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Journal OJ rhr History OJ the Behavioral Scicncn 17 (1981): 242-245. PAVLOV’S INFLUENCE ON PSYCHOLOGY IN AMERICA B. F. SKINNER It is hard to think of oneself as a contemporary of a man who died forty-four years ago, but it is nonetheless true that on two occasions Pavlov and I worked on the same problem at the same time. I mention this for what it may be worth in supporting my right to comment on Pavlov’s contribution to psychology. I am not an authority on Pavlov, and I shall report here little more than what I learned about his research as a student and then as it affected my own work and those of whom I remained a contemporary for a much longer period of time. That American psychologists learned about Pavlov through German publications is clear from the fact that they first spelled his name with w’s instead of v’s. In 1909 R. M. Yerkes and S. Morgulis published “The Method of Pawlow in Animal Psychology.”l Neither author seems to have been much influenced by Pavlov’s work, but John B. Wat- son was different, and fortunately I can let him tell his own story. In 1937 Ernest R. Hilgard asked Watson the question we are raising here today, and he has kindly per- mitted me to give you Watson’s answer: I cannot say that either Pavlov or Bechterev had much influence in shaping m early a seminar I gave on Bechterev’s Objective Psychology, I repeatedly pointed out that he was a parallelist at heart. I felt the same about Pavlov. Even in 191 1 and 1912 when 1 was publishing my own views, neither had helped me much. I had worked the thing out in terms of HABIT formation. It was only later, when I began to dig into the vague word HABIT that 1 saw the enormous contribution Pavlov had made, and how easily the conditioned response could be looked upon as the unit of what we had all been calling HABIT. 1 certainly, from that point on, gave the master his due credit. Pavlov’s work and the work of his students were so much more accurate and com- rehensive in technique that it is small wonder he received the credit over Bechterev. !lease don’t get the im ression that I discount Bechterev’s work in any way. We the war broke out. Lashley deserves far more credit than I for the early conditioned reflex in the coun- try. You will remember that I said he had done most of the work,in my presidential address. [Watson’s address was published as “The Place of the Conditioned Reflex in Psychology” in 1916.’ In it he considered Pavlov’s work on sensory discrimina- tion as an alternative to introspection.] It has been a long time since I’ve read the old article of mine in the Encyclopedia Brirannica on Behaviorism. I think I wrote it about 1928. Possibly my memory was fresher then on those to whom credit is due.a What Watson remembered in 1928 was this: The work of Pawlow and his students on the conditioned reflex, while known to the behaviourists, played at first a relatively minor role in their formulations. This was B. F. SKINNER is Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, at Harvard University. William James Hall, 33 Kirkland St.. Cambridge, M A 02138. USA. He is of course a leading figure in the field ofpsychology. His most recent book is the second volume of his autobiography. The Shap- ing of a Behaviorist (New York: Knopf. 1979). 242 convictions. I never thought either of them was an objectivist. As a matter of r act, in used to correspond and P had made all arrangements for Lashley to go to him when PAVLOV’S JNFLUENCE ON AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 243 due to the fact that his experiments were chiefly concerned with conditioned glan- dular reflexes, which was at that time a subject hardly touched upon by psy- chologists. Bechterev’s work on the conditioned motor reflex, where human subjects were used, had from the first a very much greater influence upon behaviourism. The work of Lashley in conditioning the human salivary reflex and of Watson and Rayner on conditioning human emotional reaction (fear) showed the reat range of ap lication of the conditioned reflex methods to human behaviour. #his work has l J t o an attempt to formulate all habit (organization) in terms of conditioned glan- dular and motor reaction. In spite of the fact that behaviourism did not at first utilize to any extent the conditioned reflex methods, Pawlow and Bechterev must be looked upon as furnishing the keystone to its arch. During the period of the eneral or as a specialized method in psyc i ology, the writings of E. B. Holt, A. P. Weiss, and K. S. Lashley are noteworthy. formulation of behaviourism as a s stem rather than as an approach to psyc I! ology, As Watson said, a salivary response was not of great interest to American psy- chologists, and subsequent work on the responses of glands and smooth muscles was not extensive. Lashley invented a method of collecting saliva from the parotid gland in humans, but in his Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence,’ published in 1929, he refers only a few times to conditioning and then critically. In 1922 Hulsey Cason reported a con- ditioned pupillary reflex: and some work was done on the galvanic skin response, but the best known psychologists in the 1920s were almost untouched. Walter S. Hunter made very little use of Pavlov’s work, although in 1933 a student of his, C. V. Hudgins, published an attempt to reduce voluntary behavior to a conditioned reflex. (A subject said “Contract” and a bright light was flashed in her eye. Eventually the pupil contracted when she said “Contract.”) Edward C. Tolman rejected the conditioned reflex formula in its entirety. In 1929 Clark L. Hull wrote a paper called “A Functional Interpretation of the Conditioned Reflex,”’ and he was responsible for much of the interest in Pavlov dur- ing the next decade. In 1932 one of his students, W. M. Lepley, suggested that the con- ditioned reflex might explain verbal learning and for years Hull referred to this as the “Lepley Hypothesis.” However, in his Principles of Behavior: published in 1943, he does not mention LeDley. In the thirties, Hilgard and Marquis studied the conditioned eyelid reflex.’ With its double innervation, this raised a new issue, which became clearest when Americans turned to the so-called conditioned motor reflexes of Bechterev. In 1924 Watson published a paper on conditioned finger withdrawal; and one of Hull’s students, Helen Wolfle, investigated certain temporal properties of that reflex in 1930.’O In 1928 Harold Schlosberg reported a conditioned patellar reflex” and in the same year Howard Liddell published his extensive work on conditioned leg flexion in sheep.‘l The trouble was that these arrangements involved consequences of behavior as well as antecedents. The organism escaped from or avoided an aversive stimulus-a puff of air in the case of the eyelid reflex or an electric shock in the case of finger withdrawal or leg flexion. The issue was not clarified for some time. In his article in the Encyclopedia Britannica Watson traced a concern with the consequences of behavior to C. Lloyd Morgan and Edward L. Thorndike. Much later Tolman spoke of “purposive behavior” and used mazes which seemed to show the goal-directedness of behavior. In 1928 two Polish physiologists, J. Konorski and S. Miller, added a consequence to a reflex. They delivered a shock to the leg of a dog, and after the leg flexed, they gave the dog food. Eventually the dog flexed its leg in the absence of the shock. In November 1931 they went to Leningrad to persuade Pavlov to change his theory. In a meeting on 20 April 1932 244 B. F. SKINNER (one of the meetings which came to be called “Pavlov’s Wednesdays”) Pavlov mentioned Konorski and Miller and credited them with having made conditioned reflexes into “con- ditioned stimuli for either attractive or noxious substances.”18 I wasstruggling with the same problem at that time. I had been impressed by Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes,“ and in my early publications I referred to the behavior I was studying (pressing a lever) as a reflex, but as I have pointed out in The Shaping ofa Behaviorist,16 before publishing my results I distinguished between two types of con- ditioning. In Type I, as in Pavlov’s experiment, a new reflex is formed. The dog salivates in response to a tone, for example. In Type 11, as in my experiment, two reflexes are ‘chained together. . . and. . , remain in that relation (the lever is pressed and the pellet is eaten).”1e That we were studying very different processes became clear when we began to rein- force only intermittently. (This was the second occasion when I could call myself Pavlov’s contemporary). Pavlov found it very hard to sustain behavior if food was not always paired with the conditioned stimulus, but rats pressed a lever rapidly and for long periods of time even though reinforcement was infrequent. In many arrangements used to study conditioned leg flexion, the shock was ter- minated as the foot was lifted off the electrode. When the electrode was fastened to the foot, the leg presumably continued to flex until the experimenter terminated the shock, in which case similar contingencies prevailed. In 1936 Elmer Culler, one of those most ac- tive in studying the conditioned flexion reflex, gave a paper at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association at which I was asked to be a discussant. I again raised the question of the role of consequences. It seemed to me that the only possible ex- ample of a skeletal response fitting the Pavlovian formula was the patellar reflex studied by Schlosberg, but when I asked Schlosberg about the possible role of consequences, he replied that they certainly had to be taken into account. It has been pointed out by R. M. Church” that the conditioned emotional response studies by Watson and Rayner also involved consequences. The rabbit and the loud noise were not paired; the noise occurred when Albert reached for the rabbit. The noise was better described as punishment. But it is possible that punishment works through the conditioning of aversive stimuli, and in any case autonomic responses were clearly in- volved. In 1940 W. K. Estes and I studied a different kind of conditioned emotional reaction in what we called ‘‘anxiety.’’’8 We reinforced pressing a lever on a fixed-interval schedule until a stable performance was maintained. Midway during a session we sounded a tone for three minutes and then shocked the rat through the feet. Originally, neither the tone nor the shock seriously disrupted the performance, but slowly the behavior in the presence of the tone was suppressed. It is a very reliable effect and has been widely used, Brady and Hunt, for example, found that electroconvulsive shock, as well as tranquiliz- ing drugs, eliminates the conditioned suppression. Although the tone no doubt elicits glandular and smooth muscle responses, the suppression is not, strictly speaking, a con- ditioned reflex. “Reaction,” a broader term, might be used, but even so the effect does not fit the pattern of stimulus substitution since no unconditioned stimulus produces the suppression. It is also possible that the conditioned salivation studied by Pavlov was not simply the salivation elicited by foodstuffs in the mouth transferred to an auditory stimulus; it could have been an innate response which would be elicited only when it became attached to a novel stimulus. PAVLOV’S INFLUENCE ON AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 245 Although Pavlov’s influence on experimental psychology was not great, various practices in behavior therapy have clearly been derived from his work. Desensitization is often no more than Pavlovian extinction. Curiously enough, Pavlov has had a more profound effect upon amateur psychologists. Literary critics, political writers, and many others use the term “conditioned reflex” with abandon. Aldous Huxley was reasonably on target in Brave New World,1g but it is not fair to call brainwashing “pavlovization.” The popular usage often overrides the professional. Behaviorists have been victims of what might be called filial regression, as whatever they do is forced into the pattern of Pavlovian conditioning. Many years ago students in introductory psychology at Colum- bia worked with operant conditioning. The Columbia Jester published a cartoon showing two rats in a box, one of them saying to the other, “Boy, have I got this guy conditioned! Every time I press the bar down he drops in a piece of food.” It was not long before the story was told this way: “Gee, have I got this fellow conditioned. Every time I ring the bell he gives me food.” That is Pavlov’s bell. NOTES I . Bulletin 6 (1909): 257-273. Robert M. Yerkes and S. Morgulis, “The Method of Pawlow in Animal Psychology,” Psychological 2. John B. Watson, “The Placc of the Conditioned Reflex in Psychology,” Psychological Review 23 (1916): 89-117. 3. Personal Correspondence, Watson to Hilgard, 1937. 4. Encyclopedia Britannico, 14th Ed., 1928. 5. Karl S. Lashley, Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). 6. Haulsey Cason, “The Conditioned Pupillary Reaction,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 5 (1922): 7. Clark L. Hull, “A Functional Interpretation of the Conditioned Reflex,” Psychological Review 36 (1929): 8 . Clark L. Hull, Principles of Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century, 1943). 9. Ernest R. Hilgard, “Reinforcement and Inhibition of Eyelid Reflexes,” Journal of General Psychology 8 10. Helen M. Wolfle, “Time Factors in Conditioning Finger-Withdrawal,” Journal of General Psychology 4 I I . Harold A. Schlosberg, “A Study of the Conditioned Patellar Reflex,” J O W M ~ of Experimental 12. Howard S . Liddell and 0. D. Anderson, “Certain Characteristics of Formation of Conditioned Reflexes in Sheep.” Proceedings of the Society of Experimental Biology and Medicine 26 (1928): 81-82. 13. K. Jerzy Konorski and S. Miller, see H. D. Kimmel, Notes from “Pavlov’s Wednesdays”: “Pavlov’s Law of Efiect.” American Journal of Psychology 89 (1976): 553-556. 14. Ivan ‘P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). 15. B . F. Skinner, The Shaping o f a Behaviorist (New York: Knopf, 1979) . 16. B. F. Skinner, “On the Rate of Formation of a Conditioned Reflex,” Journal of General Psychology 7 (1932): 276286. 17. Russell M. Church, “The Role of Fear in Punishment” in Punishment, ed. R. H. Walters, J. A. Cheyne, and R. K. Banks (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972). 18. William K. Estes and B. F. Skinner, “Some Quantitative Properties of Anxiety,” Journal of Erperimen- tal Psychology 29 (1941): 390-400. 19. Aldous Huxley. Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932). 108-146. 498-5 11. (1933): 85-113. (1930): 372-379. Psychology 1 1 (1928): 468-494.
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