On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, bill fancher wrote:
> Skinner enumerated the techiniques of effective behavioral control. He
> demonstrated how behavior is controlled and showed how and why the
> traditional "literature of Freedom and Dignity" is ineffective against
> non-traditional, non-punitive measures of control. === He should have titled his book differently. He may have gotten more readers. and given he was saying this during the Cold War was not going to win him any friends. No wonder Benjamin Spock had more adherents.
>
> Since such methods are (and were then) the methods of choice
for the ruling
> class, this exposure was considered extremely dangerous.
Consequently, his
> work was attacked from both the left and the right. His ideas
fell out of
> favor, not because anything he said was shown to be false, but
because his
> ideas were said to lead to authoritarian systems of control, or
demeaned the
> dignity of man. Funding for research dried up, and a program of
character
> assassination was instituted.
>
This is a pretty generous summary of the rise and fall of behaviorism
in psychology as a scientific discipline. In fact, Skinner's ideas
fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s among psychological researchers
because a growing corpus of cognitive research clearly disconfirmed
basic behaviorist tenets. ===========
I would simply note that Timothy Leary was grabbing a lot of Skinner's students with his claims about LSD. And once that stuff hit the streets, well, we know the story.
One example: Festinger's research on
cognitive dissonance clearly demonstrated that people are often
motivated more by the need for cognitive consistency than by
positive reinforcement. "Character assassination" was the least
of Skinner's problems; it's pretty clear (to me, at least) that
radical behaviorism was superceded by cognitivism among research
psychologists because research psychologists prefer theories that
are consistent with a wide array of research findings.
That said, I agree that behavior is sometimes influenced by
classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational
learning. But note this is not the radical behaviorist claim
that all behavior can be analyzed in terms of reinforcement
contingencies.
Miles ==========
It was, in a sense, the totalizing claims of Skinner's with regard to tracing out all the causal pathways that determined a passive [yet not tabula rasa] subjectivity, that turned more than a few people off. It reminded them of Ignatius Loyola and the early Jesuit theories of education.
Ian