All Psychologists Are Behaviorists

Because all they can measure is behavior, and nothing more.

Photo by Luke Jones on Unsplash

BEHAVIOR, AND NOTHING MORE

To be a behaviorist is to hold that psychology is the study of behavior, and nothing more.

If I demonstrate that the rat presses the lever more when food immediately follows, and it stops pressing the lever when food no longer follows, and if I can repeat this demonstration, at will, there seems nothing controversial about what I would say. The food following the lever pressing is the reason the rat presses the lever. For convenience, we can call this reinforcement, and we say that the food reinforces lever pressing. And nothing more.

But if I say that a rat presses the lever more often when food follows each lever press because it “knows” or “expects” or “remembers” that lever pressing produce food, I am saying something more.

THE BURDEN OF PROOF

You cannot argue with the statement that food following the lever press increases lever pressing when that is the very thing that is seen. You can argue that there has to be more to it, but then the burden of proof is on you. As a radical behaviorist, I consider myself explanatorily conservative. That is, I tend toward straightforward description and parsimony, perhaps at the expense of mystery and intrigue and all sorts of fun.

So where is that evidence for the something more, such as the knowledge or expectation? We cannot remove the knowledge or expectation and stop lever pressing, except by stopping the food. Because if we don’t stop the food, the rat will know that food follows and will continue to expect it. So we’re back to the food, added or removed. So what role does the knowledge or expectation play? And, more importantly, what is the evidence for those things, at all? They are something more.

There must be independent evidence for the “something more.” The evidence can’t be the rat pressing the lever more when food follows. That is circular. With our labeling of the relation between lever pressing and food as reinforcement, we are not locked in a circularity. We can stop the food and stop the lever press. We can bring the food back and bring back lever pressing. And so on. And nothing more.

THE GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

Unquestionably, the complete picture, of the lever press or anything else, will be seen only when we also know about the physiological changes that take place as the organism behaves. The physiologist might observe that a certain collection of neurons fire in a certain pattern as a behavioral episode unfolds, with traceable effects on the musculoskeletal system of the behaving organism. But that is a different level of analysis, belonging to the physiologist. And it doesn’t replace a behavior analysis, it complements it.

So where does the psychologist, who is not a behaviorist, work? Somewhere in between the physiology and the behavior. Knowledge, expectations, associations, representations, memories and so on, all are things other than the observed physiology or the observed behavior. There needs to be evidence of their existence, because they are something more.

For example, if I use the observed activation of a network of neurons, and the corresponding chemical happenings, as evidence of an expectation, I am saying something more. But there is no evidence of the expectation, there is only the observation of the electrical and chemical actions of the nervous system and the corresponding behavior occurring in a certain circumstance. And nothing more.

The same for memory. How do you know somebody has a memory? They can do something now that they learned before. They can open the combination lock. They can greet you by name. They can answer a question on the midterm exam. They press the lever. All behavior. How else could you possibly know someone remembered? They have to do something, and that is what you observe. You don’t ever observe a memory, you see the person doing things we call remembering. And nothing more.

Physiologists might identify the neurons that fire when they do (“remember”) something now, and they might even determine that they are the same neurons that fired when they were learning it before. But that’s the behavior of the nervous system, not memory. That’s like measuring your heartbeat while you are running and calling it your fitness. That is something more.

Anybody, with the proper tools and some time, can see the environment-behavior relations and the environment-physiology-behavior relations. But nobody has seen a so-called mental process, memory or otherwise. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. They require something more.

OUCH! MY QUICKNESS HURTS

Even finding that damage to some area of the brain impairs some particular performance is not evidence of anything other than the correlated actions of that part of the nervous system and that part of behavior. If there is brain damage and a resulting loss of the ability to say the names of people you just met, that is something, but it is not evidence of a memory.

Assuming it is evidence of something more is like seeing that an athlete runs slower when they injure their hamstring and concluding that the hamstring must be where their “quickness” is stored. Later, when the hamstring is healed, the athlete runs faster. But then they sprain their ankle and, wouldn’t you know it, they run slower again. Did the quickness migrate to their ankle?

With something like memory or any other hypothetical construct, we might see that damage to some specific area of the brain reliably results in an inability to say people’s names after we meet them, like the athlete reliably runs slower after an injury to their hamstring. But, of course, we might observe a lessened ability to say people’s names later following hearing loss, too. Or, for that matter, when traveling in a country where the names sound very different from what we regularly hear in our own country. And so on.

ALL PSYCHOLOGISTS ARE BEHAVIORISTS

Now, some might argue that “memory” simply describes the occurrence of these two types of events—behavioral and physiological. But I worry about this because we simply can’t resist reifying terms once we use them. So memory inevitably becomes a “thing” that we try to study, even though we can never do so directly or, I would argue, fruitfully.

True, we might see changes in behavior as a result of changes in the nervous system. But we have to ask, why did we see those changes in the nervous system? That inevitably leads us back out to the environment and something that the organism experienced.

We have behavior of the whole organism occurring in certain circumstances, and we have the behavior of the nervous system occurring in certain circumstances. And that’s enough, as far as I am concerned. Invoking “memory” adds nothing to the account. There’s no room, and more importantly, no evidence for it.

Pick your poison: memory, cognition, awareness, expectation, and so on. Maybe there is more than behavior for psychology, but I don’t think we’ve gotten to a point where we should feel compelled to look for it. At least not yet.

At the end of the day, all psychologists are behaviorists, whether they know it or not, and even whether they like it or not. That’s because they can observe behavior, and nothing more. But most psychologists ignore this and talk, almost exclusively, about something more.