Skinner, B. F. (1977). Herrnstein and the evolution of behaviorism

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Herrnstein and the Evolution of Behaviorism
B. F. SKINNER Harvard University
ABSTRACT: // is difficult to identify the tacit
assumptions to which Herrnstein attributes the rise of
the experimental analysis of behavior and which he
feels must be exposed and revised. The assumptions
that have been explicitly stated must, as in any science,
be constantly reviewed, but Herrnstein's comments are
not particularly helpful for that purpose. Operant
conditioners have not neglected relevant genetic contri-
butions; they have never asserted that the "drives"
they use in their research compose an exhaustive list;
and their treatment of response classes encompasses
recent data without serious dislocation. Phylogenic
intrusions into ontogenic behavior, as in autoshaping,
are more than matched by intrusions in the other
direction. Herrnstein's theory of self-reinforcement in
the explanation of behavior clearly attributable to
natural selection is an unnecessary appeal to environ-
mentalism. A science of behavior must deal with both
phytogeny and ontogeny, but Herrnstein has not pointed
toward a useful rapprochement.
When one has published nine books setting forth a
scientific position, it is disconcerting to find it mis-
understood. To be misunderstood by a former
student and present colleague is especially puzzling.
Yet I do not recognize the views attributed to me
by Professor Herrnstein (1977) in his explanation
of a "rising tide of anti-Skinnerianism" (p. 593)
in the evolution of behaviorism. Specifically, I
cannot agree that, "tacitly" or explicitly, I (a)
minimized the role of phylogenic behavior, (b)
"forswore exact prediction and instead sought
quantitative laws," (c) incorrectly identified "the
natural lines of fracture along which behavior and
environment actually break," (d) assumed that
there were only a few "drives," (e) unjustifiably
overlooked the "hedonic value of stimuli," and (f)
became interested in behavioral engineering only
at a relatively late date. It is possible that what
he says is applicable to the views of other people,
but insofar as readers may suppose that he is
speaking of my own, and possibly with the special
authority of a close associate, I must try to set the
record straight.
The Breland Effect
Herrnstein begins with the Brelands and I shall
deal with them first. Marian Breland was in a
class of 20 sophomores to whom I taught intro-
ductory psychology at the University of Minnesota
in 1938-1939. (Another member of the class was
W. K. Estes.) Keller Breland was a graduate
student, although not one of mine. I enlisted
their help in what became known as Project
Pigeon (Skinner, 1960) early in 1942. Together
on that project we learned the techniques of shap-
ing behavior from which they developed a new
field of applied animal psychology (Breland &
Breland, 1951).
Their commercial work gave them a unique
opportunity to observe the effect of highly repeti-
tive behavior emitted over long periods of time,
and they made the important discovery that when
manipulation of an object as a token was repeat-
edly reinforced with food, an animal might begin
to show, with respect to the token, behavior that
was quite obviously of phylogenic origin. A racoon
"washes" the token; a pig "roots" it. When Keller
Breland reported these results to our Pigeon Staff
at Harvard around 1960, we were far from "taken
aback" and urged him to publish. Unfortunately,
the tone of their paper (Breland & Breland, 1961)
encouraged misunderstanding, as Keller Breland
(Note 1) pointed out in a letter sent to me before
publication:
We have been concerned here for a number of years
with the area of observations commonly called instinct (a
rosebush by any other name is just as thorny), and an
article discussing the type of problem one encounters in
this area will soon appear in the American Psychologist.
Preparation of this paper was supported by Social
Security Number 474-24-0443.
I am grateful to Robert Epstein for critical comments
and help in the preparation of this paper. I have also
profited from comments by A. Charles Catania.
Requests for reprints should be sent to B. F. Skinner,
Department of Psychology and Social Relations, William
James Hall, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts 02138.
1006 • DECEMBER 1977 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
That is the occasion for this letter since, after looking at
the galley proofs, it occurred to us that it might convey
impressions not intended. Perhaps we did not state
strongly enough our feeling as to the efficacy of operant
conditioning in the control of organisms. This conviction
is so "old hat" with us that I am afraid that we sometimes
forget that it is not shared by all American psychologists.
His letter concluded: "Viva la operant! (Such a
pregnant notion as the operant must be female.)"
It was, of course, necessary for the Brelands to use
the phylogenic repertoires of the various species
with which they worked (and they did so in a
most ingenious way), but they continued to be
dependent upon the shaping technique we dis-
covered in Project Pigeon in developing that be-
havior for commercial purposes. So much for their
"fading enthusiasm" at this "early point in the
rising tide of anti-Skinnerianism" (Herrnstein,
1977, p. 593).
Curiously enough, Clark Hull may have been
the first to observe the Breland effect. In 1937
someone had said that the use of tokens was a kind
of symbolic behavior beyond the reach of rats, and
I countered by teaching a rat (the student news-
paper named it Pliny) to pull a chain to release
a marble from a rack, pick the marble up in its
forepaws, carry it across the cage, and drop it
down a slot (Skinner, 1938). When Hull visited
my laboratory during the American Psychological
Association meetings in Minnesota in September
1937, he saw Pliny at work and noticed that the
rat licked the marble as it carried it across the cage.
"Anticipatory goal behavior," he called it. I had
another explanation: We never washed the marbles
and they became rather tacky and no doubt had
some flavor if not nutritional value. If Hull was
right, he anticipated the Brelands by more than
two decades. The behavior did not, of course,
seriously disrupt the behavior being reinforced.
It was a mistake, no matter how tempting, for
the Brelands to speak of "misbehavior." I do not
believe that organisms ever misbehave. I long ago
adopted the basic rule in animal research that the
organism is always right. It does what it is
induced to do by its genetic endowment or the
prevailing conditions. If anyone misbehaves, it
is the experimenter in making a bad prediction.
The prolonged repetitive use of a token appears
to lead eventually to adjunctive behavior toward
the token which is characteristic of the reinforcer
for which the token is exchanged. The miser is
the human archetype. However, in commenting
on the Breland effect, I have pointed out (Skinner,
1966b) that in Project Pigeon we also observed
contrary instances in which environmentalism
"overrode" nativism. A pigeon that had been con-
ditioned to peck very rapidly at a target pecked at
food at the same rate and was unable to take pieces
into its mouth. It had nearly starved to death be-
fore we discovered what was wrong. (We did not
publish this as "completely invalidating the nativist
position.") As I pointed out in that paper, civil-
ization has supplied an unlimited number of ex-
amples of the suppression of the phylogenic rep-
ertoire of the human species by learned, behavior.
In fact, it is often the very function of a culture
to mask a genetic endowment.
In view of the importance of the Breland effect,
not to mention the extent to which it has been
cited as showing "trouble with the Skinnerian
method," it is disappointing that it has not been
studied further. It would be interesting to know,
forexample, whether the same behavior would be
exhibited if a raccoon or pig were thirsty and its
token-using behavior were being reinforced with
water.
Environmentalism
According to Herrnstein (1977), William Mc-
Dougall stands for nativism and I for environ-
mentalism, but we "just barely resisted converging
on [a] middle ground" where "the accumulating
data of our science root us ever more firmly" (p.
S94). But I have always regarded myself as on
the middle ground. "Skinnerianism" is not "dedi-
cated to environmentalism as opposed to nativism"
(p. 593). My first five papers were about innate
behavior, and I have referred elsewhere (Skinner,
1956) to two unpublished experiments conducted
at about the same time on "ethological" topics. In
my first experiment on conditioning, I used inbred
strains of rats and planned to make genetic tests
when differences in behavior were discovered.
With W. T. Heron, I explored the possibility that
two strains of rats separated on the basis of scores
in a linear multiple-T maze might differ in rate of
extinction in an operant setting (Heron & Skinner,
1940). I have commented on the four ways in
which a culture or social environment can deal
wUh innate susceptibilities to reinforcement by
salt, sugar, sexual contact, and signs of aggressive
damage (Skinner, 1966a) and have written at
length on the relation between the phylogeny and
ontogeny of behavior (Skinner, 1966b), pointing to
many similarities between natural selection and
operant conditioning. When the latter paper was
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • DECEMBER 1977 • 1007
reprinted in Contingencies of Reinforcement: A
Theoretical Analysis (Skinner, 1969), I added
many notes touching on issues now being raised
by Herrnstein. One of them points to "a possible
example of programmed phylogenic contingencies"
which I later expanded in a paper called "The
Shaping of Phylogenic Behavior" (Skinner, 1975),
a much stronger statement on the inheritance of
behavior than is commonly made by many etholo-
gists.
There are a few statements in Science and
Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953) questioning in-
nate imitation of which I am now less sure. Phy-
logenic imitative repertoires are obvious enough.
There are many circumstances in which doing
what other members of a group are doing should
have survival value, but it is possible that this is
confined to behavior with survival value in its own
right. Whether organisms naturally imitate novel
forms of behavior acquired in novel environments
is another question. I failed to get a pigeon to
peck at a ping-pong ball fastened on the wall of
a box when another pigeon in a clearly visible space
was pecking a similar ball and getting food for
each peck, but I had no trouble setting up very
precise imitative behavior through direct reinforce-
ment (Skinner, 1962). I have discussed the inter-
relations among phylogenic and ontogenic imitation
and aggression in detail (Skinner, 1969). This
does not seem to be the history of an extreme
environmentalist who has "tacitly" assumed a
tabula rasa.
The Unspoken Heuristic Assumptions
Herrnstein's paper is concerned almost exclusively
with assumptions he calls "unspoken," "implicit,"
or "tacit." It is, of course, impossible to prove
that one has never made such an assumption or in
some obscure way profited from making it. One
can only argue that it would not have been needed
or that a contrary assumption has been stated.
Herrnstein (1977) argues that
Only something subtle can explain why, for about a
generation, the Skinnerian school has been a major pro-
ducer in the study of instrumental behavior, for all the
obvious ingredients antedate it. What was the creative
impetus in Skinner's work, if not its operant-respondent
distinction or its lever boxes or cumulative records?
(p. 594)
I should suppose that a valid answer would be
the use of rate of responding as a dependent vari-
able and the extent to which it was shown to be a
function of carefully controlled and increasingly
complex contingencies of reinforcement. Vast
areas of research, from animal psychophysics to
psychopharmacology to schedules of reinforce-
ment to physiological psychology, began to show a
degree of rigor and reproducibility that had not
been antedated. There is nothing subtle about
such an explanation, but it seems to account for
the rapid multiplication of laboratories for the
experimental analysis of behavior and for the
increasing flow of important experimental papers.
Herrnstein himself does not answer his question
except to imply that all this happened because of
unwarranted "tacit" assumptions. He does not
show how, by serving their "heuristic purposes,"
they led to the present flourishing state of the field.
He explains the assumption of equipotentiality
in some detail, and then judges me innocent of
making it. He is not so clear in identifying the
other assumptions of which Skinnerians are said
to be guilty. He says that my
theoretical point of departure here was Watsonian be-
haviorism, characterized by [my] quote from Watson
(1Q24): "the ascertaining of such data and laws, that, given
the stimulus, psychology can predict what the response will
be; or, given the response, it can specify the nature of the
effective stimulus." (p. 595)
If it was my "point of departure," I departed very
soon, as Herrnstein himself goes on to show:
"Skinner considered the Watsonian program 'im-
practicable' because 'the number of possible reflexes
is for all practical purposes infinite and . . . what
one might call the botanizing of reflexes will be a
thankless task'" (p. 595). Nevertheless, I did
not, as Herrnstein says, express "pessimism about
a completely predictive science of behavior" (p.
595). I thought it might be possible in the lab-
oratory.
I am at a loss to explain the sentences that
follow:
The only way to find out about the specific stimuli and
responses comprising the flow of behavior, said Skinner,
was to observe and catalogue them as a botanist does
plants, and he was clearly to have none of it. It is true
that the Brelands and the long line of pioneering be-
havioral engineers since them have dared to venture
where Skinner said he wouldn't, even if he seems to
have since become as practical-minded as Watson ever
was. (p. 595)
I did not say that the only way to find out about
the flow of behavior was to botanize reflexes. I
said it was to select a few samples of behavior and
study them intensively under laboratory control.
And as to "pioneering behavioral engineers," what
is the force of the second "since"? Project Pigeon
1008 • DECEMBER 1977 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
was one of the first engineering applications of
operant conditioning and it was already under way
when I enlisted the help of the Brelands. Further-
more, before they proposed their new "field of
applied animal psychology," I had written Walden
Two as an essay in behavioral engineering on a
much broader scale. The "long line of pioneering
behavioral engineers since [the Brelands]" owed
nothing to them. Indeed, any connection would
have worked against technological extensions by
supporting those critics who have likened behavior
modification to the training of animals.
The "Contamination" oj Response Classes
Another "tacit" assumption to be reconsidered is
said to involve response classes. In my paper on
the generic nature of stimulus and response (Skin-
ner, 1935), I pointed to the diversity to be seen
in the topography of behavior but also to the
reasonably ordered processes observed in spite of
it. I spoke of the "natural lines of fracture along
which behavior and environment actually break"—
a nativist statement if I ever heard one, but one
which Herrnstein misrepresents by equating it with
generalization.
The facts cited by Herrnstein are far from a
contamination." The experiment which Herrnstein
offers asan example Wolin did in my laboratory
at Indiana University. The water-reinforced re-
sponses were not exactly "pigeon pecks," as Herrn-
stein says, but "slow, long, easy pushing motions"
(Wolin, 1948), much more like dipping the
beak into water. I have tried to repeat that
experiment several times without success, but there
is no question that Wolin got his result. The
following fact may be relevant. Wolin used a
small white ceramic cup into which the pigeon
could just insert its beak to draw up a very small
quantity of water at each reinforcement. Seen
from above, the cup was about the size and shape
of the key, and the white light on the key was not
unlike the white glaze on the cup. It is perhaps
not surprising that the response to the key should
then resemble the response to the cup. W. H.
Morse and I could detect no difference in duration
of contact-openings in an experiment in which
pecking one key was reinforced with water and
pecking another, with food. But the Wolin result
showed that behavior appropriate to obtaining
water as a reinforcer can strongly influence the
topography of a response to a rather similar key.
It is an important observation, but not, I think, a
"source of evidence against Skinnerianism" (p.
599), whatever that may be.1 (Incidentally, an
entirely different principle explains the fact that
food-reinforced yawning differs from real yawning.
The operant simulation of a respondent—or for
that matter of another operant—is seldom precise.
Actors find it difficult to yawn in a convincing way.
The behavior is a poor copy because the contin-
gencies are different, not, as Herrnstein says, be-
cause the response class has been contaminated
by reinforcers or "drives.")
Autoshaping
Autoshaping is a special application of a more gen-
eral principle. When a stimulus or a change in a
stimulus is repeatedly correlated with an event of
biological significance, such as the presentation of
food to a hungry animal, it begins to elicit or
release behavior that is pretty obviously part of
the animal's phylogenic repertoire. One example
is the pigeon's investigatory peck at a disk that is
occasionally lighted or darkened a few moments
before food is presented. At Indiana University
in 1946 I used a spot of light that moved across a
screen; when it reached the edge, a food dispenser
operated. In that case, the spot did not evoke an
investigatory peck; instead, the pigeon "drove" it
across the screen, striking it at the rear edge. I
was not "alarmed" at this result; I suggested that
a graduate student at Harvard take it as a subject
for a PhD thesis and built the necessary apparatus.
It was, I believe, the only time I have ever sug-
gested a topic to a graduate student, and unfortu-
nately she chose to do something else. In 1958,
W. H. Morse and I undertook some experiments
to see why extinction curves after continuous
reinforcement were so variable. Our guess was
that reinforcement was not always really con-
tinuous, because many pecks did not operate the
key. We used what would later be called auto-
shaping to get a clean response—again without
alarm. That the investigatory responses should
actually prevent the occurrence of a reinforcement
is interesting but not devastating. Phylogeny and
ontogeny are friendly rivals and neither one
always wins.
1
 Like Wolin, Morse and I were observing operant be-
havior rather than the autoshaped behavior in which
Jenkins and Moore (1973) found a topographical similarity
between pecking a key and the consummatory behavior of
drinking and eating.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • DECEMBER 1977 • 1009
Drives
Another of the "tacit" assumptions that Herrnstein
feels must be stripped away concerns motivation.
I have certainly not neglected "drive," though I
stopped using the term shortly after the publication
of Science and Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953)
because it was so easily misunderstood. For
example, Herrnstein (1977) says that "for Skin-
ner a primary drive is a state" (p. 596). It is
not. In Science and Human Behavior (Skinner,
1953), successive sections are headed A drive is
not a physiological state, A drive is not a psychic
state, and A drive is not simply a state oj
strength. In my first discussion of the subject I
said, "The question of hunger arises from an
apparent variability in the behavior of the intact
organism" (Skinner, 1932 p. 35). Rather than
explain this by referring to a state, I argued that
we should turn to an observable and, if possible,
a manipulable operation. I contended that nothing
was gained by talking about a "state of hunger,"
no matter what the introspective or physiological
evidence, because we must still explain the state.
In the case of hunger, the additional operation is
deprivation, though rate of eating can, of course,
be altered in other ways. I pointed out in The
Behavior oj Organisms (Skinner, 1938) that "in
a conditioned operant, the drive governing the
strength is determined by the reinforcement" (p.
372), and also that a single, labeled "drive" such
as hunger can be changed in many ways and has
many effects. If we stick to our observations, we
can only specify the operations and the behaviors
they affect; I could see no evidence of a single
drive called hunger, and I agree with Herrnstein
(1977, p. 598) that "We still do not know precisely
what we are doing when we make a rat hungry"
(though "millions of pellets" have not been
"rollfed] down chutes" to find out).
An organism is always in a "state," uniquely
associated with what it is doing. We can speak
of either the state or the behavior, but we can not
explain one by the other. The really serious mis-
take is to infer a drive state as an explanatory
entity simply from the behavior to be explained.
When a pigeon "prompted by flashing lights and
unexpected pellets of food or jolts of shock" pecks
a key, it is the behavior that is prompted, not the
"creature's curiosity drive" (Herrnstein, 1977, p.
601).
Herrnstein appears to agree. He says, "Of
course, it does not explain behavior to infer drives
and reinforcers, nor is it a substitute for honest
research" (p. 601). But he then goes on:
It is, rather, to allow one's system of behavior to take
cognizance of two directions in which psychological knowl-
edge is growing: The first concerns the complexity of
the motivational endowment of typical subjects, and the
second, the reinforcing status of the stimuli arising in
behavior, (p. 601)
I believe this can be abbreviated as follows: To
infer drives and reinforcers is to recognize moti-
vational endowments and the reinforcing effects of
stimuli arising in behavior. But that comes close
to saying simply that by inferring drives- and self-
reinforcers, we can talk about them. I prefer to
talk about observations rather than inferences. To
demonstrate that motivation has been neglected,
Herrnstein says that in spending so much time on
schedules of reinforcement, behaviorists tell us
"that they think that relatively little behavioral
variance is explained by organisms' varying drive
states" (p. 597), but is this not like saying that
in spending so much time on hormones, the endo-
crinologists tell us that they think relatively little
behavioral variance is explained by the nervous
system? To stick to one field is not to assert that
another field is worthless.
It is true that I have studied only a few "drives,"
but I am surprised that this should be taken as
evidence that I have made "the most fallible of all
the behaviorist assumptions . . . [namely] that the
number is small" (Herrnstein, 1977, p. 596). I
do not see that it follows that "Although he never
says so in so many words, Skinner can be said to
be disposed toward short lists of drives, especially
for human beings, simply because he says so little
about the issue" (p. 598). I have not talked about
or studied many forms of deprivationor aversive
stimulation for reasons of expedience. What is to
be gained from attempting to do more if, as Herrn-
stein supposes, "the list . . . is long, not fully
known, and, finally, somewhat variable from per-
son to person and from time to time" (p. 598)?
I doubt very much whether there is very much
"potential for mischief as the controlling agencies
unwittingly withhold reinforcers belonging to drives
not yet recognized as such or allow unrecognized
reinforcers to sabotage their conditioning" (p.
598). If there is, I do not see how it can be
prevented. A few examples of these dangers would
have been helpful.
Self-Reinforcers
What Herrnstein is really concerned about becomes
clear when he writes, "The unspoken behaviorist
1010 • DECEMBER 1977 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
premise of a short list has, until recently, sheltered
behaviorists from the profound motivational com-
plexity of animal behavior, the cycles and epicycles
[Ptolemy?] of drive from appetitive to territorial
to aggressive to nurturant and so on" (p. S98).
Territorial, aggressive, nurturant—Herrnstein is
talking about innate behavior. But why does he
bring it in under the rubric of "profound moti-
vational complexity"? Why not natural selection?
The answer lies in his theory of drives and rein-
forcers. Herrnstein uses a curious notion of self-
reinforcement to explain behavior that seems to me
clearly traceable to natural selection. To do so
is to miss an important distinction. Innate
susceptibility to reinforcement is different from
innate behavior, as Peterson (1960) showed in his
study of imprinting. The young duckling does not
necessarily approach or follow its mother or an
imprinted object becuse it inherits the behavior
of doing so. It also inherits, possibly as a redund-
ant mechanism, a susceptibility to reinforcement
from getting close to mother or object. Approach-
ing an imprinted object is the simplest natural way
to increase proximity, but Peterson showed that a
quite arbitrary response such as pecking a key
could also be reinforced by bringing the object
closer to the duckling. To attribute behavior to
such an innate susceptibility, is very different than
saying that phylogenic behavior is self-reinforcing.
Two examples may help to make this clear. Let
us begin with Herrnstein's example of cat and
mouse. Here the stalking behavior of a cat appears
to be largely inherited, though the topography no
doubt changes under reinforcement as a mouse is
stalked. (I should have preferred a bird rather
than a mouse as the prey. Cats tend to chase and
play with mice; they must stalk birds because
birds escape so much more easily.) Herrnstein
wants to explain all the behavior as due to self-
reinforcement—reinforcement not by the reactions
of the mouse but by the very behavior itself. He
is convinced that this is true for two reasons: (1)
The behavior cannot be extinguished. (But why
should it be if it is innate? Technically speaking,
only conditioned behavior can be extinguished;
reflex and released behaviors must be eliminated in
other ways, and it is usually difficult to find ways.)
(2) Stalking and pouncing cannot be conditioned
in a cow or moose. (But the behavior has not
been conditioned in the cat either.) As a matter
of fact, given a prey which bears the same relation
to a cow, with respect to speed and mutual stim-
ulation, as a mouse does to a cat, it should not be
too difficult to set up contingencies under which
a cow will "stalk"—that is, approach slowly when
at a distance in order not to alert the prey and
then move quickly to capture. The prey would
have to be something like an animated bundle of
corn. Because of gross physical differences in size
and speed, of course, the stalking would not look
like the unconditioned stalking of a cat.
My objection to Herrnstein's attribution of the
behavior to self-reinforcement is that no reinforcer
can be identified and none need be, any more than
in. explaining retching or digesting one's dinner.
Stalking is simply the kind of thing cats do as
cats, subject to considerable modification by identi-
fiable reinforcers in the life of the individual.
As a second example, a mature eel finds its way
from a European river to the Sargasso Sea where
it breeds and dies. Each turn and each forward
movement into new territory cannot be due to self-
reinforcement, because the eel makes the trip only
once and only past reinforcers can be effective.
To hold that an organism behaves because of some
future reinforcing consequence is unnecessarily
teleological. Of course some "state" of the eel
(what else?) leads it to take all the right turns.
The state could be comparable to that which
prevails in an organism that has actually been
conditioned to make such a journey, but it is the
end product of an entirely different process. It is
an unnecessary bit of environmentalism to appeal
to self-reinforcement in the individual eel to explain
the strength of behavior that is due to natural
selection.2
Conclusion
Herrnstein (1977) finds The Behavior oj Organ-
isms "too grandiose a title for a book about lever
pressing by albino rats" (p. 596). It is. And
so are Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes; An Investi-
gation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral
Cortex (a book about salivation in dogs) and
2
 Herrnstein also appeals unnecessarily to events in the
life of the individual to explain a species trait in his account
of drive reduction. The fact that getting and ingesting
food is susceptible to reinforcement by most foodstuffs
only when an organism has been deprived of food has
great survival value, since eating at all times would be
wasteful and dangerous. Susceptibilities to reinforcement
by salt and sugar are exceptions—and again for phylogenic
reasons: Until recently, these substances were usually in
short supply and it was important that organisms ingest
them at every opportunity regardless of the current level
of deprivation.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • DECEMBER 1977 • 1011
Sherrington's The Integrative Action of the Nerv-
ous System (the bulk of which is about the simplest
part of the nervous system and only in cats and
dogs). And so, I suggest, is "The Evolution of
Behaviorism," unless Herrnstein is contending that
his own theory of drives and reinforcers is the
wave of the future.
Of course behaviorism will evolve. The Be-
havior of Organisms has long been out of date,
thanks to the efforts of many researchers, of whom
Herrnstein is one. But I am continually surprised
at how little of the book is actually wrong or no
longer relevant. Every scientific field broadens
and changes, but why should such a development
be characterized as "a crescendo of apparent dis-
sent" (p. 594) ? When it proved necessary to
modify Boyle's law to allow for the effect of tem-
perature, it is possible that critics spoke of a com-
plete refutation or of "holes in the fabric" of Boyle,
but we now see that that kind of criticism is unim-
portant in the historical growth of science. Herrn-
stein (1965) is co-editor of a distinguished source
book in the history of psychology. In this par-
ticular case, proximity seems to have interfered
with an objective evaluation.
The behavior of organisms is a single field in
which both phylogeny and ontogeny must be taken
into account. Like all sciences, it must have its
specialists, since it is unlikely that anyone can be
an expert in the field as a whole. The full title of
my book (Skinner, 1938) was The Behavior of
Organisms: An Experimental Analysis—an explicit
exclusion of the field observations from which the
science of ethology was just emerging. As in any
science, it would be a mistake to ignore other fields
that bear upon one's own or to neglect to call to
the attention of those in other fields material of
one's own which they might find relevant. It is
possible that ethology andthe experimental anal-
ysis of behavior have failed to further this essential
interchange in the past, but I do not believe the
fault can be assigned to either side. I join with
Herrnstein in looking forward to a closer rap-
prochement of the two fields, though I do not think
it will proceed along the lines he suggests.
REFERENCE NOTE
1. Breland, K. Personal communication, November 25,
1961.
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1012 • DECEMBER 1977 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST