner states are discarded and explanations are formulated solely in terms of external sources of stimulation and reinforcement. Thus, all disorders become the simple product of environmentally based reinforcing experiences. These shape the behavioral repertoire of the individual, and differences between adaptive and maladaptive behaviors can be traced entirely to differences in the reinforcement patterns to which individuals are exposed. Inner states, such as traits or schemata, are considered throwbacks to primitive animism. Instead, the understanding of a behavior can be complete only when the contextual factors in which the event is embedded are illuminated.

The logic is relatively simple: If there are no innate ideas, sensation or stimuli are by definition all that exist. Because sensation originates in the environment, the environment must ultimately control all behavior, however complex. The mind becomes an empty vessel, or tabula rasa, that contains only what the environment puts there.

All behavior is said to be under stimulus control. For this reason, the relationship between personality and behaviorism has been mainly antagonistic, and understandably so, because behavioral psychology exclusively focuses on observable surface behavior rather than on inferred entities, such as personality traits, cognitive schemata, instinctual drives, or interpersonal dispositions, all essential units in the study of personality.

By the mid-1980s, a number of crucial reinterpretations of traditional assessment had been made that allowed clinically applied behavioral approaches to become successively broader and more moderate. Most notably, the diagnoses of Axis I, regarded in psychiatry as substantive disease entities, were reinterpreted with the behavioral paradigm as inductive summaries, labels that bind together a body of observations for the purpose of clinical communication.

For example, whereas depression refers to a genuine pathology in the person for a traditional clinician, a behavioral clinician sees only its operational criteria and their label, not a disease. As a result, behavioral assessment and traditional assessment could thus speak the same tongue, while retaining their respective identities and distinctions. This allowed behavioral therapists to rationalize their use of diagnostic concepts without being untrue to their behavioral core.

Likewise, as the cognitive revolution got underway in earnest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, behavioral psychologists began seeking ways to generalize their own perspective to bring cognition under the behavioral umbrella. In time, cognitive activity was reinterpreted as covert behavior. Finally, the organism itself began to be seen a source of reinforcement and punishment, with affective mechanisms being viewed as the means through which reinforcement occurs.

Contemporary behavioral assessment, then, is no longer focused merely on surface behavior. Instead, behavioral assessment is now seen as involving three “response systems,” namely, the verbal-cognitive mode, the affective-physiological mode, and the overt-motor response system, a scheme originated by Lang (1968).

However, behavioral theorists have gone far toward rediscovering personality. The relationship among responses across the three response systems, for example, has been extensively studied (see Voeltz & Evans, 1982, for a review). Behavioral psychologists now talk about the organization of behavior, an idea that draws on the conception that the individual person is more than a sum of parts, even where those parts are only behavioral units.

An especially seminal thinker, Staats (1986) has developed a more systematic approach to personality that broadens the behavioral tradition. In what he terms “paradigmatic behaviorism,” Staats has sought a “third-generation behaviorism” that adds a developmental dimension, arguing that the learning of “basic behavioral repertoires” begins at birth and proceeds hierarchically, with each new repertoire providing the foundation for successively more complex forms of learning. Thus, some repertoires must be learned before others. For example, both fine motor movements and the alphabet must be learned before cursive writing can develop. Staats holds that repertoires are learned in the language-cognitive, emotional-motivational, and sensorimotor response systems, and these systems are interdependent and only pedagogically distinct.

Personality thus becomes the total complex hierarchical structure of repertoires and reflects the individual’s unique learning history. Different repertoires mediate different responses, so individual differences simply reflect different learning histories. Thus, the concept of a behavioral repertoire is simultaneously both overt and idiographic, making it acceptable from both behavioral and personality perspectives and capable of spanning both normality and abnormality.

References

Personality Disorders in Modern Life, second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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