Behaviorism is dead. A short chapter in the history of Psychology. Accused from the beginning as short-sighted and simplistic, it was obviously replaced by the cognitive revolution many decades ago. This perspective is what is commonly conveyed in textbooks, magazines, and popular publications (Baron-Cohen, 2014; Miller, 2003).
To be a behaviorist seems to be to belong to the past, to be a vestige of Psychology. It seems to come as a surprise to some, then, that radical behaviorism – and its science and analysis of behavior – is in fact thriving. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “reports of the death of behaviorism have been greatly exaggerated.”
Far from having led to an absolute historical death, the ideas of radical behaviorism form an important part of our psychological present. And it is precisely these ideas that are making radical behaviorism position itself in a clearly advantageous position. Since its principles, terms and theories are slowly becoming part of popular thought, it is difficult to distinguish it from other models and positions. Here we will have some examples.
The social construction of science
Skinner defined radical behaviorism as the philosophy of the science of behavior. Behavior, for radical behaviorism, refers to everything an organism does, which for humans includes private experiences such as thoughts and emotions. This is what differentiates it from early forms of behaviorism, which focused only on public, observable behaviors. In fact, that is one of the reasons why it is called radical.
What is less known is that radical behaviorism discards the idea that the world can be objectively known, and assumes scientific knowledge as a social construction. For radical behaviorism, science is a form of human behavior (very specialized) so it is the subject of the same contextual analysis as any other behavior.
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With its origins in the American pragmatism of William James, John Dewey and Charles Pierce (Menand, 2001), radical behaviorism takes science as a method of finding useful ways of talking about and relating to the world, and not as a method of discovering the ultimate truth or the nature of reality. In fact, that task is impossible, because no science will ever be able to provide an unbiased perspective on its subject matter.
What underlies the vision of science given by radical behaviorism is “invention” (Hayes&Follette, 1992). He describes science as the process by which we invent (in the creative sense of formulating or arranging) ways of talking about the world that are useful. While it is possible that a real world exists out there, we will never be able to know it objectively. This vision of science contrasts with that which describes it as a process of discovery, through which we gradually illuminate the ultimate truth of nature. Radical behaviorism completely rejects this positivist idea, and positions itself as totally aontological (Barnes-Holmes, 2000).
Although it can sometimes be understood as mechanistic, radical behaviorism is best understood as a variant of philosophical contextualism (Hayes et al., 1988). Contextualism covers a wide range of philosophical models, including social constructivism, which is currently popular in psychological science (Gergen, 2001) and its particular relevance to clinical practice (Rapley et al., 2011). Coming from the same philosophical stance, it is not surprising that social constructivism and radical behaviorism have a lot to do with typical issues in clinical practice. For example, the British Psychological Society’s (BPS, 2011) reservation that the DSM diagnostic manual decontextualizes people’s problems and their personal character is lost is fully shared by leading behavior analysts (Hayes et al., 2011). .
Learning as an evolutionary process
In recent years, evolutionary psychology has been relating human behavior to the Darwinian theoretical framework. Human abilities and capacities are conceived as psychological adaptations in the same sense in which our body obeys biological adaptations. One of the biggest criticisms made of this assumption of evolutionary psychology is that the supposed context that favored the development of human abilities is historical and therefore unobservable and unmeasurable; In this way, these criticisms emphasize that the explanations of evolutionary psychology are speculations and little more than stories “just because.” (Rose&Rose, 2000).
Functional contextualism also understands human activity within the framework of Darwinism, but in its case said relationship can be studied directly in an evolutionary present. Learning is understood as the process by which we adapt to our environment, taking into account our life period. We learn when behavioral variants are selected by the environment, which makes them more likely to be repeated in the future. Skinner called this process selection by consequences (commonly known as “reinforcement”), in the sense that consequences cause an increase or decrease in the future probability of the behavior (Skinner, 1987). Just as Darwin explained how species adapt to their environment through natural selection, Skinner explained how individual organisms adapt to their environment through learning throughout their life span. This is not just wild speculation or “just because.” Natural selection of behavior is not a theory or a hypothesis, it is a directly observable process that has been widely studied in the laboratory and in everyday situations.
The “operant” is a central concept in evolutionary behavior and is the equivalent of the species in evolutionary biology. Operants and species are the units in which evolution and change as individual variants are selected. In evolutionary biology, organisms live and die as the species evolves. In evolutionary behavior, behaviors are selected as the operant evolves. The main difference is that in the species the organism lives concurrently and is distributed in space, while in the operant species the behaviors occur consecutively and are distributed over time (Glenn et al., 1992). Likewise, both species and operants are shaped by the selective action of the environment. No wonder Skinner has been described as “the Darwin of ontogeny” (Donahoe, 1984).
Language and psychotherapy
One of the most curious misunderstandings of radical behaviorism is that it cannot explain complex behavior, such as language. Judging by the way this issue is commonly approached, it was Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957) that dealt the final blow. What’s strange about that criticism is that, really, it’s totally wrong. Whatever Chomsky criticized, he clearly did not criticize Skinner’s functionalist stance (Andresen, 1991; MacCorquodale, 1970).
It is true that the first behavioral researchers focused on the study of language, focusing on non-human animals or humans with underdeveloped linguistic systems. Likewise, this strategy was just the beginning, and the intention was always to direct the research towards more complex analyzes when appropriate. It was in the early 1980s that Murray Sidman and his colleagues conducted a series of research that led to functional equivalence theory (Sidman, 1994) and later to relational framing theory (RFT: Hayes et al., 2001). The details of these theories go beyond this article, and could be summarized as describing how linguistically competent humans relate and combine functions derived from learning. This ability may sound trivial, and the truth is that it is something that has only been found in humans: other animals fail to perform derivation learning in an equivalence relationship. It is an ability that allows humans to link all types of events and stimuli (including thoughts and emotions) in an arbitrary way, which seems to be the difference between human symbolic language and other forms of animal communication.
The basic principles of behavior analysis, together with stimulus equivalence and RFT, have been transformed into therapeutic models, the most characteristic being Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT: Hayes et al., 2011) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). : Dimeff and Linehan, 2001). Curiously, many of the therapists currently practicing are not aware of this, or at best have no idea about the relationship between these therapeutic models and radical behaviorism.
A partnership with neuroscience and epigenetics
Radical behaviorism is interested in our biological and neurological functioning. Although it is said that this posture ignores “our interior” and looks at it as if it were a “black box”, it is not really true. Skinner (1974) was very explicit in this regard, writing: “The organism is not empty, of course, and cannot be treated as a “black box” (page 233).
In this case, however, we do not need to understand what happens inside to study the functional relationships we have with the external environment. It is very feasible that, while we develop research on how we relate to our enormous context, neuroscience will continue studying our inner biological functioning. The data from one science will not invalidate the data from the other partly because they are answering different questions. Since neuroscience investigates how our neurobiology correlates with our behavior, it cannot explain the contextual meaning of our behavior. It may tell us what happens in our brain when we think and do certain things, but in no case will it tell us why we think or do those things. Neuroscience can identify which parts of our brain are active when we think about playing tennis, but it cannot tell us why we think about playing tennis in the first place, nor what meaning playing tennis has for us. This requires a contextual analysis, and that is the domain of psychology (for further discussion on levels close to and far from causation, see Alessi, 1992).
Far from being strange bedfellows, radical behaviorism sees psychology and neuroscience as in need of each other. Neuroscience will deepen our understanding of human functioning by filling the…