A Science of Behavior: Perspective, History and Assumptions

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Chapter 1

• A Science of Behavior Perspective, History and
  Assumptions

Prepared by Brady J. Phelps, South Dakota State
University
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Learning

• Learning refers to the acquisition, maintenance,
  and change of an organisms behavior as a result
  of lifetime events

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What is behavior?

• The behavior of an organism is everything it
  does, including private and covert actions like
  thinking and feeling

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Human Behavior

• Human behavior has been attributed to a variety
  of causes.
• These causes can either be internal or external.
• - Internal causes range from metaphysical
  entities (the soul), to hypothetical structures
  of the mind.
• - External causes include the influence of the
  moon and tides, the arrangement of the stars, and
  whims of the gods.
• These accounts of behavior are not scientific
  they do not hold up to testing by scientific
  methods.

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Science and Behavior

• The experimental analysis of behavior is a
  natural-science approach to understanding
  regulation.
• Experimental analysis is concerned with
  controlling and changing the factors affecting
  the behavior of humans and other animals.

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Behavior Analysis

• Behavior analysis is defined as a scientific
  approach that includes assumptions about how to
  study behavior, techniques to carry out the
  analysis, a systematic body of knowledge, and
  practical implications for society and culture.

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Behavior Analysis

• A specific type of behavior analysis is known as
  applied behavior analysis which is referred to as
  the use of behavior.
• Behavior analysis has a strong focus on
  environment-behavior relationships. Organisms
  alter their behavior to meet the ever-changing
  demand of the environment.
• When an organism learns new ways of behaving in
  reaction to the changes that occur in its
  environment, conditioning occurs.

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Respondent Conditioning

• A reflex is a behavior that is evoked by a
  biologically relevant stimulus.
• When a stimulus automatically evokes a
  stereotypical response, the stimulus response
  relationship is called a reflex.
• Respondent conditioning occurs when a neutral
  stimulus is paired with and unconditioned
  stimulus.
• For example, the buzz of a bee (neutral stimulus)
  is paired with the pain of a bee sting
  (unconditioned stimulus). After this
  conditioning a buzzing bee usually causes people
  to avoid it.
• A respondent is a behavior that is elicited by
  the new conditioned stimulus.

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Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning involves the regulation of
  behavior by its consequences.
• B.F. Skinner termed operant conditioning due to
  the responses that operate on the environment to
  produce an effect.
• Any behavior that operates on the environment to
  produce an effect is called an operant.
• During operant conditioning, an organism emits
  behavior that produces an effect that increases
  or decreases the frequency of an operant.
• Most of what we call voluntary, willful, or
  purposive action is analyzed as operant behavior.

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Selection by Consequences

• Selection is observed at three levels
• Selection of characteristics of a species
  (natural selection)
• Selection of behavior within the lifetime of the
  individual (selection of operant behavior)
• Behavior patterns of groups of humans beyond a
  lifetime (cultural selection)

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Causation

• Immediate Causation is a mechanism where the goal
  is to isolate the event(s) that directly brings
  forth an effect
• With respect to behavior an example would be
  physiology and biochemistry of an organism, like
  bar pressing by a rat in an operant chamber that
  results in neurotransmitter release
• Remote Causation is explained as viewing distant
  event(s) that bring forth an effect the results
  of natural selection upon a species

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Causation and Selection by Consequences

• The principle of selection by consequences is a
  form of explanation via remote explanation called
  functional analysis.
• When a rat or a child acquires a new operant
  response, we explain the behavior by looking to
  its past consequences, the contingencies of
  reinforcement for lever pressing or searching for
  toys. The child or the animals behavior has been
  selected by its history of reinforcement

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Behavioral Neuroscience

• The integration of the science of behavior with
  neuroscience includes behavioral pharmacology,
  imaging of neural events, among other topics.

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The Evolution of Conditioning

• When organisms are faced with unpredictable and
  changing environments, natural selection favored
  those whose behavior could be conditioned.
• Organisms who condition are more flexible, in the
  sense that they can adjust to new requirements of
  the environment.

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The Evolution of Conditioning

• Processes of behavior regulation, like operant
  and respondent conditioning, lead to greater or
  lesser reproductive success.
• Presumably, those organisms that changed their
  behavior as a result of experience during their
  lives survived and had offspring-those that were
  less flexible did not.
• Therefore, the capacity for conditioning is
  inherited.

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The Biological Context of Behavior

• Although behavior analysts recognize the
  importance of biology and evolution, they focus
  on the interplay of behavior and environment.
• The evolutionary history and biological status of
  an organism are examined as part of the context
  for specific environment-behavior interactions.

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The Selection of Operant Behavior

• Early behaviorists like John Watson used the
  terminology of stimulus-response (S-R)
  psychology.
• From this perspective, stimuli force responses
  much like meat in a dogs mouth (or forces)
  salivation.
• Stimulus-response theories are mechanistic in the
  sense that an organism is compelled to respond
  when a stimulus is presented.
• Skinner recognized that operants are selected by
  their consequences.

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The Selection of Operant Behavior

• The previous mechanistic model was rejected by
  B.F. Skinner, who based operant conditioning on
  Darwins principle of selection.
• The principle of selection states that an
  individual emits behavior that produces effects,
  consequences, or outcomes.
• Based on these consequences, those performances
  that are appropriate increase while inappropriate
  forms decline or become extinct.

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Culture and Behavior Analysis

• Society and culture refer to aspects of the
  social environment that regulate human conduct.
• Culture is usually defined in terms of the ideas
  and values of a society. However, behavior
  analysts define culture as all the conditions,
  events, and stimuli arranged by other people that
  regulate human action.

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Culture and Behavior Analysis

• Cultural practices are maintained through the
  social conditioning of individual behavior.
• Behavior analysts suggest that the principle of
  selection (by consequences) also occurs at the
  cultural level.
• Cultural practices therefore increase (or
  decrease) based on consequences produced in the
  past.
• Behavior analysts are also interested in cultural
  evolution because cultural changes alter the
  social conditioning of individual behavior.

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History of Behavioral Analysis

• Contemporary behavior analysis is based on ideas
  and research that became prominent at the turn of
  the century.
• The Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
  discovered the conditioned reflex, and this was a
  significant step toward a scientific
  understanding of behavior.

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Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

• Ivan Pavlov worked on the salivary reflex and its
  role in digestion.
• The analysis of the salivary reflex was based on
  prevailing notions of animal behavior.
• Pavlov reasoned that anticipatory reflexes were
  learned or conditioned.
• He concluded that these conditioned reflexes were
  an essential part of the behavior of organisms.
• Although some behaviors were described as innate
  reflexes, others were conditioned reflexes which
  were actions based on conditioning that occurred
  during an animals life. These were present in
  most animals but most prominent in humans.

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John Broadus Watson(1878-1958)

• Watson argued that there was no need to make up
  unobservable mental associations to account for
  human and animal behavior.
• He also rejected as scientific data what people
  said about their thoughts and feelings.
• He focused on the unreliability of psychological
  inferences about another persons mind.
• Watson noted that the psychology of mind had
  little practical value for behavior control and
  public affairs.

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Edward Lee Thorndike(1874-1949)

• Thorndike was concerned with how success and
  failure affect the behavior of organisms.
• His research emphasized the events and
  consequences that follow behavior.
• Therefore, he was the first scientist to
  systematically study operant behavior, although
  he called the changes that occurred
  trial-and-error learning.

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Edward Lee Thorndike

• At Columbia University, Thorndike began his
  experiments on trial-and-error learning in cats.
• Animals were placed in what Thorndike called a
  puzzle box and food was placed outside the box.
• A cat that struggled to get out of the box would
  accidentally step on a treadle, pull a string,
  and so on.
• These responses resulted in opening the
  puzzle-box door.

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Edward Lee Thorndike

• Thorndike found that most cats took less and less
  time to solve the problem after they were
  repeatedly returned to the box.
• From these observations Thorndike made the first
  formulation of the law of effect
• The cat that is clawing all over the box in her
  impulsive struggle will probably claw the string
  or loop or button so as to open the door. And
  gradually all the other non-successful impulses
  will be stamped out and the particular impulse
  leading to the successful act will be stamped in
  by the resulting pleasure until after many
  trials, the cat will, when put in the box,
  immediately claw the button or loop in a definite
  way.

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Law of Effect

• Today, the law of effect is restated as the
  principle states that all operants may be
  followed by consequences that increase or
  decrease the probability of response in the same
  situation.
• Notice that references to stamping in and
  pleasure are not necessary and that nothing is
  lost by this modern restatement of the law of
  effect.

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B.F. Skinner

• Skinner said, I began to think of reflexes as
  behavior rather than with Pavlov as the activity
  of the cerebral cortex or with Sherrington, as
  the integrative action of the nervous system.
• The idea that reflexes could be studied as
  behavior (rather than as a reflection of the
  nervous system or the mind) was fully developed
  in Skinners 1938 book, The Behavior of Organisms.

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B. F. Skinner

• Skinner soon talked about a science of behavior
  rather than one of physiology or mental life.
• Once stated, the study of behavior for its own
  sake seems obvious, but consider that most of us
  say that we do something because we have made up
  our mind to do it or, in more scientific terms,
  because of a neural connection in our brain.

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B. F. Skinner

• Most people accept explanations of behavior that
  rely on descriptions of brain, intelligence,
  cognitive function, neural activity, thinking, or
  personality.
• Because these factors are taken as the causes of
  behavior, they become the focus of investigation.
• Skinner suggested that remembering, thinking,
  feeling, the action of neurons, and so on are
  more behavior of the organism that requires
  explanation.
• He also proposed that the action of organisms
  could be investigated by focusing on behavior and
  the environmental events that precede and follow
  it.

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Psychology as a science...

• A science of behavior exists but it is a minority
  view in psychology. Behavior is worth studying
  because behavior is itself important. However,
  only behavior that can be measured reliably and
  objectively is suitable for scientific study.

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Some points of a science of behavior...

• All behavior is determined entirely by biological
  and environmental variables.
• Any behavior that can be objectively and reliably
  measured (including such things as creativity and
  insight) will eventually be understood in
  scientific terms.
• There is no reason to assume, apriori, that the
  behavior of humans and other species follow
  fundamentally different principles.

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Some points of a science of behavior...

• The brain is just a part of the body the idea
  that there is an immaterial mind in the brain
  that produces behavior is pure supposition.
• The actions of the brain are not explanations for
  behavior these are actions calling for an
  explanation.
• Ones personality is not an explanation for
  behavior personality is a label given to an
  individuals behavior repertoire. We are what we
  do.

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Some points of a science of behavior...

• Anytime you encounter an explanation of human
  behavior attributed to the mind or the power
  of mind over matter, the so-called explanation
  is just offering a mystery as an explanation.
  Appealing to mysteries as explanations is a sign
  of a pseudoscience
• Scientists attempt to explain known or unknown
  events by referring to known facts and
  established principles.

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Some points of a science of behavior...

• What is Mind? Mind is best seen as a label for
  covert behaviors such as remembering, private
  speech (talking silently to ourselves), seeing
  objects in the absence of the actual object
  (hallucinating, imagining, etc.) among other such
  behaviors. The fact that environmental experience
  changes these and other behaviors lead some to
  conclude there must a mind. Mind is a just label
  for these behaviors and changes therein
  therefore it cannot be used as an explanation for
  such behaviors.

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Science and Behavior

• In terms of behavioral analysis, researchers
  assume that the behavior of organisms is lawful,
  meaning that it is possible to study the
  interactions between an organism and its
  environment in an objective manner.

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Science and Behavior

• It is necessary to isolate behavior-environment
  relationships in order for them to be scientific.
• The scientist must identify events that reliably
  proceed the onset of some action and the specific
  consequences that follow behavior.
• If behavior systematically changes with variation
  in the environmental conditions, then behavior
  analysts assume that they have explained the
  action of the organism.

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The Private World

• Contemporary behavior analysts include internal
  events as part of an organisms environment.
• Internal physical events have the same status as
  external stimuli such as light, noise, odor, and
  heat.
• Both external and internal events regulate
  behavior.
• However, behavior analysts usually emphasize the
  external environment. This is because external
  events are the only stimuli available for
  behavior change.

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Feelings and Behavior

• Most people assume that their feelings and
  thoughts explain why they act as they do.
• Contemporary behavior analysts agree that people
  feel and think, but they do not consider these
  events as causes of behavior.

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Feelings as By-Products

• Because feelings occur at the same time that we
  act, they are often taken as causes of behavior.
  
• Although feelings and behavior are necessarily
  correlated, it is the environment that determines
  how we act, and at the same time how we feel.
• Feelings are real, but they are by-products of
  the environmental events that regulate behavior.
• Therefore, a behavioral approach requires that
  the researcher trace feelings back to the
  interaction between behavior and environment.

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Reports of Feelings

• Feelings are largely inaccessible to the
  scientific community.
• The person who feels has access to this private
  information, but the problem is that reports of
  feelings are highly unreliable.
• This unreliability occurs because we learn to
  talk about our feelings (and other internal
  events) as others have trained us to do so.
• Reports are only as good as the training of
  correspondence between public conditions and
  private events.
• In addition to inadequate training, there are
  other problems with accurate descriptions of
  feelings.

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Observing our feelings
Obviously humans have evolved very acute sensory
systems for observing the external environment.
But when it comes to observing events inside our
bodies, our interoceptive nervous system has
never evolved to such a high degree. We can
only observe our feelings with vague descriptions
and difficulty in labeling what we are
experiencing internally. If we can only vaguely
describe an experience and cannot put it into
words precisely to convey it to another, what
kind of a science of feelings can we have?
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Thinking and Behavior

• The history of human thought is what people have
  said and done.
• Symbols are the products of written and spoken
  verbal behavior, and the concepts and
  relationships of which they are symbols are in
  the environment.
• Thinking has the dimensions of behavior, not a
  fancied inner process which finds expression in
  behavior.

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Thinking and Response Tendencies

• The term think in our culture has a variety of
  meanings.
• A person may say, I am thinking of buying a new
  car when the individual is reporting a low
  probability of action.
• Another example of people saying, I think
  occurs when there is weak control of behavior by
  a stimulus. When shown an unfamiliar object, you
  may say, I think its a computer chip, which is
  contrasted with the responses I know its a
  computer chip.

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Thinking as Private Behavior

• The function of thinking, as covert behavior, is
  to increase the effectiveness of practical
  action.
• People can act at the covert level without
  committing themselves publicly.
• Thinking is an operant behavior.

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What about cognitive psychology?

• Cognitive psychology violates or ignores Occams
  razor
• Cognitive psychology produces much theory, few if
  any practical usable findings
• Cognitive psychology produces elaborate models to
  describe an action but comes up short on
  identifying causes

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Cognitive Psychology
Considering that Occams razor is a time-honored
tradition of science, it is important to use it
in psychology. Occams razor arose when events in
the weather were being attributed to witches,
curses, etc., seemingly everything but the
actual causes, events in the natural environment.
Finally somebody, (William of Occam) argued that
such explanations were useless and unnecessarily
complex. Now behavior is attributed to the mind,
to information processing, etc. Such
explanations are not necessary nor
productive. Given two competing explanations for
a phenomenon, both of which offer what appear to
be equally valid accounts, the explanation that
has the fewest assumptions is to be preferred.
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Cognitive Psychology
Granted that cognitive psychology will claim to
be the science of mind, memory or language,
where are the applications of their findings?
In terms of memory, what has cognitive psychology
developed to remediate amnesia? How useful are
their models of memory? Not very, as memory
retraining or cognitive rehabilitation has only
proven effective when using behavioral techniques
to change the behaviors of remembering and
forgetting. How has cognitive psychology helped
the language delayed or the language impaired?
Not much as communication disorder professionals
see no useful applications of its hollow theory.
Why are the so-called cognitive therapies of
psychotherapy behavioral in practice and
cognitive in name only? To quote a famous
critic of the past, when it comes to cognitive
psychology, Wheres the beef?
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Cognitive Psychology
Why is cognitive psychology now trying to become
cognitive neuroscience? For decades the
computer model was the basis for cognitive
theory but that proved unsuccessful, so now
their model is how the brain works. Granted
this is an improvement since now they are
studying something real but when they are just
practicing physiological psychology, why not
just call it that? Cognitive psychology has
adopted a new model to gain some form of
legitimacy as a science. But since they now
argue that the brain processes information
(and presumably the mind doesnt anymore) they
again violate Occams razor. Cognitive
psychology is like the emperors new Clothes