Lecture 4 - Foundations: Skinner

Overview:

Professor Bloom opens with a brief discussion of the value and evolutionary basis of unconscious processing. The rest of this lecture introduces students to the theory of Behaviorism, particularly the work of prominent behaviorist, B. F. Skinner. Different types of learning are discussed in detail, as well as reasons why behaviorism has been largely displaced as an adequate theory of human mental life.



Professor Paul Bloom: I actually want to begin by going back to Freud and hitting a couple of loose ends. There was a point in my lecture on Wednesday where I skipped over some parts. I said, "We don't have time for this" and I just whipped past it. And I couldn't sleep over the weekend. I've been tormented. I shouldn't have skipped that and I want to hit--Let me tell you why I skipped it. The discussion I skipped was the discussion of why we would have an unconscious at all. So, I was talking about the scientifically respectable ideas of Freud and I want to talk about some new ideas about why there could be an unconscious.

Now, the reason why I skipped it is I'm not sure this is the best way to look at the question. As we will learn throughout the course, by far the vast majority of what our brains do, the vast majority of what our minds do, is unconscious and we're unaware of it. So the right question to ask may not be, "Why are some things unconscious?" but rather, why is this tiny subset of mental life--why is this conscious? On the other hand, these claims about the utility of unconsciousness, I think, are provocative and interesting. So I just wanted to quickly share them with you.

So, the question is, from an evolutionary standpoint, "Why would an unconscious evolve?" And an answer that some psychologists and biologists have given is deception. So, most animals do some deception. And deception defined broadly is simply to act or be in some way that fools others into believing or thinking or responding to something that's false.

There's physical examples of deception. When threatened, chimpanzees--their hair stands up on end and that makes them look bigger to fool others to thinking they're more dangerous than they are. There's an angler fish at the bottom of the ocean that has a rod sticking up from the top of its head with a lure to capture other fish – to fool them in thinking that this is something edible and then to themselves be devoured. But humans, primates in general but particularly humans, are masters of deception. We use our minds and our behaviors and our actions continually to try to trick people into believing what's not true. We try to trick people, for instance, into believing that we're tougher, smarter, sexier, more reliable, more trustworthy and so on, than we really are. And a large part of social psychology concerns the way in which we present ourselves to other people so as to make the maximally positive impression even when that impression isn't true.

At the same time, though, we've also evolved very good lie detection mechanisms. So not only is there evolutionary pressure for me to lie to you, for me to persuade you for instance, that if we're going to have a--if you are threatening me don't threaten me, I am not the sort of man you could screw around with. But there's evolutionary pressure for you to look and say, "No. You are the sort of man you could screw around with. I can tell." So how do you become a good liar? And here's where the unconscious comes in. The hypothesis is: the best lies are lies we tell ourselves. You're a better liar, more generally, if you believe the lie that you're telling.

This could be illustrated with a story about Alfred Hitchcock. The story goes--He hated working with child actors but he often had to. And the story goes--He was dealing with a child actor who simply could not cry. And, finally frustrated, Hitchcock went to the actor, leaned over, whispered in his ear, "Your parents have left you and they're never coming back." The kid burst into tears. Hitchcock said, "Roll ‘em" and filmed the kid. And the kid, if you were to see him, you'd say, "That's--Boy, he's--he really looks as if he's sad" because he was. If I had a competition where I'd give $100,000 to the person who looks the most as if they are in pain, it is a very good tactic to take a pen and jam it into your groin because you will look extremely persuasively as if you are in pain. If I want to persuade you that I love you, would never leave you, you can trust me with everything, it may be a superb tactic for me to believe it. And so, this account of the evolution of the unconscious is that certain motivations and goals, particularly sinister ones, are better made to be unconscious because if a person doesn't know they have them they will not give them away. And this is something I think we should return to later on when we talk about social interaction and social relationships.
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Now, at the core of behaviorism are three extremely radical and interesting views. The first is a strong emphasis on learning. The strong view of behaviorism is everything you know, everything you are, is the result of experience. There's no real human nature. Rather, people are infinitely malleable. There's a wonderful quote from John Watson and in this quote John Watson is paraphrasing a famous boast by the Jesuits. The Jesuits used to claim, "Give me a child until the age of seven and I'll show you the man," that they would take a child and turn him into anything they wanted. And Watson expanded on this boast,

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train them to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.

Now, you could imagine--You could see in this a tremendous appeal to this view because Watson has an extremely egalitarian view in a sense. If there's no human nature, then there's no sense in which one group of humans by dint of their race or their sex could be better than another group. And Watson was explicit. None of those facts about people will ever make any difference. What matters to what you are is what you learn and how you're treated. And so, Watson claimed he could create anybody in any way simply by treating them in a certain fashion.

A second aspect of behaviorism was anti-mentalism. And what I mean by this is the behaviorists were obsessed with the idea of doing science and they felt, largely in reaction to Freud, that claims about internal mental states like desires, wishes, goals, emotions and so on, are unscientific. These invisible, vague things can never form the basis of a serious science. And so, the behaviorist manifesto would then be to develop a science without anything that's unobservable and instead use notions like stimulus and response and reinforcement and punishment and environment that refer to real world and tangible events.

Finally, behaviorists believed there were no interesting differences across species. A behaviorist might admit that a human can do things that a rat or pigeon couldn't but a behaviorist might just say, "Look. Those are just general associative powers that differ" or they may even deny it. They might say, "Humans and rats aren't different at all. It's just humans tend to live in a richer environment than rats." From that standpoint, from that theoretical standpoint, comes a methodological approach which is, if they're all the same then you could study human learning by studying nonhuman animals. And that's a lot of what they did.
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Okay. So, here are the three general positions of behaviorism. (1) That there is no innate knowledge. All you need is learning. (2) That you could explain human psychology without mental notions like desires and goals. (3) And that these mechanisms apply across all domains and across all species. I think it's fair to say that right now just about everybody agrees all of these three claims are mistaken.

First, we know that it's not true that everything is learned. There is considerable evidence for different forms of innate knowledge and innate desires and we'll look--and we'll talk about it in detail when we look at case studies like language learning, the development of sexual preference, the developing understanding of material objects. There's a lot of debate over how much is innate and what the character of the built-in mental systems are but there's nobody who doubts nowadays that a considerable amount for humans and other animals is built-in.

Is it true that talking about mental states is unscientific? Nobody believes this anymore either. Science, particularly more advanced sciences like physics or chemistry, are all about unobservables. They're all about things you can't see. And it makes sense to explain complex and intelligent behavior in terms of internal mechanisms and internal representations. Once again, the computer revolution has served as an illustrative case study. If you have a computer that plays chess and you want to explain how the computer plays chess, it's impossible to do so without talking about the programs and mechanisms inside the computer.

Is it true that animals need reinforcement and punishment to learn? No, and there's several demonstrations at the time of Skinner suggesting that they don't. This is from a classic study by Tolman where rats were taught to run a maze. And what they found was the rats did fine. They learn to run a maze faster and faster when they're regularly rewarded but they also learn to run a maze faster and faster if they are not rewarded at all. So the reward helps, but the reward is in no sense necessary.
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Finally, the other reading you're going to do for this part--section of the course is Chomsky's classic article, his "Review of Verbal Behavior." Chomsky is one of the most prominent intellectuals alive. He's still a professor at MIT, still publishes on language and thought, among other matters. And the excerpt you're going to read is from his "Review of Verbal Behavior." And this is one of the most influential intellectual documents ever written in psychology because it took the entire discipline of behaviorism and, more than everything else, more than any other event, could be said to have destroyed it or ended it as a dominant intellectual endeavor.

And Chomsky's argument is complicated and interesting, but the main sort of argument he had to make is--goes like this. When it comes to humans, the notions of reward and punishment and so on that Skinner tried to extend to humans are so vague it's not science anymore. And remember the discussion we had with regard to Freud. What Skinner--What Chomsky is raising here is the concern of unfalsifiablity. So, here's the sort of example he would discuss. Skinner, in his book Verbal Behavior, talks about the question of why do we do things like talk to ourselves, imitate sounds, create art, give bad news to an enemy, fantasize about pleasant situations? And Skinner says that they all involve reinforcement; those are all reinforced behaviors. But Skinner doesn't literally mean that when we talk to ourselves somebody gives us food pellets. He doesn't literally mean even that when we talk to ourselves somebody pats us on the head and says, "Good man. Perfect. I'm very proud." What he means, for instance, in this case is well, talking to yourself is self-reinforcing or giving bad news to an enemy is reinforcing because it makes your enemy feel bad.

Well, Chomsky says the problem is not that that's wrong. That's all true. It's just so vague as to be useless. Skinner isn't saying anything more. To say giving bad news to an enemy is reinforcing because it makes the enemy feel bad doesn't say anything different from giving bad news to an enemy feels good because we like to give bad news to an enemy. It's just putting it in more scientific terms.

More generally, Chomsky suggests that the law of effect when applied to humans is either trivially true, trivially or uninterestingly true, or scientifically robust and obviously false. So, if you want to expand the notion of reward or reinforcement to anything, then it's true. So why did you come--those of you who are not freshmen--Oh, you--Why did you come? All of you, why did you come to Yale for a second semester? "Well, I repeated my action because the first semester was rewarding." Okay. What do you mean by that? Well, you don't literally mean that somebody rewarded you, gave you pellets and stuff. What you mean is you chose to come there for the second semester. And there's nothing wrong with saying that but we shouldn't confuse it with science. And more generally, the problem is you can talk about what other people do in terms of reinforcement and punishment and operant conditioning and classical conditioning. But in order to do so, you have to use terms like "punishment" and "reward" and "reinforcement" in such a vague way that in the end you're not saying anything scientific.

So, behaviorism as a dominant intellectual field has faded, but it still leaves behind an important legacy and it still stands as one of the major contributions of twentieth century psychology. For one thing, it has given us a richer understanding of certain learning mechanisms, particularly with regard to nonhumans. Mechanisms like habituation, classical conditioning and operant conditioning are real; they can be scientifically studied; and they play an important role in the lives of animals and probably an important role in human lives as well. They just don't explain everything. Finally, and this is something I'm going to return to on Wednesday actually, behaviorists have provided powerful techniques for training particularly for nonverbal creatures so this extends to animal trainers. But it also extends to people who want to teach young children and babies and also want to help populations like the severely autistic or the severely retarded. Many of these behaviorist techniques have proven to be quite useful. And in that regard, as well as in other regards, it stands as an important contribution.