On the Flaws of Behaviorism (Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm)

From Erich Fromm's book "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness"

"It was only in the twenties that the focus in psychology shifted radically from feeling to behavior, with emotions and passions thereafter removed from many psychologists' field of vision as irrelevant data, at least from a scientific standpoint. The subject matter of the dominant school in psychology became behavior, not the behaving man: the "science of the psyche" was transformed into the science of the engineering of animal and human conduct. This development has reached its peak in Skinner's neobehaviorism, which is today the most widely accepted psychological theory in the universities of the United States.

The reason for this transformation of psychology is easy to find. The student of man is, more than any other scientist, influenced by the atmosphere of his society. This is so because not only are his ways of thinking, his interests, the questions he raises, all partly socially determined as in the natural sciences, but in his case the subject matter itself, man, is thus determined. Whenever a psychologist speaks of man, his model is that of the men around him-and most of all himself. In contemporary industrial society, men are cerebrally oriented, feel little, and consider emotions a useless ballast-those of the psychologists as well as those of their subjects . The behavioristic theory seems to fit them well. (...)

Skinnerian neobehaviorism' is based on the same principle as Watson's concepts: psychology as a science need not and must not be concerned with feelings or impulses or any other subjective events; it disdains any attempt to speak of a "nature" of man or construct a model of man, or to analyze various human passions which motivate human behavior. To consider human behavior as impelled by intentions, purposes , aims or goals, would be a prescientific and useless way of looking at it. Psychology has to study what reinforcements tend to shape human behavior and how to apply the reinforcements most effectively. Skinner's "psychology" is the science of the engineering of behavior; its aim is to find the right reinforcements in order to produce a desired behavior. (...)

Skinner's experiments are not concerned with the goals of the conditioning. The animal or the human subject is conditioned to behave in a certain way. What it (he) is conditioned to is determined by the decision of the experimenter who sets the goals for the conditioning. Usually the experimenter in these laboratory situations is not interested in what he is conditioning an animal or human subject for, but rather in the fact that he can condition them to the goal of his choice, and in how he can do it best. However, serious problems arise when we turn from the laboratory to realistic living, to individual or social life. In this case the paramount questions are: to what are people being conditioned, and who determines these goals? (...)

Because neobehaviorism has no theory of man, it can only see behavior and not the behaving person. Whether somebody smiles at me because he wants to hide his hostility, or a salesgirl smiles because she has been instructed to smile (in the better stores ) , or whether a friend smiles at me because he is glad to see me, all this makes no difference to neobehaviorism, for "a smile is a smile."

That it should make no difference to Professor Skinner as a person is hard to believe, unless he were so alienated that the reality of persons no longer matters to him. But if the difference does matter, how could a theory that ignores it be valid?

Nor can neobehaviorism explain why quite a few persons conditioned to be persecutors and torturers fall mentally sick in spite of the continuation of "positive reinforcements." Why does positive reinforcement not prevent many others from rebelling, out of the strength of their reason, their conscience, or their love, when all conditioning works in the opposite direction? And why are many of the most adapted people, who should be star witnesses to the success of conditioning, often deeply unhappy and disturbed or suffer from neurosis ?

There must be impulses inherent in man which set limits to the power of conditioning; to study the failure of conditioning seems just as important, scientifically, as its success. Indeed, man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only "almost." He reacts to those conditions that conflict with basic human requirements in different and ascertainable ways. He can be conditioned to be a slave, but he will react with aggression or decline in vitality; or he can be conditioned to feel like part of a machine and react with boredom, aggression, and unhappiness.

Basically, Skinner is a naive rationalist who ignores man's passions. In contrast to Freud, he is not impressed by the power of passions, but believes that man always behaves as his self-interest requires. Indeed, the whole principle of neobehaviorism is that self-interest is so powerful that by appealing to it-mainly in the form of the environment's rewarding the individual for acting in the desired sense-man's behavior can be completely determined . In the last analysis, neobehaviorism is based on the quintessence of bourgeois experience: the primacy of egotism and self-interest over all other human passions."

#psychology #behaviorism #politics #philosophy #change