Behavioral and Social/Cognitive Approaches to Forming Habits

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6 Behaviorist and LearningAspects of Personality The Classical Conditioning of Personality

Conditioning a Response to a Stimulus ■ Behavioral Patterns as a Result of Conditioning ■ Extinction Processes ■ Conditioning of Neurotic Behavior ■ Complexities in Application of Conditioning Principles

The Origins of Behaviorist Approaches: Watson’s Behaviorism

The Rejection of Introspection ■ Applying Conditioning Principles to Little Albert: Conditioned Fear and Systematic Desensitization

The Radical Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner Operant Conditioning ■ Operant Theory as an Alternative Description of Personality ■ Controlling

A few years ago, a friend of ours came into a small fortune as the result of a successful business venture. Feeling happy, generous, and curious, he took a short taxicab ride and paid the $5 fare with a $100 bill. Carefully watching the unfolding expressions on the cabdriver’s face, our friend said, “Keep the change,” and went on his way. This cabdriver had never received such a lavish tip and was unlikely to receive another for a long time, if ever. Yet we can predict that this cabdriver may look for customers who resemble our friend, try to behave as he did when traveling with our friend, and in general drive his cab in the hopes of another such tip; and he may do so for a long time to come. In other words, the cabdriver is now acting in a consistent and relatively predictable manner thanks to receiving a significant reward from a patron. In a sense, this behavior is now part of his personality.

the Reinforcement ■ Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia: Walden Two

Applying Behaviorism: Personality Change and Individual Differences

Internal Processes and Behaviorist Theory ■ External Causation versus Free Will or Free Choice

Other Learning Approaches to Personality The Role of Internal Drives: Clark Hull ■ Social Learning Theory: Dollard and Miller ■ Habit Hierarchies ■ Drive Conflict ■ Patterns of Child-Rearing and Personality: Robert R. Sears ■ Modern Behaviorist Personality Approaches

Key Behaviorist Terms and Concepts Evaluation

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A large, unpre- dictable reward such as the cabdriver’s tip is called a partial rein- forcement by behavior- ist psychologists. Partial reinforcement has been studied in laboratory rats and many other ani- mals. Experimental results show that a reward that comes after some, but not all, occurrences of a behavior (i.e., is partial) is more powerful in influ- encing behavior than a reinforcement that is continuous. Just as a rat will press a lever or button dozens of times for a food pellet, people will continue their activities for that occasional but highly rewarding slot machine jackpot, birdie golf shot, sexual liai- son, A+ grade from a professor, or $100 tip. This chapter explains how certain reward structures in our environments can produce consistencies in an individual’s behaviors.

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ehaviorist approaches strike at the very heart of most other personality approaches, which rely on ideas of internal traits, tendencies, defenses, and

motivations. Behaviorists reject such concepts; they see people as controlled absolutely by their environments. Much controversy has necessarily resulted. Poet W. H. Auden (1970) wrote,

Of course, Behaviorism “works.” So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to- earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

As you will see, Auden’s description is not an accurate one, but the controver- sial issues behaviorism raises about the nature of human beings are very real. This chapter considers the strengths and weaknesses of behaviorist and learning approaches to personality.

The Classical Conditioning of Personality

One of the philosophic bases for the learning approach to personality was laid down by the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). Locke viewed an infant as a blank slate—tabula rasa—on whom the experiences of life would write their tale.

BPartial Reinforcement A reward that occurs after some, but not all, occurrences of a behavior

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Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research, Fourth Edition, by Howard S. Friedman and Miriam W. Schustack. Copyright © 2009 by Howard S. Friedman and Miriam W. Schustack. Published by Allyn & Bacon.joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka joka

The Classical Conditioning of Personality 191

This assumption does not preclude certain other approaches to personality, but it definitely elevates the great influence of the situation. However, as all psychology students know, it was the brilliant Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov (1849–1936) who laid the foundation for modern learning approaches.

Conditioning a Response to a Stimulus Studying digestion in dogs, Pavlov discovered the important principle called classical conditioning. He presented food (the unconditioned stimulus), which causes salivation in dogs (the unconditioned or automatic response), to a hungry dog, at the same time pairing it with something that normally did not cause salivation, such as a bell (a neutral stimulus). Pavlov found that if he paired the food presentation and bell a num- ber of times, eventually merely the sound of the bell elicited salivation; that is, the conditioned stimulus (the bell) came to elicit a conditioned response (salivation). Similarly, people can be conditioned to salivate in response to the sound of a food chime on a ranch. Normally, of course, bells have noth- ing to do with salivation. But dogs and people can learn (i.e., be conditioned to) an automatic association.

Pavlov also noted that the conditioned response would occur in response to stimuli that were similar to the conditioned stimulus, indicating that there was generalization of the conditioning. However, the conditioned response would not occur for all possible similar stimuli, indicating that the animal also could learn to tell the difference between different stimuli; this is called discrimination. Thus, if the food followed a bell of only one tone and did not follow the ringing of a bell of other tones, the dog would discriminate this one tone, and the conditioned response would occur only in response to that particular relevant tone. Analogously, a young boy who is stung by bees and bitten by mosquitoes might become fearful of (be condi- tioned to react to) the buzzing of all insects (generalization). Or, on the other hand, if he sees that the flies and gnats buzzing around him do not cause any problems, he may learn to discriminate the buzzing of stinging insects from that of other flying insects.

Behavioral Patterns as a Result of Conditioning Many behavioral reaction patterns are explainable by classical conditioning. Neutral stimuli associated with positive, enjoyable occurrences become “likes,” but events or consequences associated with negative responses become “dislikes” (or worse). For example, a college student might learn to associate drinking at parties with having a pleasant, sociable time with friends. On the other hand, a woman date-raped at a party might develop a “personality” that fears college social events that involve alcohol.

Pavlov’s constructs thus often provide a basis for explaining emotional aspects of personality. For example, why do some people have extreme fear reactions (pho- bias) to certain things while other persons do not? Many people are herpetaphobic and have extreme emotional reactions even to still pictures of snakes. This might be

Classical Conditioning

The concept that after the repeated pairing of an unconditioned stimulus that elicits an uncon- ditioned response and a neutral stimulus, the previously neutral stimulus can come to elicit the same response as the uncond- itioned stimulus

■ Ringing the dinner bell can cause humans to sali- vate, a classically conditioned reaction virtually identi- cal to what Pavlov observed in his laboratory dogs.

Generalization

The tendency for similar stimuli to evoke the same response

Discrimination

The concept that a conditioned response will not occur for all possible stimuli, indicating that an animal can learn to tell the difference between different stimuli

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Chapter 6 ■ Behaviorist and Learning Aspects of Personality192

conditioned if a grandmother took her five-year-old granddaughter to the zoo and exhibited great anxiety in the child’s presence when they approached the “snake house.” This conditioning explanation of a phobia is very different from a biological explanation that relies on an innate fear of snakes, or a psychoanalytic explanation that sees snakes as symbolic of a threatening penis, or a neo-analytic explanation in which fear of snakes is part of our collective unconscious.

Extinction Processes What happens if pairing of the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus stops? Then extinction may occur; that is, the conditioned response becomes less frequent—the association weakens—over time until it disappears. In other words, “personality” (pat- tern of response) changes. A rape victim who developed a fearful personality (afraid of going to parties, out on dates, or even going to shopping malls) could undergo a dra- matic personality change for the better if she repeatedly experienced these events in the calm presence of a supportive friend. Unfortunately, people who have learned to fear certain things will often avoid them, thus not allowing their fear to extinguish.

Conditioning of Neurotic Behavior But how does behaviorism explain a complex personality dimension like neuroti- cism? Pavlov in fact was able to condition a response similar to neurotic behavior in a dog. First, he associated food presentation with a circle but not with an ellipse, and

Extinction

The process by which the frequency of the organism’s producing a response gradually decreases when the response behavior is no longer followed by the reinforcement

John Travolta: Reinforcement of Stardom? Like flashes in the dark, celebrities come and go. As overnight success stories whose careers are launched by the fuel of public appeal, these rockets become teen idols, figures of adolescent crushes, and objects of adult envy. With their stardom shining bright in the public eye, these sudden success stories often fizzle out just as quickly.

Film star John Travolta’s career is a striking excep- tion, but not in the way you might first think. First hitting the spotlight in the 1970s, Travolta’s career sky- rocketed with his performances in the blockbuster movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease. During that period, Travolta was considered by many to be the biggest box-office property around. After a brief period of stardom, though, Travolta was eclipsed. Still in his 20s, he became a “former movie star,” accepting a few roles in mediocre movies and then turning down roles that were offered to him.

What makes Travolta’s story different from the usual path of the has-been is that he made a successful come- back, and then later came back again. Decades after the roles that initially brought him stardom, and after more than a decade of near-invisibility, he resurfaced in 1994 with his on-screen reappearance in Quentin Tarantino’s award-winning pop-culture film Pulp Fiction. That was the start of a second rise to stardom; further successful film roles followed in Get Shorty, Face/Off, and The Thin Red Line. He then did it again, with five films in 2004 and 2005, including Be Cool. Additional successful films followed, including a starring role in Hairspray (in drag).

Can Travolta’s career (sudden stardom, rapid eclipse, reemergence to stardom) be understood by a behaviorist interpretation? One way to describe Travolta’s early upward trajectory is that his behavior (in this case, his acting) was shaped through strong positive

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the dog developed a conditioned response to the circle, discriminating it from the ellipse. Then Pavlov gradually increased the roundness of the ellipse so it approximated the circle. When the dog could no longer discriminate the circle from the ellipse, it began to exhibit neurotic behaviors (Pavlov, 1927). This hints that neuroticism may be a conditioned response, fostered by an environment that requires the individual to dis- criminate between events under conditions in which that judgment is almost impossi- ble (Wolpe & Plaud, 1997). For example, some children find it impossible to predict the reactions of their unstable parents. If children are never sure whether to expect praise or punishment, they may feel frustrated, anxious, and depressed.

Pavlov was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest and intended to become a priest himself. However, as a young man, he read with fascination the recently published theories of Charles Darwin and turned to a career in science (Windholz, 1991). His studies of the function and control of salivation were firmly rooted in Darwin’s ideas.

Complexities in Application of Conditioning Principles Modern research suggests that classical conditioning is not as simple as Pavlov had hoped. For example, he assumed that conditioning principles were general rules that applied uniformly to all animals, but it is now known that different organisms are more easily conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli (Garcia & Koelling, 1966). Hungry dogs can be conditioned to salivate with a bell that is paired with the sight and smell of meat, but each species and even each individual

reinforcement (in the form of money, the “perks” of stardom, respect from his colleagues, and public admi- ration). In operant conditioning terms, the more closely his behavior resembled that of the ideal star, the more he was rewarded; the well-structured contingencies of Travolta’s environment conditioned him to become a star.

Then what happened? Perhaps poor choices of roles led to the extinction of those behaviors that had propelled him to success. Perhaps, after not being rein- forced for engaging in his “star” behavior—that is, after his failure in several movies—Travolta slid into a down- ward spiral of the extinction of his “star” behavior. Having not been reinforced for several movies he did take on, he may have been reluctant to accept new roles or unable to act at top form. As he became less visible, he was less likely to be offered desirable new roles. The

downward path may have become a spiral of negative reinforcement; by not taking on any new roles, he could avoid reexperiencing the scorn and bad reviews that his recent roles had brought.

How to account for his comeback through behav- iorist principles? Perhaps Travolta’s experiences out of the limelight (his more recent reinforcement history) had brought about a change in his responses to seeking or accepting a movie role. Perhaps the actions of the director of his comeback movies were especially success- ful in evoking Travolta’s long-dormant behavior pat- terns from his days of stardom. Once these appropriate responses had been restimulated and reinforced, they became more likely to reappear in subsequent situa- tions. In one sense Travolta was always Travolta, but in another sense he became a different actor in response to the different situations at different times in his life.

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has certain tendencies that facilitate or impair certain learning. For example, humans rely more on visual cues than smells, and different people have different perceptual and aesthetic inclinations. Yet classical conditioning remains a powerful explanation of response patterns, especially when there is a strong natural pairing of stimulus and automatic response. However, much more of our learned patterns of responses comes by experiencing or anticipating the consequences (effects) of our actions. This is the focus of behaviorist approaches to personality. (See the Famous Personalities box.)

The Origins of Behaviorist Approaches: Watson’s Behaviorism

Around the turn of the last century, not only Freud but also many experimental philosopher–psychologists, such as Wilhelm Wundt, were studying psychology using subjective analyses of the human mind, asking people to introspect about their thoughts or to free associate to reveal unconscious processes. This approach was fraught with methodological difficulties. There was no way of validating or verifying the data and conclusions. How could we know if what people reported thinking was really a good representation of their psyche?

The Rejection of Introspection In response to the perceived limitations of introspectionism, behaviorism, the key learning approach in psychology, was founded by John B. Watson. Watson wanted to develop a rigorous science and thus completely rejected introspection. According to Watson, thoughts and feelings elicited through introspection are unobservable and unscientific.

Watson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1878. His experiences led him to start graduate study in philosophy at the University of Chicago, but he soon switched to psychology and also studied neurology, physiology, and animal research. Interestingly, while doing his dissertation, Watson noticed that he had a dislike of using human subjects; he much preferred using animals. Watson believed that he could learn the same things by using animals that others claimed to learn by studying humans.

Watson was a professor at Johns Hopkins University from 1908 to 1919. His basic theories about studying observable behavior and disregarding introspection were laid out in 1914 in his book Behavior, and he and Rosalie Rayner wrote an important book about behaviorism in 1919 called Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. In a sweeping critique, they condemned both introspectionists, who were studying consciousness, and psychoanalysts, who concentrated on the unconscious.

Applying Conditioning Principles to Little Albert: Conditioned Fear and Systematic Desensitization Watson demonstrated the manner in which emotional responses are conditioned when he applied Pavlov’s theory, developed through the study of animals, to the conditioning of little Albert, an 11-month-old boy (Watson & Rayner, 1920). They

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conditioned Albert to fear a rat, an animal that did not initially provoke a fear reac- tion in the baby. They repeatedly made a sudden loud noise (hitting a hammer against a steel bar—a noise that had severely frightened little Albert during pretest- ing) to startle the infant when the rat was presented, or when he reached for the rat with interest. Soon, the mere sight of the rat made him cry.

Generalization was also demonstrated as little Albert’s conditioned fear general- ized to other furry objects, including a rabbit, a dog, and a fur coat. Poor Albert even feared a Santa Claus mask. This study thus suggested that an emotional response that was conditioned to one stimulus could result in later emotional reaction to a variety of events/stimuli. It also demonstrated that any neutral stimulus might end up elicit- ing an emotion. Watson believed that this was how most of personality was formed. Confident that Freud’s notions of the sexual basis of personality were ridiculous, he teased Freudians by maintaining that Albert’s fear of fur would be interpreted by a psychoanalyst in terms of an early experience with pubic hair.

Watson and Rayner’s approach was also used to countercondition the fear of rats, rabbit fur, feathers, and the like, in a little boy called Peter (Jones, 1924). Peter played with three other children while a fear-inducing rabbit was present; the fear was gradually extinguished by slowly bringing the rabbit closer and closer to the child while keeping him happy. This was one of the first documented cases of the use of what has come to be called systematic desensitization. Peter became desen- sitized to the rabbit; thus this aspect of his personality changed.

This deconditioning of phobias by treatment using systematic desensitization techniques is now a common and successful form of therapy (Choy, Fyer, & Lipsitz, 2007). This suggests that even highly emotional aspects of personality can disappear (be extinguished) over time. Recently, the technology that enables people to experi- ence virtual reality (VR) has improved substantially both in terms of the quality of

Systematic Desensitization

Gradually extinguishing a phobia by causing the feared stimulus to become dissociated from the fear response

■ When people suffer from phobias, they often can be successfully treated by desensitization training, which applies the principle of extinction. The fear response is “deconditioned” by pairing the experience of being calm and anxiety-free with successively closer approaches to the fear-inducing situa- tion. Here, an acrophobic young man participates in a fear-reduction program that relies on virtual reality to simulate the situations that elicit his fear of heights. With appropriate application of the approach, techniques based on virtual reality can be as effective as conventional systematic desensitization in allowing people to decrease or eliminate phobic responses. (Photo courtesy of Charles van der Mast, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.)

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the experience created and the cost (in time and money) of creating the simulated environments. Current research is focusing on the use of VR therapy for phobias by applying the techniques of systematic desensitization using electronically simulated fearful situations rather than imagined ones or actual ones (Wiederhold & Wiederhold, 2005). Positive results have been shown for a range of common phobias, including fear of spiders, heights, and enclosed spaces (e.g., Emmelkamp et al., 2002; North, North, & Coble, 1998). There are poten- tially many benefits to such an approach beyond reduced cost and higher effectiveness. People with phobias are more willing to enter a treatment program where they know that they won’t have to confront the target of their phobia in vivo, but only a computer-generated sim- ulacrum (Garcia-Palacios et al., 2001; Garcia-Palacios, Botella, Hoffman, & Fabregat, 2007).

Another early application of conditioning princi- ples was to the treatment of bedwetting (Mowrer & Mowrer, 1928). An electrical device—a loud bell— awakens the child when the slightest wetness is detected. Such a treatment is effective for many chil- dren. Soon, the child learns to respond to the sensa- tions before becoming wet. This approach contradicts the Freudian explanation of bedwetting as the result of a personality disorder resulting from being fixated at a stage of psychosexual development. The focus instead is on staying dry through the night as a skill that can be learned via conditioning from the outside rather than on bedwetting as a symptom of psychic distress on the inside. The application of behaviorist conditioning techniques to therapy developed into a field sometimes referred to as behavior modification or applied behav- ior analysis.

In 1920, Watson divorced his wife and married his student assistant. This scandalous act in the environ-

ment of the time (undoubtedly linked to poor moral conditioning in childhood) resulted in great social pressures, and he had to leave Johns Hopkins University. This disruption produced a major change of career for Watson. He applied his learn- ing theories to the marketplace and became a successful consultant to business. He published another book, Behaviorism, in 1924, but his career as an experimental psychologist pretty much ended when he left the university. Watson died in 1958.

In modern research, the effects of classical conditioning on personality provide an interesting way to think about the initiation of many habits and addictions, but patterns of behavior are maintained when they are rewarded. For example, smoking, drinking, and gambling may initially elicit an unconditioned positive response (of positive arousal, euphoria, excitement), but the persistence of the behaviors in the long run may be better explained as a consequence of the rewards they provide.

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Why Does It Matter? The behaviorist approach to therapy focuses on changing an undesirable behavior rather than finding out what caused it. A funda- mental underlying assumption is that the cause of the problem is irrelevant (although the cause surely lies in the prior history of reinforcement)—the behavior itself is the issue. Merely apply the training tools to change the behavior, and the problem will be solved. In this perspective, an undesired behavior can be changed by learning a differ- ent behavior. Suppose you are a nail-biter, and that habit is creating problems of infected cuticles and embarrassment over unsightly hands. A behaviorist approach would be to train you to stop biting your nails, using a planned program of shaping via reinforcement. From many other perspec- tives, though, especially a psychodynamic one, fixing the symptom is not ultimately of value because the underlying problem will then just manifest itself in some other way. A traditional psychoanalyst would accept that the nail-biting could be stopped by condi- tioning, but would see such an effort as a distraction from the real goal of helping the nail-biter understand the inner conflicts that are causing self-destructive behavior. You could spend years in intensive psychoanalysis sessions to get at the root of the problem— or go for a few sessions of behavior therapy and stop the nail-biting.

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Watson (1924) took seriously the idea that a child was a blank slate. He boasted, “Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him” to be anything, from a doctor or lawyer to a beggar or thief, regardless of his talents, color, inclinations, or whatever. In other words, Watson is proclaiming much more than a specific theory about personality; he is espousing a worldview in which the environment is key to understanding a person. Accordingly, if children are raised properly, they will behave properly, because their personalities are a function of the environment. This perspec- tive is in marked contrast to the perspectives described in other chapters of this book. It was Watson’s assumptions that laid the basis for the work of B. F. Skinner.

The Radical Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederick (“Fred”) Skinner (1904–1990) was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His lawyer father and his mother followed a stringent morality. According to Skinner, he lived in a stable, loving home. His parents and grandparents taught him to respect the Puritan work ethic, virtues, and morals.

As a child, Skinner constructed machines (scooters, rafts, seesaws, slingshots, blow guns, steam cannons) and invented contraptions (among others, a flotation system to separate ripe from green berries), and these childhood interests may have been reflected later in his building and using laboratory equipment and machines (Hall, 1967). From his early years, he was also very interested in animals and their behavior; for example, he watched the trained pigeons at the fair.

Skinner would later say that he could trace his adult behaviors to his childhood reinforcements, not to “personality development” as described by personality theo- rists such as Freud and Jung. Skinner emphasized that who he was, his personality, was clearly the result of his reinforcement history as a child—the rewards and pun- ishments he experienced. His life and personality, he claimed, were determined and controlled by environmental events.

When Skinner was studying literature at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college, he sent some stories to the poet Robert Frost, who recommended he con- tinue to write. After graduation he did spend a year trying to write but determined that he didn’t have anything significant to say. (We might wonder why Robert Frost’s positive reinforcement did not encourage him to keep trying. Was it the limited pos- itive reinforcement he received? Did his behavior extinguish without further rewards?) He then spent six months in Greenwich Village during which time he read Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes and some works by and about Watson. He was also influenced by the pioneering experimental psychologist Edward Thorndike, whose Law of Effect argued that the consequences of a behavior (i.e., the effect) will either strengthen or weaken that behavior. Learning initially comes about through trial and error. We learn to do those actions that bring us rewards or help us avoid pain.

Skinner decided to do graduate work in psychology at Harvard after determining that one needs to understand behavior (as a psychologist does), not just describe it (as a writer does). During graduate school, he concluded that the environment controls

The Radical Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner 197

Reinforcement

An event that strengthens a behavior and increases the likelihood of repeating the behavior in the future

Law of Effect

Edward Thorndike’s concept that the consequence of a behavior will either strengthen or weaken the behavior; that is, when a response follows a stimulus and results in satisfaction for the organism, this strengthens the connection between stimulus and response; however, if the response results in discomfort or pain, the connection is weakened

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behavior: Environmental events, particularly the consequences of behavior, are responsible for most behavior. That being the case, Skinner reasoned, one must uncover the envi- ronmental conditions surrounding any behavior in order to understand the behavior. Skinner endeavored to explain behavior without having to refer to physiology or inter- nal personality constructs. He took his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1931.

Operant Conditioning After Harvard, Skinner went to Minnesota, and then to Indiana for a short time, and finally returned to Harvard in 1948. He became sort of an animal trainer using his newly developed principles called operant conditioning. In operant conditioning, behavior is changed by its consequences; that is, Skinner manipulated the environ- ment in such a way that he was able to train animals (rats, pigeons) to do things (such as playing badminton) that were far from their native behaviors. He did this by grad- ually shaping successive approximations to the desired behavior. Trained seals do not jump through hoops because of their personality but rather because they have been rewarded with fish for performing the behaviors desired by their trainers.

Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning emphasized the study of overt, observable behavior, environmental conditions, and the process by which environ- mental events and circumstances determine behavior. Thus, the theory places its emphasis on the function of behavior (what it does) rather than the structure of personality. It is also a deterministic theory, in which there is no free will.

Operant Theory as an Alternative Description of Personality According to Skinner, the term “personality” is meaningless. There is no place for internal components of personality, psychical structures (id, ego, superego), traits, self-actualization, needs, or instincts. This strong rejection of “mentalism” in favor

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Operant Conditioning

The changing of a behavior by manipulating its consequences

Shaping

The process in which undifferentiated operant behaviors are gradually changed or shaped into a desired behavior pattern by the rein- forcement of successive approximations, so that the behavior more and more resembles the target behavior

■ Skinner’s behaviorist approach explicitly claimed that the principles of learning were common across all species. He used primarily pigeons (shown here) and rats—both are capa- ble of making responses that are eas- ily recorded mechanically (pecks on a key, pressing a bar, etc.).

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of directly observable behaviors has been an ongoing conflict between behaviorism and most other psychological theorizing (Uttal, 2000). The thing we know as per- sonality is merely a group of responses to the environment, in Skinner’s view. To Pavlov’s ideas, Skinner added and developed the important notion that responses produced by the organism have environmental consequences; if the responses are rewarded, then they are more likely to appear again. Skinner argued that most behavior of a person or other organism is of this type and that it is these operant behaviors, taken together, that we call personality.

Skinner cleverly analyzed the behavior of a superstitious individual, without relying on any internal aspects of personality. How can we understand a person who wears lucky shoes to important exams, eats only peanut butter sandwiches before job interviews, and always wears a silver bracelet when going to a party to look for a date? Skinner would explain that if a person has experiences in which a behavior (like wearing one’s shiny black shoes) coincides with getting an A on exams, especially on a few random occasions, the person continues that behavior because the reinforcement strengthens the performance of the behavior even though there is no causal connection. There is no need to propose a “superstitious personality.”

Skinner found that any one animal’s learning and behavior did not look like the average animal’s behavior, emphasizing the individuality of environmental condi- tions and responses. He therefore stressed that we must apply the principles of learning to each organism individually. Thus, his was an idiographic (rather than nomothetic) approach. He did, however, look for general laws of learning that would apply equally to all organisms, human and nonhuman, underscoring a com- mon process.

Of course, Skinner did not consider himself a personality psychologist. On the contrary, notions of internal, nonobservable psychological characteristics were anathema to him. He relied heavily on animal research, whereas other personality theorists studied the development of human personality as a uniquely human process. Skinner believed that the universal laws of behavior acquisition, resulting in what we know as personality, operate in the same manner in human and animal, maybe just more simply in nonhuman animals.

Noam Chomsky (1973), the linguist and political commentator, was one of many who detested the view of humanity propounded by Skinner:

Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportu- nity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can’t tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion. (p. 345)

Is it true that Skinner couldn’t “tell a pigeon from a poet” ? As we have noted, Skinner studied literature and loved to write. He did, however, view the consisten- cies in behavior of his laboratory pigeons and his Harvard colleagues as similar in principle. In person (especially in his later years), Skinner, contrary to reputation, generally acted as a polite and friendly gentleman.

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Controlling the Reinforcement Because Skinner, like Watson, believed that a child (like a pigeon) was a function of the environment, he set out to design the best ways to raise children and even to structure whole communities. His inquiries led to the invention of what is some- times called the Skinner box (although Skinner himself did not call it this and did not like others to use this designation). In this enclosure, termed the experimental chamber or operant chamber, the animal (or child) was segregated from all irrele- vant environmental influences, except those under the control of the experimenter. For animals, the box contained either a lever (to be pressed by the rat) or a key (to be pecked by a pigeon). This lever or key, when pecked or pressed, triggered release of a food pellet (providing positive reinforcement) or stopped the administration of an aversive stimulus like a shock (providing negative reinforcement).

The reinforcement rate could be carefully calibrated and controlled, and the rate of pressing/pecking was registered by the device. The early versions of Skinner’s apparatus were made before the era of electronics and were operated electromechanically, but as more sophisticated components became available, the operant chambers were upgraded. Even the earliest of the boxes allowed accurate measurement of the response rate while the reinforcement rate and schedule were controlled. Partial reinforcement schedules, in which the reward was delivered intermittently, were generally found to be most effective at shaping behavior pat- terns. These techniques were later applied to the design of teaching machines and

self-paced teaching regimens, in which students receive rewards as they master skills. As applied to a young child, this might be a sort of fancy playpen that provides structured feedback about how the world works. As applied to a corporation employee, it might be a salary bonus schedule tied to certain productivity or profit increases (Skinner, 1938).

Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia: Walden Two But Skinner, like Freud and other influential theorists, also had a broad vision for the design of society. In his novel Walden Two, Skinner (1948) describes a utopian community that is behaviorally engineered, based on principles of operant conditioning. A benev- olent government rewards (reinforces) positive, socially appropri- ate behavior. Walden Two is problem-free because only positive reinforcement is used; people always behave reliably and responsi- bly, and they are invariably very competent. There is no issue of freedom because Skinner believes free will is only an illusion.

In a sardonic move, Skinner carefully selected the title for his novel from the work of the nineteenth-century essayist Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau lived alone for two years in a cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts; the experience had been the inspi- ration for his classic Walden. Thoreau was an individualist who called for self-reliance and rejection of authority. The individual was seen as the source of freedom. In Skinner’s Walden Two,

Skinner Box

An enclosure in which an experimenter can shape the behavior of an animal by controlling reinforcement and accurately measuring the responses of the animal

Negative Reinforcement

An aversive event that ends if a behavior is performed, making it more likely for that behavior to be performed in the future

■ B. F. Skinner devised a “teaching machine” to administer controlled reinforcement to a human learner. It was used to help teach an undergraduate course at Harvard in the 1950s, establishing the “programmed instruction” approach to teaching.

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there is no freedom, only perceived freedom, as the community engineers everyone’s behavior.

Time magazine called Walden Two a “depressingly serious prescription for communal regimentation, as though the author had read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and missed the point” (“Box–Reared Babies,” 1954). Skinner, of course, had not missed the point. He well knew about fears that the govern- ment would assume control over self-destiny, but he himself did not fear this. Indeed, he did not worry at all because he believed that all behavior is determined anyway. Rather, he believed that a desirable utopian community could be designed by control- ling the environment rather than leaving it unstructured.

Skinner formalized these ideas in his 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, a nonfiction treatise advocating a society like Walden Two. He proposed a behaviorally engineered soci- ety, using environmental control to shape human behavior—a technology of behavior in which environmental conditions are manipulated to shape human actions. Although Freud believed that horrible human problems could be traced to id forces and the death instinct, and although many biological psychologists believe that there is an evolved aggressive drive, Skinner believed that most such problems—including war and crime— are just human behaviors that can be shaped through learning. If society could reinforce better behaviors, they would super- sede the maladaptive ones. Skinner’s (1974) ideas stand in precise opposition to visions of individual freedom and self-fulfillment, discussed in detail in Chapter 9.

■ In the years immediately following the publication of Skinner’s Walden Two, several small communities were founded on behaviorist principles. Here, a community member works at Twin Oaks Community (in Louisa, Virginia), which began as a Walden Two society in the 1960s but later evolved away from behaviorism.

■ A Skinnerian approach to altering behavior is to set up environmental contingencies that reward desirable behavior. This approach has been suc- cessfully adopted in many “special” schools and treatment centers for children and adults with emotional and cognitive disabilities. In this day- treatment center for adults with intellectual disabilities, there is a “token economy” where appro- priate behavior is rewarded with tokens that can be exchanged for treats and privileges—the tokens thus serve as secondary reinforcers. Here, a staff member is helping a client (on the left) select a reward to buy with his tokens in the center’s store.

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Skinner was willing to apply some of his principles to his own life. For example, he arose at the same time early each morning and sat at the same writing table to estab- lish the habit of daily productive writing. He arranged a working and sleeping setup for himself in his basement, so that he could structure his environment to reinforce the desired behaviors. As he became older, he was less and less willing to interrupt this structure. College students who seek advice about improving their grades are often advised to adopt just such a regimen—to arrange their study materials in a quiet place and go there every single day at the same time. This condition- ing can produce a “productive personality.” Of course, many students reject such advice, seeking to be more spontaneous, intuitive, and “free.”

What about maladaptive behaviors? According to Skinner, psychopathology is learned in the same man- ner as all other behaviors: The adaptive or maladaptive personality (i.e., behavior) is learned by reinforcement. People have either not learned the appropriate response and have a behavioral deficit, or they have learned the wrong response. Also, some individuals may have been punished for adaptive behaviors. Thus, the treatment for “mental illness” is to set up environmental contin- gencies that reward desirable behavior. This approach has been operationalized to some extent in schools and group homes for children with cognitive and emotional disabilities. Interestingly, Skinner agrees with Karl Marx and Erich Fromm that an incoherent, oppressive society leads to the many problems of individuals in

modern life; but for Skinner it is behavior, not consciousness or psychic stability, that is fragmented by disorganized reinforcers (Skinner, 1974). To Skinner, a neu- rotic is someone who has been reinforced for overly emotional behavior.

Applying Behaviorism: Personality Change and Individual Differences

Skinner agreed that Freud was an insightful observer of human behavior, but Skinner did not want to allow any vague mentalistic concepts (that could not be observed). So he continually reinterpreted the explanations of other theorists. Some examples of this reinterpretation are shown in Table 6.1.

An example of current research in line with this Skinnerian approach is a Japanese study that examined 36 men who exhibited the unhealthy, stress-prone Type A personality (see Chapter 12 for more information on this syndrome). The study demonstrated the role of operant conditioning in the alteration of these assumed “personality characteristics” by training these men with operant self-control

Why Does It Matter? The principles of controlling people’s behavior through structured reinforcement are often used in institutional settings for people with severe mental illness and devel- opmental delay. In these environments, the interpersonal processes that might go on in a typical family setting are necessarily absent. In the case of children with severe develop- mental delay, they are unable to learn the skills of daily life through the informal and unstructured processes of instruction that work for most children. Most parents have no formal knowledge about how to toilet train their children, or how to teach their children language, but virtually all typically developing children become toilet trained and learn language anyway. But for those who are severely disabled, it is often the case that they can learn these skills only under highly structured training regimens, which are devised and carried out by staff. Both the children and the staff reap the benefit of the children’s improved skills: The children become more independent, and the caregiv- ing becomes less burdensome.

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procedures, such as rewarding more constructive behaviors, so that all the subjects were able to learn to reduce their Type A behaviors. The focus was not at all on the internal personality or hostility, but rather on their externally observable behavior (Nakano, 1990). If personality is merely learned behavior, as this school of thought contends, it can then presumably be unlearned using the same conditioning processes by which it was first learned. This is not a totally new idea. In fact, we pres- ent an example offered by Ben Franklin in the Self-Understanding box. What is new is that behaviorists try to do this systematically, according to scientific laws that they propose about contingencies.

Skinner did not deny that there are genetic differences among organisms. Instead, he said that the role of biological factors was to define the organism’s range of responses and the organism’s ability to have its behavior strengthened by environmen- tal events. He emphasized that the environment is of primary importance even in hereditary characteristics because the environment selects behaviors that encourage procreation and survival; that is, in a relatively constant environment, the environment

TABLE 6.1 Behaviorist Reinterpretation ofPsychoanalytic and Neo-Analytic Concepts

Psychoanalytic or Neo-Analytic Concept Behaviorist Reinterpretation

Freud’s notion of the id as the instinctual energies that form the undifferentiated core of personality

Skinner asserted that this is simply humans’ innate susceptibility to reinforcement, which is a product of evolution

The internal personality structure termed the ego or “I,” which responds to the world according to the reality principle

The learned responses to the practical contingencies of everyday life; there are different behavioral repertoires for differ- ent environmental contingencies

The superego or “over-I” that internalizes societal rules and helps protect the ego from overwhelming id impulses

Behavior is learned from the punitive prac- tices of society, controlling behavior not allowed by parents and society; “uncon- scious” simply means that people are not taught to observe it and talk about it

The ego defense mechanism of repression, that pushes threatening thoughts and motives back into the unconscious

We learn to avoid behavior that is pun- ished, and by not engaging in it, we avoid conditioned aversive stimulation

Jung’s notion of archetypes (universal emotional symbols) and the collective unconscious of deep, universal emotional symbols

Skinner says that this is the evolution of certain universal characteristics of the human species and the parallel cultural evolution of useful behaviors; there is thus a sameness or universality of things that are reinforcing, and a commonality of behaviors that societies need to control

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Self-Understanding

Ben Franklin’s Habit Chart Although behaviorist theories of learning and reinforcement were developed in the twentieth century, key elements of the approach have been understood by some people for many centuries. (Throughout this book, we show how the eight aspects of personal- ity embody basic approaches to understanding the complexities of human nature.) One of the keenest insights into behaviorist principles was given by Benjamin Franklin (rpt. 1906) in his autobiography more than two hundred years ago. Rather than paying for a New Age course in self-improvement, you might try Franklin’s method for yourself.

In an effort to improve the moral quality of his life, Franklin made a list of 13 virtues he thought desirable. For example, he wanted more temperance (not drink- ing to excess), frugality, industry (“be always employed in something useful”), and humility. He saw that the virtues were composed of specific behaviors, which together comprised habits. To change his habits, Ben constructed a calendar book, with rows of the virtues and columns of the days of the week (see chart). At the end of each day, he would put a black mark on his chart if he had violated the virtue that day. Aiming to create a clean slate, he had the reinforcement of seeing the number of black marks decrease. In this way, Franklin gradually minimized his bad habits.

Franklin, with great insight, went even further. At the beginning, he focused on one virtue at a time, so that he would not be distracted or discouraged by attempt- ing too much at once. Second, he arranged or ordered the virtues in a way that each one would facilitate the learning of the next one. (For example, once he was no longer dull with too much drink, he could more easily move on to tackle the next set of habits.) Third, he gradually increased the reinforcement intervals; over time, he returned to his notebook less and less often, although he always kept it with him.

Interestingly, Franklin also recognized some of the limits of the behaviorist approach. He wrote little encouraging mottoes and sayings and poems in his note- book (a quote from Cicero here, a Bible verse from the Proverbs there), to inspire and motivate him further. Although he was not religious in the orthodox sense, he well understood and reflected on the importance of the religious underpinnings of what he was attempting. He thus integrated what today would be called a cognitive and motivational approach to behavioral change.

In the end, Ben Franklin said that although he could not achieve perfection, the endeavor made him a better and happier man than he otherwise would have been.

■ Benjamin Franklin’s Habit Chart Almost two centuries before behaviorism was formalized, Franklin had a sophisticated and insightful approach to modifying his own behavior using a form of negative reinforcement (a decrease in the black marks that signified violations of the virtues to which he aspired).

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will “select” individuals who have the most adaptive behaviors to survive and reproduce. But ascribing any behavior to “instinct” is a mistake because it again ignores the role of environmental circumstances.

Internal Processes and Behaviorist Theory Skinner acknowledged that we have emotions, thoughts, and internal processes, but he dismissed these as irrelevant in the explanation and understanding of behavior. Thoughts and emotions do occur, according to Skinner, but they do not cause behavior. Thoughts, emotions, and other internal events are, as are all characteristics of the organism, caused by environmental events. In any case, we cannot operationalize internal processes or measure their magnitude. So rather than ask if someone feels tired or how tired he or she is, look to the environment—when he or she last slept, how much he or she slept, and so on. These environmental events are the factors that can be measured and studied scientifically. Thus, contrary to what many personality theorists have emphasized, person- ality is not something that is specially or uniquely human. Because personality is merely a group of behaviors that have been well supported by the environment, any organ- ism could potentially have a “personality” as Skinner’s theory defines it.

External Causation versus Free Will or Free Choice Like Freud, Skinner was a radical determinist, which means he believed that all human behavior is caused. Both believed that there is absolutely no evidence that people have “free choice” in their behavior. For Freud this determinism was biolog- ical, whereas for Skinner it was environmental. According to Skinner, considering internal causes just confuses our study, diverting important attention from the real causes of behavior—the organism’s reinforcement history. He was concerned that a focus on internal explanations for behavior entails the risk of eventually neglecting the key influence of the environmental events.

Other Learning Approaches to Personality

In the 1930s and 1940s, a number of experimental psychologists became dissatisfied with the notion that behavior is totally a function of the events in the environment. They believed it was also important to take into account internal characteristics of

Why Does It Matter? The strong position of the behaviorist approach is that only observable behavior can provide appropriate data for a science of behavior. From this point of view, a subjec- tive verbal report by an individual of a memory, an emotion, or an idea is only “data” to the extent that the string of words and the physical properties of the utterance constitute observable behavior. Skinner, in fact, wrote a book titled Verbal Behavior in which he provided a stimulus–response analysis of language behavior. As the technology to do neu- ropsychological measurement improves, it brings up the question of whether internal events occurring in the brain can be consid- ered observable, and thus legitimate for sci- entific analysis if they can be measured objectively and reliably. We can do such measurement now with a variety of meth- ods (EEG, fMRI, and so on, as described in Chapter 2). Does the behaviorist now need to broaden the scope of what behaviors are investigated?

Radical Determinism

The belief that all human behavior is caused and that humans have no free will

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the organism, such as how hungry or tired it was. But they still wanted to maintain a totally objective (often rat-based) approach. One of the most influential of these theorists was Clark Hull.

The Role of Internal Drives: Clark Hull Hull was born in New York and later studied at the University of Michigan. He studied math, physics, and chemistry, intending to become an engineer, but he con- tracted polio and had to recast his plans. He turned to psychology, encountered the views of Watson and Pavlov, and soon became an influential professor at Yale. In 1943, he wrote Principles of Behavior. Hull’s emphasis was on experimentation, an organized theory of learning, and the nature of habits, which were, according to Hull, simply associations between a stimulus and a response.

For Hull, the organism (usually a white rat) makes responses that lead to a goal that alleviates a drive. These responses in themselves become stimuli for further

Habits

In learning theory, simple associations between a stimulus and a response

SHARPEN YOUR THINKING Current Controversy

Should Governments Encourage Gambling? In the United States, the majority of the states sponsor state lotteries, with the proceeds going to public schools or other public purposes. More than two dozen countries run national lottery programs, also with “good causes” as the beneficiaries.

From the perspective of the principles of learning theory, playing a lottery (and most other forms of gam- bling) can be viewed as an example of partial reinforce- ment: The behavior of betting (buying a ticket) results in an outcome (winning the game and receiving money) that reinforces the behavior. In many gambling activities, small payouts occur rather frequently—for example, if you play “scratcher” games, as many as 10 percent of the tickets may provide a prize. Although these more frequent prizes tend to be very small (as little as the initial cost of the ticket in some cases), they can act as reinforcers all the same. Of course, the rein- forcement is partial—the vast majority of the time, a person will not win. But partial reinforcement is very powerful in increasing the likelihood of a behavior being repeated and in making that behavior resistant to extinction. By its nature, gambling leads to more gambling.

Many governments require that their lottery offi- cials regularly determine who is participating in the lottery. These reports, intended to address the criti- cism that the lottery disproportionately burdens the

poor, tend to focus on the fact that lottery players are representative of the general population. While this may truly be the case, the impact of lottery gambling may still be disproportionally harmful to people who have lower incomes. For example, suppose 8 percent of those who spend $50 a month or more on lottery tickets have very low incomes, and that 8 percent of people in a state are classified as very low income. In this case, the income distribution of the group of heavy lottery players may well reflect the overall income distribution of that state as a whole. Does that mean, though, that the lottery has no greater negative impact on low-income people? A system where the poorest 8 percent of a population pay 8 percent of the taxes collected would be much less progressive than the income tax systems used by most governments, where the tax rates increase as the income level rises.

Is the promotion of gambling an activity in which governments should participate? Does running a lot- tery contribute to the general good of society? Is it appropriate for governments to encourage people, including those who may not have much discretionary income, to spend it on the addictive entertainment of the lottery? Should personality psychologists advise lottery boards on the most effective reinforcement schedules and lottery marketing so as to encourage more and more people to gamble?

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responses and intervene between the stimulus (e.g., hunger) and response (e.g., eating). So, for example, the rat must learn to make a variety of moves to get through the maze before it can reach the food and reduce its hunger drive. As applied to humans, this explains how a goal such as becoming rich can be learned, even though it is quite distant from an innate drive such as hunger. We learn that money and success can lead to drive reduction (such as allowing us access to good food). But it all comes back to basic innate or primary drives—hunger, thirst, sex, and the avoidance of pain.

What is important for understanding Hullian learning approaches to personality is that Hull turned attention to the internal state of the organism during learning, although he still emphasized the reinforcements provided by the environment. This allowed later development of more complex learning-based approaches than would result from a strict focus on stimulus and response.

Social Learning Theory: Dollard and Miller A very productive and influential group of investigators from various backgrounds coalesced at Yale in the 1930s and were heavily influenced by Hull. One of these was Neal Miller, who received his Ph.D. at Yale in 1935. Interestingly, Miller did postdoctoral work at the Vienna Institute of Psychoanalysis, where he was exposed to Freud’s ideas at the height of their European influence. Miller later also became an expert physiological psychologist. Putting all these background pieces together, Neal Miller worked in a research paradigm of environmental reinforcements in laboratory rats, like a good experimental behaviorist; however, he continued Hull’s focus on internal drives, both in terms of physiology (such as brain mechanisms) and motiva- tion. Furthermore, he tried to understand the deeper issues of the psyche that Freud and others had raised. He stayed at Yale until 1966, when he went to Rockefeller University and became a leader in the new field of health psychology, working on such topics as biofeedback and the voluntary control of processes like heart rate.

At Yale, Miller met John Dollard, who had received his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. Chicago, at the time, was the center of the sociological and anthropological approach to social psychology, which emphasized the social or relative nature of the self. Dollard had also studied psychoanalysis in Berlin. So, when Dollard and Miller met and started collaborating, they together represented almost all the important traditions relevant to the study of personality—the psycho- analytic and ego aspects, the social and anthropological aspects, and the biological and cognitive aspects, all in the overall context of a learning and behaviorist frame- work. It is fascinating to see what emerged from this blend of fundamental ideas— an approach to personality called social learning theory.

Habit Hierarchies Simply put, social learning theory proposes that our likelihood of responding in certain ways—termed “habits”—are built up in terms of a hierarchy of secondary, or acquired, drives. For example, suppose you are mugged and beaten up while walk- ing down a dark alley. Not only would you probably learn to avoid such situations (remembering the pain), but you would feel anxiety in similar situations. This learned anxiety is now an acquired drive that can motivate new behavior. You could be reinforced (and thus learn new aspects to your personality) when this drive is

Primary Drive

A fundamental innate motivator of behavior, specifically hunger, thirst, sex, or pain

Social Learning Theory

A theory that proposes that habits are built up in terms of a hierarchy of secondary drives

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reduced, such as always walking at night with a confident companion. You might even learn to enjoy sipping wine with a good-humored group of friends when the sun begins to set (if this reduced your anxiety). Note that the lighthearted people will not protect you from being mugged in the dark alley; rather, a hierarchy of responses has been built up from the learning and reducing of new drives.

In other words, for Miller and Dollard (1941) there is a learned hierarchy of like- lihoods that a person will produce particular responses in particular situations. They call this a habit hierarchy. In essence, the individual’s experiences result in learning the likelihood that a specific response in a particular situation results in reward. Using this information, the individual ranks the probability of responses in the habit hierar- chy. Through this implicit process, the responses most likely to result in reward become the responses most likely to occur. Social learning theories see this personal ranking as responsible for individual differences that we often term personal style or personality. Furthermore, many of the important reinforcers that determine a person’s habit hierarchy are social in nature, coming from people in the social environment.

The concept of secondary drives attempts to describe how the (adult) human personality, in all of its complexity, can be conditioned from the infant stage, at which the child is just a bundle of undifferentiated physiological drives and responses. The concept of secondary drive explains traditional personality constructs, like the trait of

extroversion, as learned secondary drives. For example, if the active orienta- tion toward others (which characterizes an extrovert) brings milk from the mother or a clean diaper from the father, a drive toward these behaviors will be learned—and so on, as the child develops. Such notions are useful in understanding why some cultures (like Japan, which promotes group cohe- sion) have more shy people than other cultures (like the United States and Israel, which reward individual activity and assertiveness). Children are socialized—they learn secondary drives and behaviors—through social rewards.

How far can this theory be extended? Does it work? An aspect of this notion of secondary drives as derived from the primary drive of feeding was applied to the concept of attachment to the mother and examined by Harry Harlow’s famous studies of rhesus monkeys (Harlow, 1986; Harlow & Mears, 1979). Infant monkeys were separated from their mothers, and some of the infants were fed by feeding bottles attached to a bare wire cylinder. Harlow demonstrated that infant monkeys did not develop a secondary drive of attachment to these wire surrogate mothers; they preferred soft, terry cloth–covered surrogate mothers (even nonfeed- ing ones). In other words, attachment did not derive from its association with nourishment. Although this finding did not totally negate the concept of attachment as a secondary drive, it did suggest that contact comfort itself has a primary drive status in these primate infants. Not only did such stud- ies suggest that the developing child needs more than to have primary needs like hunger satisfied, but they also showed the difficulty of simply accounting for the social needs and tendencies.

As noted, both Dollard and Miller had studied psychoanalysis, were impressed with its many insights, and were eager to combine them with experimental findings. But although Freud had psychoanalyzed a neu- rotic man obsessed with images of rats (whom he called Rattenmann, or

Habit Hierarchy

In social learning theory, a learned hierarchy of likelihoods that a person will produce particular responses in particular situations

Secondary Drives

In social learning theory, drives that are learned by association with the satisfaction of primary drives

■ In understanding drug abuse, the behaviorist and learning approach focuses not on motives toward impul- sivity, nor on neurochemical substrates, but rather on hierarchies of behaviors that have been reinforced. Addiction and abuse are seen as patterns of learned behavior. Similarly, in designing the best treatment, focus is on rein- forcements (see the Classic to Current box on treatment for drug abuse).

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Classic to C U R R E N T Treatment for Drug Abuse

From their very beginnings in the conditioning labs of Pavlov and Watson, behaviorist and learning approaches have been focused on two things: the environmental stimulus, and the rewards and punishments that affect the likelihood of an organism’s subsequent response. Indeed, these approaches are sometimes termed “stimu- lus—response” (S-R) theories. Although the models have been refined, modern approaches in this perspec- tive maintain this focus. A good example concerns therapeutic interventions for drug abuse. Or perhaps we should say, a good example concerns attempts to change societally undesirable behavior.

Whereas a psychoanalytic or neo-analytic approach to drug abusers would be focused on disrupted childhood experiences and how those experiences became manifested in a poorly functioning adult ego, and a biological perspective would be interested in the neural circuits and neurotransmitters involved in drug abuse, the behaviorist and learning perspective focuses on changing the relevant stimulus and changing the consequences. In other words, certain stimuli have become associated with taking illegal drugs, and the rewards for abstaining have not been strong enough to maintain legal behavior. In particular, what does this mean in terms of today’s therapies?

In terms of dealing with the stimulus, one approach is to address the eliciting circumstances. For example, if the abuser usually meets a group of abus- ing friends in a seedy restaurant, the focus might be to make that setting inaccessible, such as taking a drug- abusing teenager and sending him or her to a differ- ent school in a different city or even to a residential treatment facility. Or, the focus might be to have the police monitor and harass the law-breakers in the seedy restaurant, thus making the situation no longer associated with good times.

Another approach to changing the stimulus would be to corrupt the drug or a similar substance to make it nausea-inducing. For example, with alcohol addiction, the therapist may prescribe a medication like Antabuse (disulfiram) which, in the presence of alcohol, causes accumulation of acetaldehyde in the blood and produces highly unpleasant symptoms such as flushing, vomiting, palpitations, vertigo, and fainting. Or the therapist might attempt to pair scenes of the drug paraphernalia with unpleasant reactions (such as seeing others vomit- ing). If one felt awful at even the sight of the drug, the

likelihood of ingestion would surely decrease (Smith, Frawley, & Polissar, 1997). But what about changing the reinforcements for not using drugs? One interesting six-month study of drug abuse treatment focused directly on reinforcement (Silverman, Svikis, Robles, Stitzer, & Bigelow, 2001). The participants (patients) were pregnant substance-abusing women who were in a drug abuse program and who had recently used opiates or cocaine. They were randomly assigned to either a special treatment group or to a usual-care control group. The treatment group women were assigned to work-training sessions and worked a three-hour shift daily for pay (vouchers). Urine samples were collected for ongoing monitoring of drug abuse. Under an escalating reinforcement schedule, the women could earn lots more if they came to training sessions and remained drug-free. (The value of the daily vouchers increased from $7 all the way up to about four times that amount if the woman remained drug-free.) The results showed that women in the treatment group were twice as likely to have urine samples that tested negative for opiates and cocaine. In other words, even in this hard-to-treat, hard-core group of drug addicts, the pro- vision of a substantial reward (high, increasing salary, which could be used to buy various goods) for desired behavior was able to change the so-called personality patterns to a substantial degree.

This approach of rewarding addicts for remain- ing drug-free has come to be called contingency man- agement. One promising recent application of it inte- grates the direct reinforcement system (rewarding addicts for abstinence from illicit drugs) with reward for compliance with other components of a treatment program, such as taking medication, that increase the likelihood of drug abstinence (Carroll & Rounsaville, 2007). In the behaviorist view, addiction is seen as a behavior, sensitive to modification like all behaviors.

FURTHER READING

Carroll, K. M., & Rounsaville, B. J. (2007). A perfect plat- form: Combining contingency management with medica- tions for drug abuse. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 33(3), 343–365.

Silverman, K., Svikis, D., Robles, E., Stitzer, M. L., & Bigelow, G. E. (2001). A reinforcement-based therapeutic workplace for the treatment of drug abuse: Six-month abstinence outcomes. Experimental & Clinical Psychopharmacology, 9(1), 14–23.

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man of the rats), of course Freud had never psychoanalyzed a rat. Dollard and Miller (1950) agreed that Freud had identified crucial periods in the child’s personality development, but they changed the explanations to ones involving learning, through rewards and punishments. For example, they named critical times during development (feeding, cleanliness training, early sex training) when the reinforce- ment contingencies provided by the parents are particularly relevant. If a hungry child is not fed, she may develop anxiety or passivity rather than sociability and love. If a child is punished for messes and toilet accidents, she may learn to avoid her par- ents to reduce anxiety. If a child is beaten for masturbation, he may learn to associ- ate anxiety with all aspects of sexuality. Such reinterpretations and refinements to psychoanalytic notions—made by Dollard and Miller and many other psychologists during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—have come to play a dominant role in current approaches to child socialization.

Drive Conflict What about the mental illnesses and repressed conflicts that Freud wrote so much about? Extending Hull’s concepts of drives, learning, and secondary drives, Dollard and Miller attempted to explain the development of internal conflicts that result in behaviors (symptoms) of neurosis and disorders such as obsessive-compulsive behavior. For example, children have sexual drives but sometimes may be punished for acting on them. If the punishment results in the conditioning of a fear response to this drive, the primary and secondary drives may conflict. This is termed an approach–avoidance conflict. The individual is both drawn to and away from the sexual object, resulting in anxiety and neurotic behavior. There can likewise be an approach–approach conflict, in which a person (or rat) is drawn to two equally attractive choices, and an avoidance–avoidance conflict, in which the individual is repulsed by two equally undesirable choices. This can make a rat run back and forth in a maze, not knowing which drive to reduce first—a neurotic rat!

Another important example of the work of the so-called Yale Group is their idea that aggression is always the result of blocking, or frustrating, an individual’s efforts to attain a goal. This theory was propounded in the influential book Frustration and Aggression (Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939). Here again we have an important psychological concept—aggression—that figures prominently in both psychoanalytic and biological approaches to personality. But it is now analyzed in terms of drives, habits, and learning (including social learning), thus taking into account the complex, multidimensional nature of aggression.

For example, it is interesting that a frustration coming from the environment may lead to aggression against a different target. If your boss blocks you from achieving your promotion, you may come home and yell at your family. In some ways, this idea is similar to Freud’s displacement defense mechanism, in which an aggressive impulse is channeled elsewhere. The frustration–aggression hypothesis, like the Freudian notion of a death instinct and like the evolutionary proposition of an evolved domineering aggression, allows for a biological tendency to aggress. However, Dollard and Miller’s approach ties these notions more closely to the envi- ronment and the ways one has learned to satisfy basic drives (an idea derived from Hull). Aggression can be learned; it can also be unlearned or prevented. And aggression clearly varies from situation to situation, from family to family, and from

Approach–Avoidance Conflict

A term used by Dollard and Miller to describe a conflict between primary and secondary drives that occurs when a punish- ment results in the conditioning of a fear response to a drive

Approach–Approach Conflict

A term used by Dollard and Miller to describe a conflict in which a person is drawn to two equally attractive choices

Avoidance–Avoidance Conflict

A term used by Dollard and Miller to describe a conflict in which a person is faced with two equally undesirable choices

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culture to culture. In other words, the social learning approach endeavors to inte- grate key ideas from other theories, but all within a learning framework. These ideas are important because they led to modern cognitive-social learning and interactionist approaches to personality.

Patterns of Child-Rearing and Personality: Robert R. Sears Another member of the Yale Group, Robert R. Sears, performed a series of studies designed to examine the efficacy of Dollard and Miller’s (and Hull’s) theoretical explanations for personality. Specifically, Sears wanted to examine psychoanalytic constructs in terms of the real, observable behavior of parents and children. He described personality as “potentialities for action” that included motivation, expecta- tions, habit structure, the nature of the instigators to behavior, and the environmen- tal events produced by that behavior. For example, Sears studied the child-rearing antecedents of dependency and aggressiveness in children (Sears, Maccoby, & Levin, 1957). Childhood personality was measured by teachers’ ratings, behavioral observation, and doll play. Child-rearing practices were obtained by maternal report (a major methodological limitation because mothers’ reports may be distorted). Still, Sears found that the amount that the parent reported punishing the child for dependency was rather highly related to both dependency and aggression in the child. Overall, the study found that although many child-rearing practices were weakly or not at all related to personality characteristics in children, Dollard and Miller’s theory that many Freudian disorders and neuroses resulted from parenting practices of punishments—that punished children for undesirable behavior—was somewhat supported by the data. This empirical approach took the conflicts described by Freud and endeavored to test them through study of parental responses. Freud never conducted such tests, but they grow naturally out of a learning approach to personality.

Why does it matter that Dollard and Miller (and other colleagues such as O. Hobart Mowrer and Leonard Doob) were working at Yale in the 1940s, where they were heavily influenced by Hull, who in turn had been influenced by the 1920s work of Watson? We are endeavoring to show that there is no simple answer to what it means to be a person. There is no single and comprehensive theory that has been established and universally adopted throughout personality psychology. Rather, there are complex systems of ideas and insights that derive from various intellectual traditions and historical movements of ideas. By tracing these developments and presenting them as eight fundamental perspectives on personality (Chapters 3 through 10 of this book), we can achieve a rich, multifaceted appreciation of personality that goes well beyond the simple assumptions of a layperson.

Modern Behaviorist Personality Approaches Most personality psychologists see a fundamental conflict in a behaviorist approach to personality: Behaviorism deals only in externally observable entities and is thus limited in its ability to address the essence of personality, which is complex, internal, and not directly observable. And the behaviorist approach has historically had little to

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contribute to central questions of personality—what makes people human and what makes each human unique—given the behaviorist focus on deriving general laws that apply to all organisms. In recent years, one promising avenue of contact has gone back to the physiological roots of conditioning research: an interesting return to a truly Pavlovian approach. In this view (e.g., Gray & McNaughton, 2000; Pickering,

The History of Behaviorist and Learning Approaches to Personality The major developments in the behaviorist and learning approaches can be seen here in historical

relation to one another and in relation to their broader societal and cultural contexts.

TIME LINE

Behaviorist and Learning Aspects

Societal and Scientific Context

Philosophers and theologians view individual deviations as games of the

gods or possession by the devil

Ancient Times and Middle Ages

Humans are seen primarily in religious terms, as created by a divine presence

Individual is increasingly understood to be shaped or set by social class and by work,

following Locke’s view of infant as a blank slate

1700s–1800s

Increasing emphasis on reason and rationality, philosophers search for the core of human nature; Ben Franklin develops habit chart

Pavlov studies classical conditioning; other studies of animal learning begin

in earnest 1880s–1900s

Darwin’s evolutionary approach leads to experimental studies in animals in search of universals applicable to people

Watson founds behaviorism 1900s–1920s Experimental psychology develops; increased industrialization of society

Skinner dramatically expands behaviorism; Hull develops broader learning theory 1920s–1940s

Experimental psychology is increasingly dominated by behaviorism; attempts to combine behaviorism and psychoanalysis

Influence of social psychology increases; child-rearing practices are studied 1940s–1950s

In reaction to fascism and world war, studies of propaganda, attitude formation, and social structure increase

Existentialists challenge behaviorists; human freedom discussed; cognitive

psychology grows; behaviorism declines 1950s–1960s

Economic boom with huge new middle class; baby boomers in public schools; new affluence removes old fears from workers

Learning approaches increasingly combined with cognitive and social approaches;

personality seen as interacting with the demands of social situations

1970s–1980s

Societal problems of crime and delinquency lead to searches for more sophisticated models of teaching and learning

Ideas of conditioning and reinforcement integrated into other approaches

to personality 1990s–2000s

Better understandings of the individual in specific work environments

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1997), characteristics of the nervous system differ sys- tematically between individuals, producing individual differences in conditioning and corresponding individ- ual differences in personality. This approach, sometimes termed reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) posits that underlying biobehavioral systems influence individ- ual responsivity to both reward and punishment. The behavioral approach system and behavioral inhibition system (BAS and BIS, see Chapter 5) moderate the effects of reward and punishment and have clear corre- lations with reliably measured personality traits (e.g., Corr, 2002, 2008; Jackson, 2003).

Another approach that connects personality psy- chology to behaviorism assesses personality by looking at the frequency with which a person performs certain observable acts (Buss & Craik, 1983). This act frequency approach records and counts behaviors that are typical of a given trait category. For example, a conscien- tious person will complete work on time, persevere in a task, be prudent before spending money, and refuse an impulsive dare. This approach meets the behaviorist requirement that only events that are observable are legitimate, but connects to more conventional personality approaches by seeking stable individual differences in behavior. The patterns of act frequencies can be examined for evidence that the traits measured by conventional instruments manifest themselves in observable behavior, within and across cultural contexts (Church, Katigbak, Miramontes, del Prado, & Cabrera, 2007).

Key Behaviorist Terms and Concepts Some key terms and concepts from a behaviorist and learning approach to personal- ity are shown in Table 6.2.

Why Does It Matter? If individuals show stable individual pat- terns of differential sensitivity to reward versus to punishment, then a customized approach to many types of training is appropriate—one size will not fit all. While the older behaviorist tradition generalized the superiority of reward over punishment as a training technique, there may be indi- viduals who would learn new behaviors more quickly or more enduringly with a dif- ferent mixture of reward and punishment.

Act Frequency Approach

Assessing personality by examining the frequency with which a person performs certain observable actions

TABLE 6.2 Some Terms and Concepts from a Behaviorist and Learning Approach Term or Concept Definition or Example

Principle of reinforcement

Frequency of behavior depends on its consequences—that is, the types of outcomes following behavior. The response is made contingent on the past outcome.

Reinforcement An event that strengthens a behavior and increases the likelihood of repeating the behavior in the future.

Negative reinforcement

An aversive event that ends if we perform a behavior, making us more likely to repeat the behavior in the future. For example, an individual with an obsessive-compulsive personality (such as the fictional Lady MacBeth) continually washes her hands because it reduces her anxiety that she will see blood on them.

continued

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TABLE 6.2 Continued

Term or Concept Definition or Example

Punishment A consequence that decreases the likelihood of performing a behavior in the future. Punishment reduces the probability of undesired behaviors, but the effect tends to be temporary. Skinner emphasized the use of hidden reinforcements rather than punishment in the successful shaping and control of behavior.

Primary reinforcement (for Dollard and Miller)

An event (such as eating food) that reduces a primary drive (such as hunger).

Secondary reinforcement

A conditioned (learned) reinforcer; a neutral stimulus that is paired with a primary reinforcer, eventu- ally becoming a reinforcer by itself. Maternal love supposedly is not in itself a primary reinforcer because, according to these theories, it does not reduce a drive; but the infant learns to associate Mom with important primary reinforcers—say, food. Some secondary reinforcements (such as mother, money, love, and praise) will be associated with a variety of primary reinforcers and so may become generalized reinforcers.

Reinforcement schedules

The frequency and the interval of reinforcement. A schedule may be based on time (animal is reinforced every 10 minutes—“fixed interval”) or responses (animal is reinforced every 10 pecks-“fixed ratio”). Or, these schedules may be variable, that is, with irregularly spaced reinforcement (“variable interval”— reinforced at varying times; or “variable ratio”— reinforced after varying numbers of responses). In the real world, responses are seldom reinforced each time, or even at regular intervals. Variable reinforce- ment increases resistance of the behavior to extinction. For example, a superstitious or obnoxious behavior might be only occasionally reinforced but may be extremely difficult to eliminate.

Extinction The process by which the frequency of the organism’s producing a response gradually decreases as the behavior is no longer followed by the reinforcement.

Generalization The tendency for similar stimuli to evoke the same response. This may help explain the seemingly general nature of personality—a person behaves similarly in similar situations. According to Skinner, this is because the response is generalized to comparable situations, not because of a stable, internal personality charac- teristic. For example, the individual who is rewarded on a variable schedule for doing his job may behave in a “conscientious,” hard-working manner in all similar “work” situations. From the observer’s standpoint this behavior, which has generalized to similar situations, looks like a stable, lasting “personality trait.”

Thorndike’s Law of Effect (1905)

When a response follows a stimulus and results in satisfaction for the organism, the connection between stimulus and response is strengthened; however, if the response results in discomfort or pain, the connection is weakened. This principle was the precursor of notions of operant conditioning.

Shaping The process in which undifferentiated operant behaviors are gradually changed (shaped) into a desired behavior pattern by the reinforcement of successive approximations, so that the behavior gets closer and closer to the target behavior. Using this technique, Skinner could teach animals complex “human-type” behaviors. Trainers can shape hoop-jumping seals, dancing bears, or table tennis—playing pigeons.

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Evaluation 215

Evaluation The emphasis of the behaviorist and learning approaches is on using completely controlled scientific experiments. In terms of research, this emphasis has led to a focus on laboratory pigeons and rats. In terms of concepts, this approach has led to an unwillingness to make inferences about the “mind” or the “spirit.” Turning first away from introspectionism, some in this field (like Skinner) eventually refused to concede any kind of internal structures, cognitions, motives, or traits whatsoever. Further, behaviorism admits no internal motivation to self-fulfillment or self-actualization, and no true heroism; there is only history of reinforcement.

Behaviorist and learning approaches to personality have forced the field of per- sonality to be much more experimental in its research and rigorous in its concepts than it would otherwise have been. Notions of conditioning, reward, and extinction now pervade psychology, including personality and clinical psychology. Moreover, this approach provides an empirically well-supported explanation of why behavior is not as consistent across situations as many other personality theories might imply. The situation itself must be considered an aspect of personality (see Chapter 10).

On the other hand, because radical behaviorists are unwilling to recognize any sorts of internal structures of the mind, they tend to be less able to profit from the many advances being made in cognitive psychology and the other brain sciences. Until the day he died, Skinner was relentless in his attack on cognitive psychology, even though cognitive psychologists are usually very strict in their experimental designs and scientific methods (see Chapter 7). Similarly, behaviorists are often unwilling to benefit from the many developments in trait approaches to personality (see Chapter 8).

Perhaps more important, behaviorists refuse to concern themselves with “unscien- tific” notions like freedom, dignity, and self-fulfillment. Such things are seen as epiphenomena—that is, secondary phenomena that are derived from real phenomena of experience. For example, Skinner repeatedly asserts that though people may sometimes feel free, they are in actuality always controlled by the contingencies of the environment. For Skinner, people feel free when they do not recognize that they are being controlled.

■ Skinner liked to point out that in many social interac- tions, the subordinate is not only being shaped by the supe- rior, but is also shaping the superior. For example, children quickly learn to train their parents by rewarding certain behaviors emitted by the parents. (© The New Yorker Collection 1993 Tom Cheney from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.)

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Chapter 6 ■ Behaviorist and Learning Aspects of Personality216

Education and religion are said to be two means through which the control of behavior is disguised or concealed (Skinner, 1974). Many psychologists view this perspective as a terribly demeaning and insulting view of what it means to be a person. A person is qual- itatively different from a laboratory rat. Writer Arthur Koestler (1967) charged that behaviorism “has substituted for the erstwhile anthropomorphic view of the rat, a rato- morphic view of man.” Such matters are taken up in the next four chapters of this book.

Evaluating the Perspectives

Advantages and Limits of the Behaviorist and Learning Approach ■ Quick Analogy

• Humans as intelligent rats learning life mazes.

■ Advantages • Forces attention to the environmental influences on behavioral consistencies.

• Demands rigorous empirical study (usually laboratory-based).

• Stresses the importance of applying the principles of conditioning to each organism individually.

• Looks for general laws that apply to all organisms.

■ Limits • Extreme behaviorism may ignore insights and advances from cognitive and social

psychology.

• May tend to dehumanize unique human potentials through comparisons to rats and pigeons.

• Tends to refuse any notion of enduring dispositions within individuals.

• Tends to view humans as objects to be trained.

■ View of Free Will • Behavior is determined by environmental contingencies.

■ Common Assessment Technique • Experimental analysis of animal learning.

■ Implications for Therapy • Since personality is conditioned and learned, therapy is based on teaching desirable

habits and behaviors, and on extinguishing undesirable ones. Disruptive or aggressive children may be rewarded when they act cooperatively or quietly. Fears of elevators or airplanes are treated through systematic desensitization, in which relaxation is slowly and progressively paired with the fear-provoking stimuli until the fear is extinguished. In aversion therapy to treat stubborn problems such as alcoholism, the therapist may prescribe a drug (e.g., Antabuse) that produces nausea when alcohol is consumed.

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Summary and Conclusion 217

Summary and Conclusion Most approaches to personality start with complex patterns of human behavior and try to break them down into simpler, understandable components; instead of breaking down, behaviorist and learning approaches start with simple stimuli and responses of lower animals and try to build up an understanding of human complexity.

Following up Ivan Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning, John B. Watson, the early-twentieth- century behaviorist, rejected introspectionism and psychoanalysis, and instead demonstrated how little Albert’s emotional “personality” could be trained by hitting a hammer against a steel bar to severely frighten the infant in the presence of a conditioned stimulus. Principles of learning, generalization, and extinction were also applied to children, as the learning approach explored how “personality” is located in the environment, not in the depths of the psyche.

According to B. F. Skinner, personality is a reper- toire of behavior learned from an organized set of environmental contingencies. (Many of the impor- tant terms and principles of behaviorism are listed in Table 6.2.) That is, personality is the group of com- monly performed responses that a person has learned. Because it is environmentally determined, behavior is therefore very situation specific.

Skinner’s approach emphasized the function of behavior, and it is a deterministic theory, in which there is no free will. He stressed that we must apply the principles of learning to each organism individu- ally. In his novel Walden Two, Skinner describes a utopian community that is behaviorally engineered, based on principles of operant conditioning; a benev- olent government rewards positive, socially appropri- ate behavior, and all is well.

According to Skinner, the motivations that Freud called the drives of the id are better understood as bio- logical reinforcers of the environment; and the part of the psyche that Freud called the superego (conscience) is better understood as the contingencies that society creates and imposes to control the selfish (individualis- tic) nature of the individual. For Skinner, personality traits such as extroversion are just groups of behaviors that have been reinforced. Behaviorist approaches

forced personality theorists to become more empiri- cally minded, and many untestable Freudian assump- tions were discarded.

Miller and Dollard (1941) developed a complex and wide-ranging approach to understanding the rela- tion between learning and personality based on drives, behaviors, and reinforcements. They said that in order to learn, one must “want something, notice some- thing, do something, and get something” (p. 2). Thus, they allowed for internal motivations, both bio- logical and cognitive, and for reinforcements, both personal and social. According to Miller and Dollard, the connection between stimulus and response is called a habit; therefore, what we call personality is pri- marily made up of habits, and the relations among var- ious habits. Secondary drives are learned—acquired by association with the satisfaction of primary drives. Abstract constructs such as happiness and status are considered to be based on learned drives. Dollard and Miller and their colleagues worked to combine the insights of psychoanalysis and sociology with the labo- ratory experiments of the behaviorists. This in turn led to social and cognitive learning theories that are common in the study of personality and psychopathol- ogy today.

In other words, Dollard and Miller (1950; Miller & Dollard, 1941) tried to understand the develop- ment of the variety and complexity of personality in terms of conditioning and learning, broadly con- strued. Their theory crossed the biological and psy- chodynamic issues with conditioning processes. As did Skinner, they saw personality as the result of the accumulation of conditioned behaviors, but unlike Skinner, they saw value in “internal” constructs (like drives and motivations) and higher mental processes. Importantly, they recognized that human behavior was embedded in a culture.

The behaviorist and learning approaches to personality, with their emphasis on the environment, drew significant attention to the situational speci- ficity of behavior: We should not expect that a per- son will behave the same way in every situation. These insights are now incorporated into the most modern conceptions of what it means to be a person.

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Chapter 6 ■ Behaviorist and Learning Aspects of Personality218

■ Key Theorists Ivan Pavlov John B. Watson

B. F. Skinner Clark Hull

■ Key Concepts and Terms partial reinforcement classical conditioning generalization discrimination extinction behaviorism systematic desensitization Thorndike’s Law of Effect

operant conditioning shaping radical determinism social learning theory secondary drives habit hierarchy act frequency approach frustration-aggression hypothesis

■ Suggested Readings Catania, C., & Harnad, S. (Eds.). (1988). The selection of

behavior: The operant behaviorism of B. F. Skinner: Comments and consequences. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden Two. New York: Macmillan. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Boyond freedom and dignity. New

York: Knopf.

■ Useful Websites Web links to further Internet material about behaviorist and learning approaches to personality are available on the textbook website at www.pearsonhighered.com/ friedman4e

John Dollard Neal Miller

Robert R. Sears

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