Chapter 13 – Four Neobehaviorist psychologists

1. Chapter 13 – Four Neobehaviorist psychologists Dr. Nancy Alvarado

2. Four Neobehaviorists • The four neobehaviorists described in this chapter (Tolman, Guthrie, Hull, Skinner) accepted Watson’s: • Rejection of consciousness • His definition of psychology as the science of behavior • His insistence on objective, observational data. • These four had similarities but also many important differences from each other. • As a result, the Behaviorist movement was extremely productive in terms of theory and research.

3. Edward Chace Tolman (1886-1959) • Tolman grew up in Newton MA and went to MIT, graduating with a degree in electrochemistry. • William James “Principles of Psychology” changed his life – he went to Harvard & studied with Munsterberg. • Tolman was troubled by why introspection was so rarely used in his lab, although taught as a methodology. • A class with Yerkes focused his attention on behavior. • He spent a month in Germany with Koffka & was influenced strongly by Lewin. • He taught at Northwestern, then at UC Berkeley.

4. Edward Chace Tolman Tolman Hall at UC Berkeley

5. Tolman’s Cognitive Behaviorism • At Berkeley, Tolman taught comparative psych using Watson’s book as a text. • He disagreed that rat behavior was mechanistic, considering rats intelligent and purposeful. • He believed rats learned the general layout of a maze, forming a “cognitive map.” • He developed a “molar behaviorism” concerned with purpose and cognition – both excluded by Watson. • However, his book “Purposive Behaviorism” began with an attack on mentalistic psychology.

6. Rats Have Purpose • Tolman & his students showed that: • Rats have preferences and run fastest for rewards they like better (bread and milk not sunflower seeds). • Rats are disappointed if they get a less valued reward previously expected due to training. • Monkeys were similarly disappointed by a lettuce leaf in place of a banana. • Rats use prior experience when unrewarded to increase their behavior later when rewarded – latent learning. What is a reward critics asked?

7. Latent Learning Results

8. Rats Have Insight • Tolman & Honzik gave unrewarded rats experience with a complex maze, then found that they use the shortest route when rewarded. • Law of least effort – given a choice of several paths, rats use insight to find the one requiring least effort. • Rats remember where something is located, not a series of turns (responses). • Two groups – one (Place) always found food in the same place; the other (Response) always found food by turning in the same direction. Place rats learned faster.

9. Tolman’s Mazes S2 curtain F2 F1 curtain S1

10. Tolman’s Theoretical Model • Tolman published over 100 papers and 2 books. • He proposed a model of independent, intervening and dependent variables that is widely used in experimental psychology. • IVs are manipulated by the experimenter and influence intervening variables such as appetite or motor skill. • Subject IVs (age, heredity) are held constant. • DVs (running speed, number of errors) are measured by the experimenter.

11. Tolman’s General Concerns • Tolman tried to relate his rat-runner’s psychology to broader human problems such as aggression or war. • In 1949, he supported younger colleagues required to take a loyalty oath, refusing to take it himself. • Tolman was APA President in 1937 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. • Tolman liberated Behaviorism from Watson’s methodological and theoretical constraints. • Contemporary behaviorists no longer view animals as passive, mechanical systems but active info processors.

12. Edwin Ray Guthrie (1886-1959) • McDougall classified Behaviorists as “strict, near or purposive” types. Guthrie was “near.” • Guthrie graduated in math, then studied psychology at Univ. of Nebraska with Wolfe. He finished his Ph.D in philosophy with Singer at Univ. of Penn. • He doubted that deduction could lead to an understanding of the human mind. • He taught math briefly then accepted a position at Univ. of Washington, transferring to psychology in 1919 and becoming a professor in 1928.

13. Edwin Ray Guthrie

14. Learning Through Contiguity • Guthrie proposed that “Stimuli which accompany a response tend, on their recurrence, to evoke that response.” • The simplicity of this was appealing as the ideas of other theorists became increasing complex. • Association through contiguity goes back to Aristotle, Bain & Hartley (British Associationists). • Reward does not cause learning – it protects it against unlearning because the situation changes. • Guthrie also proposed single-trial learning.

15. Guthrie’s Approach • Guthrie was able to provide clever explanations of a variety of learning phenomena (effects of reward and punishment, practice, trace conditioning). • Punishers elicit actions – these actions are learned. • Improved behavior occurs with practice because the constituent movements become better with repetition. • “Learning does not disappear with lapses in time but due to new learning which erases the old.” • Sleep prevents learning of new associations.

16. Pavlov’s Criticism of Guthrie • To explain delay & trace conditioning, Guthrie suggested that the stimuli accompanying salivation are not the CS (bell) but the orienting response (listening, turning head, pricking up ears). • In reply, Pavlov wrote and angry response -- “The Reply of a Physiologist to Psychologists,” his only paper published in an American psychology journal. • He said the “listening” response was nonexistent because dogs were not alert during the trace gap and because the orienting response quickly disappears – there are no mysterious latencies in the nervous system.

17. Guthrie’s Examples • Dogs encountering meat with embedded mousetraps become suspicious of the meat because of the almost perfect contiguity. • A daughter made to re-enter and hang up her coat changes behavior because of the new association. • Other examples of pastor’s horse trained to lunge when he said “whoa” (which means stop); breaking horses with successive weight on its back (contiguity). • Signals to smoke (finishing a meal, starting work).

18. Cats in a Puzzle Box • Performing 800 escape responses, Guthrie observed that cat responses were highly stereotypical (the same each time). • He suggested that cats had learnedto associate that specific movementwith escape from the box. • Critics suggested the movementwas stereotypical because it was instinctive (species typical) to greet others by rubbing against them.

19. Guthrie’s Clinical Views • Guthrie published “The Psychology of Human Conflict” in 1938. • He translated Pierre Janet’s “Principles of Psychotherapy” and preferred Janet’s idea of force mentale to Freud’s ideas about the subconscious. • Everyone has a certain amount of energy (force). • When it is depleted by crises, neuroses appear. • Mental health requires maintaining a balance of mental energy.

20. Clark Leonard Hull (1884-1952) • Hull was born on a farm but worked hard to become more than a “chore boy.” He was intensely self-critical and had poor health (polio, typhus). • He originally studied mining engineering but a paralyzed leg ruled that out. • He entered grad school at Univ. of Wisconsin, working with Joseph Jastrow, who had studied with G. Stanley Hall. • His dissertation taught subjects associations to Chinese characters. He then became a lecturer at Wisconsin.

21. Clark L. Hull

22. Research on Aptitude Testing • Assigned to teach a class on psychological testing, he became interested in validating existing tests. • His attempt to develop a universal aptitude test failed. • Hull built a correlation machine to avoid doing the laborious calculations by hand. • His machine predated calculators and computers and is now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. • Without access to sufficient subjects to validate his tests, he abandoned aptitude testing as a research interest.

23. Research on Hypnosis • Teaching classes to medical students, Hull became interested in the role of suggestibility in medical cures. Jastrow shared that interest – as a skeptic. • He attempted to improve the quality of experimental work done to investigate hypnosis, wary of fraud. • He believed susceptibility to hypnosis was normally distributed in the population with little correlation with other traits or sex. Children slightly more susceptible. • He found that hypnosis did not improve memory. His book Hypnosis & Suggestibility is still used as a text.

24. Hull’s Behavior System • Hull’s most significant contribution to psychology was his development of a comprehensive behavior system – a model of how behavior occurs. • At Yale, Hull intensively studied Newton’s Principia and philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Hobbes, Lock, Hume, Kant & Leibnitz. • Spence (Hull’s student) described his system as “a Herculean elaboration of [Woodworth’s] S-O-R formula” (Stimulus – Organism – Response). • He conceptualized humans as elaborate machines.

25. Hull’s Drive Theory • He attempted to extend the principles of classical conditioning to instrumental trial and error learning. • He accepted the idea of reinforcement based on drive reduction. His theory was presented in “Principles of Behavior.” • His theory had 17 postulates and 17 corollaries. • It included intervening variables for habit strength, stimulus intensity, drive level, incentive value of the reward to determine output latency, reaction amplitude. • He led an impressive program of experimentation.

26. Evaluating Hull’s Theory • It was successful at stimulating new research. • Some questioned whether the limited range of experimental situations used in his research could shed light on more generalized behavior. • Can a theory of behavior be developed without testing humans? Hull hoped to go on to test humans later. • The theory was better at predicting group results than individual rat behavior. • Hilgard said “For its time, Hull’s system was the best there was.”

27. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990) • Between 1945 & 1975, B.F. Skinner was the best known psychologist in the world. • 12 major books, numerous papers, a multi-volume autobiography, numerous works written about him. • 3 journals are devoted to a Skinnerian approach to psychology. • He was the modern spokesperson for radical Behaviorism – articulate, effective, opinionated and controversial. • He said he would burn his kids before his books.

28. B.F. (Fred) Skinner

29. Skinner’s Early Life • His father was a conservative, small town lawyer. • He started out to become a writer and poet but changed his mind because he had nothing to say. • Pen name Sir Burrhus de Beerus • Watson’s “Behaviorism,” praised by his favorite philosopher (Bertrand Russell) inspired him to study behavior. He was accepted to Harvard. • Skinner heard Pavlov speak & was impressed. • He focused on reflex as the unit of behavioral analysis.

30. Operant Conditioning • Skinner developed the apparatus called an operant chamber (Skinner box). • Operant = the animal operates on its environment. • In Skinner’s apparatus the animal controls the response rate, not the experimenter. Response rate was his DV. • Behavior could be manipulated by changing reward. • This approach was an important step toward a scientific way of experimentally studying behavior. • Animals learned right before his eyes.

31. Skinner’s Four Principles • Skinner proposed four principles of scientific practice: • When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it. • Some ways of doing research are easier than others. • Some people are lucky. • Apparatuses, especially complicated ones, break down. • Skinner disliked statistics and didn’t use many. He focused on individual animals.

32. Schedules of Reinforcement • This approach was discovered accidentally because he had only a few rat pellets left, so he could only reinforce an occasional response. • Intermittent reinforcement maintained the frequency of responding, and even increased it. • Research on schedules was a major contribution to psychology and is the research Skinner was most proud of.

33. Behavioral Control • Skinner described approaches to shaping behavior in “How to Teach Animals” in 1951. • Shaping is a powerful procedure for establishing and changing behavior. • He shaped a rat to drop a marble through a hole and two pigeons to play ping pong. • His students Keller & Marian Breland formed a company to train animals for entertainment & commercial businesses.

34. Skinner’s Utopia • In 1945 Skinner wrote “Walden II,” a utopian novel describing a community based on operant principles of behavioral control. • He envisioned a happy, health, productive community. • Other utopias include Plato’s “Republic,” St. Augustine’s “City of God,” Rousseau’s “The Social Contract,” and Huxley’s “Brave New World.” • Huxley’s satire warns of the threat of psychology.

35. Skinner’s Applied Research • Skinner built a child compartment (early version of the incubator) to provide warmth & keep out germs. • Called “air cribs” or “heir conditioners.” • Rumors that his daughter was harmed by her “baby in a box” experiences are wrong. • Skinner developed token economies and “teaching machines” to provide feedback, immediate reinforcers & let kids to progress at their own rate. • Programmed instruction has worked for some subjects (arithmetic and spelling) but not others.

36. Behavior Modification • Skinner explored possibilities for shaping psychotic patients at Worcester State Hospital in MA. • His student, Fuller, trained a severely mentally disabled man to make operant responses. • Skinner called Freud theories “explanatory fictions.” • Two students Lindsley & Azrin developed “behavior modification” to change inmate behavior. • “The Token Economy” described their procedures. • Successful techniques now exist to change a wide variety of behaviors (smoking, shyness, autism).