Rom Harre - Behaviourism in the social sciences (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Behaviourism in the social sciences
Classical behaviourism has had almost no direct reflection in the social sciences, in that there has never been a
behaviourist social psychology or sociology. However, various features of the cluster of behaviourist doctrines
have been widespread in the human sciences. Behaviourism as it developed from its roots in the proposals of
Watson, and in its transformation by Skinner, had two influential aspects, one metaphysical and the other
methodological. The metaphysics of behaviourism was positivistic. It was hostile to theory, favouring a psychology
the subject matter of which was limited to stimuli and responses. It was hospitable to the conception of causation
as regular concomitance of events, rejecting any generative or agent causal concepts. The methodology of
behaviourism was hospitable to simple experimental techniques of inquiry, seeking statistical relations between
independent and dependent variables. It was hostile to descriptions of human action that incorporated the
intentions of the actor, favouring a laconic vocabulary of neologisms. Metaphysically and methodologically
behaviourism favoured the individual as the locus of psychological phenomena. But, in practice, the use of
statistical analyses of data abstracted psychological processes from real human beings leaving only simplified
automata in their place.
1 The behaviourist legacy in social psychology
Despite the influence of aspects of behaviourism on mainstream psychology, in one important respect
experimental (or ‘old paradigm’) social psychology was anti-behaviourist, in that it was in some ways
anti-positivist. For example Tajfel’s (1982) theory of intergroup relations proposed a cognitive mechanism of
social comparison to explain observed correlations. Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory was based
upon the alleged existence of cognitive discomfort in the presence of contradiction between expressed beliefs and
actions. Yet the methodological influence of behaviourism is very clear in that both Tajfel and Festinger, and
indeed many social psychologists of the post-war generation employed an experimental methodology that was a
direct descendent of the methods of inquiry of behaviourism. Only the statistical trends which could be discerned
in objectively described experimental manipulations of independent variables were to be admitted into an alleged
‘truly’ scientific social psychology as data. In this respect ‘new paradigm’ social psychology, particularly the
role-rule model of Harré and Secord (1972), differed considerably in that a methodology of account analysis was
recommended instead of simple experimentation. The history of social psychology can be seen in two stages: first
the rejection of the metaphysics of behaviourism and only much later the abandonment of its methodology.
Behaviourism was both a learning theory according to which all human behaviour consisted in conditioned
responses to types of environmental contingencies and a method of investigation in which the study of mature
organisms simply consisted in the attempt to manipulate stimuli so as to discover which responses had indeed been
installed in them. Even after the abandonment of behaviourism as general theory of human conduct (Danziger
1990) the use of the ‘experimental’ method persisted in social psychology. It was assumed that the complex
situations in which human beings found themselves could be split up into simple states of the environment which
could be treated as values of variables. Responses too were partitioned in a similar manner. Neither the role of the
actor’s interpretation of the stimulus conditions nor the actor’s intention in responding were admitted as relevant,
or as competing with the interpretations imposed by experiments (Milgram 1974). By an elementary application of
Mill’s Canons of Induction, that an effect which was always found to follow a certain phenomenon and which, in
the absence of the phenomenon, did not appear, statistical trends in the relationship between stimuli and responses
were offered as psychological laws. From the point of view of the social sciences the most important and most
paradoxical applications of the experimental method were in social psychology.
The application of the methodological part of the behaviourist paradigm in social psychology led to the setting up
of a number of experimental programmes centred around a variety of human social phenomena (Lindzey and
Aronson 1968). For example the investigation of interpersonal liking (Zajonc 1968); of the fact that when they
were with groups people tended to follow majority opinion (Asch 1956); of the conditions under which people
behaved aggressively (Berkowitz 1962), all used the ‘experimental’ method. Paradoxically this approach to social
behaviour in which the role of the individual human actor as agent undertaking various projects, alone or with
others, was swept away and replaced by the idea of an automaton reacting with exactly those responses to which it
had been conditioned, was dominant in that home of the ethos of the individual, the USA. This poses a fascinating
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problem for the sociology of science.
2 The critique of behaviourism
It was the acceptance of a Cartesian metaphysics of mind that had led to scepticism about the possibility of public
knowledge of mental states and processes from which the original impetus to a behaviourist treatment of problems
in the human sciences had come. The most influential criticism of behaviourism was directed not at its Cartesian
metaphysics, but at the limitations that it imposed on the possibility of obtaining scientific knowledge of other
minds. This line of criticism developed into the ‘first cognitive revolution’ initiated by J.S. Bruner (1973) and G.A.
Miller (Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976). Adopting the hypothetico-deductive conception of scientific method the
new cognitivists saw the experiment as playing the role of a test for a hypothesis about publicly unobservable
mental processes, rather than as a datum to be used in an induction to a correlative law of stimulus and response.
The ‘cognitive science’ movement developed out of the insights of Bruner and Miller by the adoption of the
computer analogy, as a way of systematically formulating hypotheses about mental processes. The computer is to
the brain as the running of a programme is to the mental activity of that brain.
A more realistic approach to the study of social psychology, that developed in the 1970s, led to a growing
emphasis on language as the main medium of human interaction (Harré 1977). In the behaviourist and immediately
post-behaviourist eras, language appeared only in various so-called ‘instruments’, such as questionnaires, rating
scales and so on. Many ‘experiments’ consisted in asking people to read stories and then to answer questions about
their opinions of these stories. Why not, it was asked (for example by Shotter 1993), just abandon misleading talk
of experiments, and turn to an analytical study of the many forms of human communication?
3 The behaviourist legacy in sociology
In sociology something akin to behaviourism developed under the influence of the three key factors identified
above in the origins of behaviourism in psychology - a positivist philosophy of science, a search for statistical
correlations between publicly observable phenomena and a ‘regularity’ conception of causality. The most
influential proponent of positivistic sociology was Émile Durkheim. In his famous work on suicide (1908) he
correlated local suicide rates with the values of broad social variables. Durkheim also offered to posterity another,
non-statistical sociological method, in which publicly observable social phenomena, such as religious ceremonies,
were subject to hermeneutical reinterpretation ascovert symbolizations of social structure. The history of the
debates over sociological method could be presented as a dispute between Durkheim and his alter ego.
Ethnomethodology was developed by Harold Garfinkel and his co-workers explicitly in opposition to Durkheimian
social fact methodology. Garfinkel (1967) looked at the way social facts, such as suicide statistics, were produced.
He found that they were the product of very complex conversational interactions, in the course of which people
with various rights and standings took part in a complex and often quite long-running negotiation. This led
Garfinkel to a very close analysis of the (conversational) procedures by which everyday reality was constituted as
something normal and unattended. At this point we are a long way from positivism. However by a strange shift in
focus the very method by which Garfinkel proposed to unveil the methods by which ordinary folk created their
worlds turned into a kind of positivistic empiricism. In CA (‘conversation analysis’), elementary conversational
acts (as identified by the analyst) are sorted into statistical patterns, independent of all contextual features
whatever. This development has been subjected to much the same kind of criticism as was classical behaviourism,
namely that as a positivistic reduction of the phenomena that define a field of interest of a science it eliminates the
thing that it should be attempting to discover by means of a context sensitive methodology, namely the cultural
conventions by reference to which the micro-orderliness of social life is maintained.
4 Summary
The behaviourist paradigm has left its traces everywhere in the human sciences and particularly in social
psychology. Despite paying lip-service to the idea that human beings in social interaction are active agents
engaged in jointly realizing certain projects, plans and intentions and sometimes antagonistically attempting to
force their projects on others, we have a view of human social actors as mindless automatons, mere spectators of
processes over which they, as individuals, could have no control. This metaphysical position is still implicit in
much of the work of US social psychologists (Wrightsman and Dew 1980) and to a much lesser extent in Europe
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(Farr and Moscovici 1987). The metaphysical foundations of microsociology and social psychology have been
strongly criticized. But to treat formalized discussions between psychologists and their subjects as experiments is,
according to the critics, to do little more than offer a rhetorical re-description of something which is utterly unlike
an experiment in the natural sciences. Instead it is argued that an acknowledgement of the fact that what are treated
as experiments are really conversational interactions and should be analysed as such, is the way forward (Potter
and Wetherell 1987). All that a psychological experiment can do, if seen in its true light as a kind of conversation,
is to enable us to discover the local conventions of social discourse. Once this is achieved we can ask whether
some such conventions can be identified in all human communities of which we have any knowledge.
See also: Behaviourism, analytic; Behaviourism, methodological and scientific; Positivism in the social sciences;
Skinner, B.F.
ROM HARRÉ
References and further reading
Asch, S. (1956) ‘Studies of Independence and Conformity’, Psychological monographs 70: 416.(Study of the fact
that when in groups people tend to follow the majority opinion.)
Berkowitz, L. (1962) Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis, New York: McGraw-Hill.(Study of the
conditions under which people behave aggressively.)
Bruner, J.S. (1973) Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing, New York: W.W.
Norton.(Initiated, with G.A. Miller, the ‘first cognitive revolution’.)
Danziger, K. (1990) Constructing the Subject, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Selective history of
modern psychology that sees psychology, not so much as a body of facts or theories, but as a special set of
social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical
conditions.)
Durkheim, É. (1908) Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. J.A. Spaulding and G. Simpson, London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.(Durkheim’s famous work in which he correlated local suicide rates with the values of broad
social variables.)
Farr, R. and Moscovici, S. (1987) Social Representations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(European
work on the metaphysical foundations of social psychology.)
Festinger, L. (1957) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.(Cognitive
dissonance theory based upon the alleged existence of cognitive discomfort in the presence of contradiction
between expressed beliefs and actions.)
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnometholodogy, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.(Develops
ethnomethodology in opposition to Durkheimian social fact methodology.)
Harré, R. (1977) Social Being, Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1993.(Emphasizes language as the main medium of
human interaction.)
Harré, R. and Secord, P.F. (1972) The Explanation of Social Behaviour, Oxford: Blackwell.(Develops the
‘role-rule’ model which recommends a methodology of account analysis instead of simple experimentation.)
Lindzey, G. and Aronson, E. (1968) Handbook of Social Psychology, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.(Looks at
the setting up of a number of experimental programmes centred around a variety of human social phenomena.)
Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority, New York: Harper & Row.(Study of experiments in social
psychology and their interpretations.)
Miller, G.A. and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1976) Language and Perception, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.(Initiated, with J.S. Bruner, the ‘first cognitive revolution’.)
Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology, London: Sage.(Argues that what are
treated as experiments in social psychology are really conversational interactions and should be analysed as
such.)
Shotter, J. (1993) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life Through Language, London: Sage.(Claims that
naturally occurring psychological and sociological ‘realities’ are both socially constructed and sustained within
everyday conversation.)
Tajfel, H. (1982) Social Identity and Intergroup Relativism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Theory of
intergroup relations that proposes a cognitive mechanism of social comparison to explain observed
correlations.)
Wrightsman, L.S. and Dew, K. (1980) Social Psychology in the Eighties, Monterey, CA: Brooks Cole.
(Integrated introduction to social psychology.)
Zajonc, R.B. (1968) ‘Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)
monograph supplement, 9 (2): 1-27.(Investigation of interpersonal liking.)
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)