Behaviourism

Beginning in the 1930s, behaviourism flourished in the United States,

with B.F. Skinner leading the way in demonstrating the power of operant
conditioning through reinforcement. Behaviourists in university settings
conducted experiments on the conditions controlling learning and “shaping”
behaviour through reinforcement, usually working with laboratory animals
such as rats and pigeons. Skinner and his followers explicitly excluded mental
life, viewing the human mind as an impenetrable “black box,” open only to
conjecture and speculative fictions. Their work showed that social behaviour is
readily influenced by manipulating specific contingencies and by changing the
consequences or reinforcement (rewards) to which behaviour leads in
different situations. Changes in those consequences can modify behaviour in
predictable stimulus-response (S-R) patterns. Likewise, a wide range
of emotions, both positive and negative, may be acquired through processes of
conditioning and can be modified by applying the same principles.
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Freud and his followers

Sigmund Freud
Concurrently, in a curious juxtaposition, the psychoanalytic theories and
therapeutic practices developed by the Vienna-trained physician Sigmund
Freud and his many disciples—beginning early in the 20th century and
enduring for many decades—were undermining the traditional view of human
nature as essentially rational. Freudian theory made reason secondary: for
Freud, the unconscious and its often socially unacceptable irrational motives
and desires, particularly the sexual and aggressive, were the driving force
underlying much of human behaviour and mental illness. Making the
unconscious conscious became the therapeutic goal of clinicians working
within this framework.

Freud proposed that much of what humans feel, think, and do is outside
awareness, self-defensive in its motivations, and unconsciously determined.
Much of it also reflects conflicts grounded in early childhood that play out in
complex patterns of seemingly paradoxical behaviours and symptoms. His
followers, the ego psychologists, emphasized the importance of the higher-
order functions and cognitive processes (e.g., competence motivation, self-
regulatory abilities) as well as the individual’s psychological defense
mechanisms. They also shifted their focus to the roles of interpersonal
relations and of secure attachment in mental health and adaptive functioning,
and they pioneered the analysis of these processes in the clinical setting.
After World War II and Sputnik
After World War II, American psychology, particularly clinical psychology,
grew into a substantial field in its own right, partly in response to the needs of
returning veterans. The growth of psychology as a science was stimulated
further by the launching of Sputnik in 1957 and the opening of the Russian-
American space race to the Moon. As part of this race, the U.S. government
fueled the growth of science. For the first time, massive federal funding
became available, both to support behavioral research and to enable graduate
training. Psychology became both a thriving profession of practitioners and a
scientific discipline that investigated all aspects of human social
behaviour, child development, and individual differences, as well as the areas
of animal psychology, sensation, perception, memory, and learning.

Training in clinical psychology was heavily influenced by Freudian psychology

and its offshoots. But some clinical researchers, working with both normal
and disturbed populations, began to develop and apply methods focusing on
the learning conditions that influence and control social behaviour.
This behaviour therapy movement analyzed problematic behaviours
(e.g., aggressiveness, bizarre speech patterns, smoking, fear responses) in
terms of the observable events and conditions that seemed to influence the
person’s problematic behaviour. Behavioral approaches led
to innovations for therapy by working to modify problematic behaviour not
through insight, awareness, or the uncovering of unconscious motivations but
by addressing the behaviour itself. Behaviourists attempted to modify the
maladaptive behaviour directly, examining the conditions controlling the
individual’s current problems, not their possible historical roots. They also
intended to show that such efforts could be successful without the symptom
substitution that Freudian theory predicted. Freudians believed that removing
the troubling behaviour directly would be followed by new and worse
problems. Behaviour therapists showed that this was not necessarily the case.

To begin exploring the role of genetics in personality and social development,

psychologists compared the similarity in personality shown by people who
share the same genes or the same environment. Twin studies compared
monozygotic (identical) as opposed to dizygotic (fraternal) twins, raised either
in the same or in different environments. Overall, these studies demonstrated
the important role of heredity in a wide range of human characteristics and
traits, such as those of the introvert and extravert, and indicated that the
biological-genetic influence was far greater than early behaviourism had
assumed. At the same time, it also became clear that how such dispositions are
expressed in behaviour depends importantly on interactions with the
environment in the course of development, beginning in utero.

Impact and aftermath of the cognitive

revolution
By the early 1960s the relevance of the Skinnerian approach for understanding
complex mental processes was seriously questioned. The linguist Noam
Chomsky’s critical review of Skinner’s theory of “verbal behaviour” in 1959
showed that it could not properly account for human language acquisition. It
was one of several triggers for a paradigm shift that by the mid-1960s became
the “cognitive revolution,” which compellingly argued
against behaviourism and led to the development of cognitive science. In
conjunction with concurrent analyses and advances in areas from computer
science and artificial intelligence to neuroscience, genetics, and applications
of evolutionary theory, the scientific study of the mind and mental activity
quickly became the foundation for much of the evolving new
psychological science in the 21st century.

Psychological scientists demonstrated that organisms have

innate dispositions and that human brains are distinctively prepared
for diverse higher-level mental activities, from language acquisition
to mathematics, as well as space perception, thinking, and memory. They also
developed and tested diverse theoretical models for conceptualizing mental
representations in complex information processing conducted at multiple
levels of awareness. They asked such questions as: How does the individual’s
stored knowledge give rise to the patterns or networks of mental
representations activated at a particular time? How is memory organized? In a
related direction, the analysis of visual perception took increasing account of
how the features of the environment (e.g., the objects, places, and other
animals in one’s world) provide information, the perception of which is vital
for the organism’s survival. Consequently, information about the possibilities
and dangers of the environment, on the one side, and the animal’s
dispositions and adaptation efforts, on the other, become inseparable: their
interactions become the focus of research and theory building.

Concurrently, to investigate personality, individual differences, and social

behaviour, a number of theorists made learning theories both more social
(interpersonal) and more cognitive. They moved far beyond the earlier
conditioning and reward-and-punishment principles, focusing on how a
person’s characteristics interact with situational opportunities and demands.
Research demonstrated the importance of learning through observation from
real and symbolic models, showing that it occurs spontaneously and
cognitively without requiring any direct reinforcement. Likewise, studies of
the development of self-control and the ability to delay gratification in young
children showed that it is crucially important how the situation and the
temptations are cognitively appraised: when the appraisal changes, so does
the behaviour. Thus, the focus shifted from reinforcement and “stimulus
control” to the mental mechanisms that enable self-control.
Traditional personality-trait taxonomies continued to describe individuals and
types using such terms as introversion-extraversion and sociable-hostile,
based on broad trait ratings. In new directions, consistent with developments
in cognitive science and social psychology, individual differences were
reconceptualized in terms of cognitive social variables, such as people’s
constructs (encoding of information), personal goals and beliefs,
and competencies and skills. Research examined the nature of the
consistencies and variability that characterize individuals distinctively across
situations and over time and began to identify how different types of
individuals respond to different types of psychological situations. The often
surprising findings led to new models of cognitive and affective information-
processing systems.

In clinical applications, cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) was developed.

CBT focuses on identifying and changing negative, inaccurate, or otherwise
maladaptive beliefs and thought patterns through a combination of cognitive
and behaviour therapy. It helps people to change how they think and feel
about themselves and others. In time, these cognitive-behavioral
treatment innovations, often supplemented with medications, were shown to
be useful for treating diverse problems, including disabling fears, self-control
difficulties, addictions, and depression.

In social psychology, beginning in the early 1970s, social cognition—how

people process social information about other people and the self—became a
major area of study. Research focused on such topics as the nature and
functions of self-concepts and self-esteem; cultural differences in information
processing; interpersonal relations and social communication; attitudes and
social-influence processes; altruism, aggression, and
obedience; motivation, emotion, planning, and self-regulation; and the
influence of people’s dispositions and characteristics on their dealings with
different types of situations and experiences. Recognizing that much
information processing occurs at levels below awareness and proceeds
automatically, research turned to the effects of subliminal (below awareness)
stimuli on the activation of diverse kinds of mental representations, emotions,
and social behaviours. Research at the intersection of
social cognition and health psychology began to examine how people’s beliefs,
positive illusions, expectations, and self-regulatory abilities may help them
deal with diverse traumas and threats to their health and the stress that arises
when trying to cope with diseases such as HIV/AIDS and cancer. Working
with a variety of animal species, from mice and birds to higher mammals such
as apes, researchers investigated social communication and diverse social
behaviours, psychological characteristics, cognitive abilities, and emotions,
searching for similarities and differences in comparison with humans.

In developmental psychology, investigators identified and analyzed with

increasing precision the diverse perceptual, cognitive, and numerical abilities
of infants and traced their developmental course, while others focused on life-
span development and mental and behavioral changes in the aging process.
Developmental research provided clear evidence that humans, rather than
entering the world with a mental blank slate, are extensively prepared for all
sorts of cognitive and skill development. At the same time, research also has
yielded equally impressive evidence for the plasticity of the human brain and
the possibilities for change in the course of development.