See for yourself. Type 'definition behaviorism' on the GOOGLE search engine, and you get a cascade of definitions that are at turns alike, dissimilar, and to some degree, wrong. Behaviorism means the study of surface behavior or all behavior, uses deductive or inductive reasoning, or entails good, bad, or no philosophies. It reduces behavior to mere stimulus-response and eliminates the role of instinct, but maybe not, and is associated exclusively with psychologists like Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B. F. Skinner, but maybe not. In spite of this confusion we stil have the popular image of the behaviorist which is as a tale to tell would do Mary Shelly (who wrote Frankestein) proud.
Enter B. F. Pavlov: Mad Behaviorist!
He certainly fits the mad scientist image: white lab coat, darting nervous eyes, clipboard at the ready, and a supremely confident and perhaps arrogant air. Like all mad scientists, he would prepare his fiendish fomulae in seclusion using hapless, imprisoned subjects. In this case it would be laboratory animals, mice, dogs, and pigeons and their mammalian cousins. And so the behaviorist labored in secret, collecting data, counting salivary drippings, and charting the trajectory of behavior as animals bar pressed, pulled and key pecked into the night. Invariably, there came the AHA! moment. The reinforcer is the key! Arrange them just so, and laboratory cirtters will mindlessly and happily obey, and keypeck, bar press, and lever pull into manic oblivion. Armed with this cosmic knowledge, the behaviorist escaped from the laboratory, and employed his evil wiles to mind control hapless humans, who would key press and lever pull TV remote controls, slot machines, and mouse buttons under the eternal control of evil behavioristic media lords. Thank goodness though that we dodged that bullet (!), as heroic psychologists of all stripes defeated their evil plans, and crushed behaviorism once and for all!
So there you have it. Behaviorism means what you want it to, ended up as a monstrous stalking monster, and was defeated by heroic psychologists who have rid the world of behavior mod, and sit back contentedly in their ivory towers watching the sun set on a happy and grateful world.
Well, almost.
Definitions are slippery things, and may have far more metaphorical than logical import. Thus when we consider liberals, conservatives, Moslems, Christians, or for that matter, behaviorists, we call to mind not just their methods but their intentions, their wit, and even the style of their hair.
So not only are definitions of behaviorism atypical, they are stereotypical, leaving us intellectually stranded among distinctions everywhere, but not with one that explains.
Ok! Ok! So what the heck is a behaviorism?
As little kids (and as parents surely know), we learn not from what people say but from what people do. Extending this truism a bit to psychology, a behaviorism is not what behaviorists (or anybody else) say, it is what behaviorists do. So throw the lot of behaviorist tradition in an intellectual pot, set on boil, and what's left is behaviorism. So a behaviorism represents the essential attributes of all those psychologists who call themselves behaviorists. These attributes are but three:
1. Behaviorism is Ethological
Behaviorism is a sub-species of learning theory, and examines how experience influences behavior, or how learning occurs. Behaviorists uniquely emphasize the study of ethological data (i.e. the study of animal behavior) and how it may inform our understanding of the human animal. These data may reflect reflexive behavior (e.g. Pavlov's salivary reflex), voluntary behavior (e.g. Skinner's operant conditioning), cognitive behavior (e.g. Tolman's cognitive maps), or neural behavior (e.g. Kent Berridges biological behaviorism). Indeed, behavior in all of its manifestations is grist for behaviorism, thus it cannot reflect the mere study of overt behavior, as most common definitions are wont to claim.
2. Behaviorism is Deductive
All behaviorisms, save for the ornery exception of B. F. Skinner's 'methodological' and 'radical' behaviorisms meet the central precepts of science: namely a focus on generating hypotheses or rules that are subject to test. A big advantage of this is that the interpretations of knowledge are progressively elaborated and pared by the deductive methods of science. This allows the theoretical principles of behaviorism like the principles of physics and biology to actually get somewhere.and not be burdened by the intellectual baggage of the past. Hence the behaviorism of today is far removed in its theoretical and practical principles from its predecessors in the last century. In other words, it ain't just Skinner and Pavlov.
3. Behaviorism is Behavior-istic
One good thing about ethological research is not that animal subjects are simple minded, but rather that they don't have any simple minded things to say. Thus your lab mouse will not spout off mindless truisms like Dr. Phil because he doesn't have the language to do so. The fact that animals do not have language saves a lot of time. since the metaphorical descriptions of behavior entailed by language can't be used by animals or the psychologists that observe them. Thus, stripped of metaphors, only behavior remains, and the psychologists who use such data become by default (i.e. not their own fault) behaviorists.
So there you have it. Behaviorism is a type of learning theory that uses animal data as a bridge to human experience, discovers truth through deduction and experiment, and stays clear of the poetic musings that separate literature from science. Indeed behaviorism is sicence, and is no different as science from the physical and biological sciences. So why then are behaviorists castigated as a half-witted, hard headed, insensitive, and blinkered lot? It is perhaps because not that they don't know any better, but because up to now they couldn't know any better. That has now changed.
B. F. Pavlov has an elixir for you!
The Blind Science
To explain the world you need to observe the world, and observation is no better than the precision of the tools you use to observe. If you don't have the proper tools your explanation of things from atoms to apples won't work, regardless of how 'scientific' your strategy might be. Before Galileo, physicists didn't have the right tools (e.g. the telescope) and physics became populated with a wierd bestiary of astronomical models that moved the earth in strange loops or not at all. Similarly, before Pasteur, biologists didn't have the right tools (e.g. microscope), and medicine was more likely to kill you as cure you with procedures (e.g. bloodletting) that stemmed from the half-baked explanations of the time.
With psychology, the story is the same. Only in the last ten years or so have the proper tools emerged (e.g. fMRI) that have permitted psychologists to observe and explain behavior in all its forms, and ground them firmly to detailed observations of an organic brain. Ironically, the languages that describe this new holistic view of psychology are the same that were born in the labs of behaviorists past, and are behavioristic through and through.
Until the waning years of the twentieth century, behaviorism was never unscientific but was rather a blind science. But blindness is not recognized by nearsighted intellectual communities that claim we have before than all that we really need and perhaps can see. Ultimately the triumph of behaviorism will come from its newly acquired vision, and its ability to give to other psychologists a desperately needed pair of glasses.
