Behaviorism

BEHAVIORISM (behaviorism, from English behavior-behavior), literally the science of behavior; a special direction in animal and human psychology that develops psychology as the science of the behavior of living beings by means of objective research methods. Behavior as the subject of psychology and objective study as its main method constitute the most essential difference of B. from subjective empirical psychology, for which the object of psychology was consciousness and mental processes, and the main method was introspection, or self-observation. In the words of Watson (J. Watson), this method "turns inside out the methods of study introduced into science by Wundt and James". B. completely refuses to study the states of consciousness, mental phenomena, experiences and all, generally, the subjective side of personality. It asserts that behavior can be studied, like all other objects of natural sciences, by the objective method. Its basic concepts are stimulus-reaction. The task at this point is to establish relationships between stimuli and reactions, which allows one to predict the reaction from a given stimulus and to determine the stimulus that caused it from a given reaction. Prediction and mastery of behavior for practical purposes constitute the main task of B. B. distinguishes between hereditary and conditioned reactions; in explaining the origin of conditioned reactions, it entirely relies on the principle of formation of the conditioned reflex, as it was experimentally established in the school of I. P. Pavlov and V. M. Bekhterev. For B., the psychology of behavior does not coincide with physiology, although it relies on it; the difference of psychology is that it studies the personality as a whole, in its relation to the environment and in its development. But physiology is the closest friend of psychology; "we can hardly make a step in psychology without using the data of physiology," says Watson. B. consistently develops an objective and materialistic point of view on human psychology. It finally breaks with the dualism of traditional psychology, which recognized, in one form or another, spirit and body as two possible beginnings in man; it frees itself from idealistic and metaphysical accretions that have settled on empirical psychology; it introduces strict objectivity and the methods of natural science into that sphere where rudimentary religious representations were masked in a scientific form. Old psychology, says Watson, has preserved, in a masked form, it is true, the old religious concept of the "soul". However, the materialism put at the basis of B. does not have a dialectical character; the complete negation of the mental side in behavior (or the assertion of its unknowability), the reduction of consciousness to a hidden motor reaction, extreme biologism in the approach to human personality, the lack of consideration of the social factor in human behavior—all these are features of mechanical materialism, characteristic of the philosophy of B., which naturally reduces the scientific value of the basic constructions and conclusions of B. Pathological changes in personality, not caused by organic lesions, B. considers as "perversions of behavior". "We can have a sick personality on the basis of perversion of habit," says Watson, "a perversion carried to such a degree that compensating factors (useful habits) are insufficient to maintain the individual in society". The pathogenesis of such functional disorders (psychoneuroses) is reduced, from this point of view, to the mechanism of conditioned reactions, to the emergence or closure of inadequate conditional connections between some stimulus and reaction ("transferred fears" and the like); the therapy of psychoneurosis is reduced to re-education of the patient, i.e., to the uncoupling of the morbid conditional connection or to the cultivation of useful habits. The decisive factor in therapy in this case is the environment. "New training ('treatment')," says Watson, "although more difficult, however, is no more mysterious or miraculous than teaching an infant to grasp a candy or to pull a hand away from a candle flame". The psychological nature of the treatment of a psychoneurotic is identical with the psychological basis of any education and re-education. B. attempts to build a doctrine of psychoneuroses and psychotherapy on an objective-psychological basis. In this sense, it opposes itself to psychoanalysis (the school of Freud) as a subjective method of treating psychoneuroses. B., just like psychoanalysis, sees the roots of such a disease in the earliest childhood, sometimes in infancy; old systems of reactions, infantile attitudes in these cases seize the behavior of the patient. But to explain this, B. does not resort to "the bottomlessness of the unconscious of the Freudian school". In particular, the reason for the instability of many cases of psychoanalytic treatment, B. sees in the fact that this method deals almost exclusively with the verbal reactions of the patient. The roots of B. lie in zoopsychology. In the study of animal psychology, the inadequacy and sterility of traditional psychology as a science of phenomena of consciousness become especially evident. "It would be unnatural to think and talk about the thoughts and desires of some amoeba or infusoria," says I. N. Pavlov, explaining the inevitability of the emergence of a school of objective zoopsychology (represented in America by Loeb, in Germany by Heinroth, Bethe and Verwer), which "had to leave the subjective point of view and try to introduce objective methods of research and terminology". This school was, according to Watson's correct remark, "rather a reaction to anthropomorphism, and not to psychology as a science of consciousness". The experiments of Lloyd Morgan in England in the 1890s on animal behavior, which broke with anthropomorphism in zoopsychology, and the research of E. Thorndike, to whom, in the words of I. P. Pavlov, "the honor of the first appearance on the new path" belongs (1898), are predecessors of B. In the field of zoopsychology B. has produced a real revolution. Subjective animal psychology had no scientific basis. It was based on a view that fundamentally contradicts the evolutionary principle and excludes its application in the study of animal behavior. Wundt formulated this view in the requirement: to judge animal psychology, starting from our own psyche. This zoopsychology, instead of going the common way of biological sciences built on the evolutionary principle, did not go from bottom up—from animals to man, tracing step by step the gradual development of higher forms of behavior from lower ones, but from top down—from man to animal, transferring to animals on the basis of external similarity the complex psychological formations observed in man, attributing, for example, to the ant a sense of duty (Henckel), to the bull a sense of reverence (Sykorsky), etc. B. refused from introspection and introduced the objective point of view into animal psychology. Only from this moment did it become possible to correctly and consistently apply the evolutionary method in comparative psychology. Thus, V. A. Wagner gave in his original works a strictly scientific picture of the evolution of building instincts in swallows and spiders. Considering the behavior of an animal as a special form of its adaptation to the environment, B. distinguishes in behavior hereditary reactions, formed in the process of phylogenetic development, and individually acquired conditioned reactions, arising in the process of ontogenetic development. The simplest forms of hereditary reactions, already found in plants and lower animals, are tropisms (see); the unconditioned reflex (see), or hereditary, is the simplest unit of hereditary behavior in animals possessing a nervous system; instincts (see) and emotions (see) represent complex formations of the same floor of behavior. Conditioned reflexes (see), superimposed on the basis of hereditary ones, represent the simplest form of individually acquired behavior. Complex formations and combinations of conditioned reflexes give rise to habits, or skills. Such is the brief scheme of the basic forms of behavior in their genetic sequential dependence, which lies at the basis of behaviorism. In its present form, B. is a product of American psychology. Watson first in the article "Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist" ("Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist"), published in "Psychological Review" in 1913, developed the idea of B. as a special scientific discipline; he also gave the first systematic exposition of the psychology of behavior (1919). At present, B. represents a powerful scientific movement, having many supporters, separate scientific schools, rich literature, etc., and exerting a strong influence on European psychology. B., however, in its present form does not represent something single and integral; within this direction there are separate currents, essentially different from each other; thus, psycho-B. tries in fact to combine objective and subjective points of view in psychology; radical, or extreme B. (behaviorism proper) completely refuses to the data of introspection and to the study of mental processes, i.e., the subjective side of behavior.

In recent times, Behaviorism has had a great influence on the reform of psychology in the USSR; the critique of subjective psychology, psychology of behavior, defense of the objective method, materialist understanding of psychology in the works of Marxist psychologists (Blonsky, Kornilov and others), - all this to a large extent relied on Behaviorism. But, at the same time, the simplified-mechanistic foundations of Behaviorism were subjected by Marxist psychologists to sharp and justified criticism.