Freedom and equality?

Lisa & Ian Murray seamus at accessone.com
Fri Sep 1 11:04:07 PDT 2000


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radical behaviorism was superceded by cognitivism among research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



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