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Learning Theory and Behaviourism
Although learning theory developed mainly in the United States, a major influence
was the work of a Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov. At the beginning of the
last century, Pavlov was exploring the digestive system in humans and other
animals. While he was undertaking research examining the salivary response of
dogs, he observed what appeared to him to be ways in which dogs learnt to
respond to objects and people. When it is given food, a dog will automatically
salivate. This is a naturally occurring response. In the terminology of
learning theory, the food is called the unconditioned stimulus and the response
of salivating is called the unconditioned response. Pavlov observed that if a
light went on or a bell rang (unconditioned stimuli) before the dog received
food, after a few trials the dog would salivate when the light went on or the
bell rang. The dog had learnt to associate what had been a neutral
unconditioned stimulus (bell or light) with the food and salivated at the
neutral stimulus even in the absence of food. This is the basis of what is
known as classical conditioning. Pavlov (1906, 1927, 1928) carried out
extensive research on the learning associated with classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning also accounts for some learning in humans. For
example, suppose a parental goal was to bring up their young child to enjoy
books. One scenario for achieving this, according to classical conditioning,
would be to start with the child being cuddled on a parent’s lap an experience
that makes the child feel good. This is an unconditioned response (naturally
occurring). Reading a book across a room to a young child will initially be a
neutral stimulus. However, if the parent reads the book to the child while
cuddling the child on their lap, after a few repeated sessions, being read to
will produce pleasant feelings in the child even when they are not being
cuddled by their parent. In this way, reading books has become a conditioned
stimulus that produces pleasure in the child. Once reading the book has become
a conditioned response, reading to the child across the room will induce the
same pleasurable response in the child.
Pavlov
demonstrated that the conditioned response could generalise to similar stimuli.
In the dog example, it could be changes in brightness or colour or the light
that would evoke the same response. Similarly with children, reading while on
their parent’s knee may generalise to being read to across a room and
eventually to reading anywhere, even on their own, and finding it a pleasant
experience. Pavlov showed that there are limits to generalisation. In the dog
example, if the food is delivered to some sounds but not to others, the dog
will learn to discriminate between the sounds and will only salivate to the
‘food’ sounds. Finally, Pavlov demonstrated that the conditioning process could
be reversed. If the light is presented repeatedly with no food following, then
the dog’s salivary response gets weaker and weaker, till eventually what is
termed extinction is achieved.
At this point, you
may wonder what all of this has to do with personality, but Pavlov went on to
show that classical conditioning could explain many of our emotional reactions.
It could be that I am an anxious person because I have had experiences where I
learnt to be anxious; it is not simply that I possess a neurotic personality.
The crucial difference is that if you have learnt to be anxious, then you can
unlearn; or, in learning theory terminology, the anxiety response can be
extinguished as it is not a part of your personality. We will return to this
shortly with a detailed example once we have understood how Pavlov’s work came
to be so influential within psychology.
John B. Watson, an American psychologist, read the early work of Pavlov
and was very impressed by it. He began to apply some of Pavlov’s observational
techniques in his own research and replicated some of his work in the United
States. As he became established within psychology, Watson began to call for a
change in the direction of American psychology so that it could become a true
science. He wanted to reject the methods of introspection and interpretation of
patients’ reminiscences that Freud and the other psychoanalysts had employed.
He saw these methods as unscientific and argued instead for a psychology that
considered only observable aspects of behaviour. In practice, this means that
no assumptions or hypotheses can be made about what is going on inside
someone’s mind. Stimuli and their effect on behaviour are the subject matter of
the behavioural approach, and rigorous scientific methods, mainly based in
laboratories, are used to collect data. Watson published his views in 1914 in a
book entitled Behaviour. In 1919, he published Psychology from the Standpoint
of a Behaviourist. This book was influential in American psychology. It
included summaries of Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning, thereby introducing
Pavlov’s work to a wider audience. Watson is generally credited as being the
founding figure of the School of Behaviourism, but his career as a psychologist
ended with his withdrawal from academia in 1920 to enter business. Behaviourism
and the popularising of Pavlov’s work had set the scene for developments in
personality theorising and research. From this perspective variables are manipulated,
ideally in a controlled laboratory setting, and then the effects of these
manipulations on the subject of the research are carefully observed.
Although the
behavioural approach is a radical departure from the psychoanalytic approaches
in previous chapters, it still maintained a heavy focus on behaviour change,
particularly within a clinical context. Put simply, if your hypothesis is that
behaviour is learnt, then it is necessary to show that it can be unlearnt. The
behavioural approaches, like the psychoanalytic approaches, focused on
demonstrating that mental health problems (psychopathology) could be cured
using behavioural interventions. A crucial difference between the
psychoanalysts and the early learning theorists concerns how psychopathology
arises. For the psychoanalysts, as we have seen, psychopathology arises because
of inner causes such as unresolved developmental crises; or conflict between
the structures within the personality such as the id, ego and superego; or
problems in personality development of some other kind. The learning theorists
rejected this as an explanation for the cause of mental problems, seeing it as
unscientific to refer to what they saw as unobservable inner mental processes
and/or structures to explain observed differences in behaviour. For these
learning theorists, psychopathology was a learnt maladaptive response to a
situation that may have generalised to other situations or similar stimuli, and
as such, it could be unlearnt. Normal development was about learning adaptive
responses in a variety of situations, while abnormal development resulted from
acquiring maladaptive responses.
PAVLOV
Pavlov (1927)
began this line of research by inducing what he called experimental neuroses in
one of his laboratory dogs. The dog was conditioned so that he would salivate
to the shape of a circle. He then learnt to distinguish between circles and
ellipses, only salivating to circles. However, when the distinctions between
circles and ellipses became harder to distinguish, the dog became very distressed;
his behaviour was disorganised, with a preponderance of neurotic symptoms. The
dog barked when taken into the laboratory, shivered in his harness and tried to
bite the restraining straps. Pavlov interpreted this as demonstrating that when
the dog could no longer cope with what was being asked of him, he developed
neurotic symptoms.
THE RADICAL
BEHAVIOURISM OF B. F. SKINNER
Skinner had been influenced by the research of Pavlov and Watson, among
others, and developed it further. (See the Profiles box on page 77.) He did not
claim that unconscious processes or inner states did not exist, but he strongly
felt that it was unscientific and unnecessary to rely on these unobservable
processes to explain behaviour. He did not deny that we had ideas and thoughts,
but he strongly believed that these inner thoughts did not cause our behaviour.
Suppose you do not turn up to do a seminar presentation; you may say that you
were so anxious at the thought of doing it that you could not make yourself
attend. For you, the explanation is that your anxiety prevented you from
attending. You are claiming anxiety as the inner cause of your not attending
behaviour. You may even go as far as to claim a neurotic personality. Skinner
would not agree with this interpretation. This inner state of anxiety is not
the cause of your non-attendance. He would argue that you experienced certain
aversive behaviours when preparing to attend; you may have felt nauseous, had
palpitations, sweated and so on, perhaps at the sight of your presentation or
while packing your bag. This resulted in you altering your preparatory
behaviour. The change in your behaviour and the change in your feelings have
the same cause. Saying that you are an anxious person does not explain the
cause of the anxiety. For Skinner the cause of your anxiety was located
somewhere in your developmental learning history where you have learned
maladaptive responses. Skinner felt that much of the time, we do not know the
real causes of our behaviour, in terms of what stimuli in the environment
trigger specific behaviour; and he rejected completely the notion of behaviour
being motivated by inner states. So if you say you feel happy, something in the
environment has triggered a response that you have previously learnt to label
as happiness; it is not some internally generated feeling for Skinner, but is
stimulated by something in the environment.
Skinner (1948) did
not accept the concept of personality, seeing it as unnecessary and
unscientific to postulate unobservable, inner psychological,
personality-generating structures. He accepted that our genetic inheritance
would have some influence on how we interacted with the environment, but he
played it down, claiming instead that the situational determinants were crucial
in explaining the cause of behaviour. He made reference to Charles Darwin’s
principles of natural selection, suggesting that over many generations human
beings have evolved particular characteristics to meet the demands of their
particular environment, and he believed this had led to some genetically based
individual differences. Perhaps being agile had a survival value for a
particular group of people; then these individuals would have opportunities to
express their agility in their environment, and these responses would be reinforced.
The more agile you were, the greater the reinforcement and so on. This then
would explain observed individual differences in behaviour. Heredity would only
impose limits on behaviour. For Skinner, it is not the kind of person you are,
but the learning history you have had and the current demands of your
environment that dictate how you behave.
Skinner accepted the principles of classical conditioning but felt that
it applied to a limited range of learning situations. He argued that what
happened after particular ways of behaving was a crucially important aspect of
learning that applied to most situations where we learn. He suggested that the
classical conditioning paradigm, consisting of a stimulus followed by a
response, is too simplistic for most learning situations. He demonstrated that
what happens after the response – the consequences of the response – is what is
crucial, as it affects the probability of the response being repeated. If you
are praised for your seminar presentation, then you are more likely to
volunteer to do a seminar presentation in future; if you are heavily
criticised, then you are more likely to want to avoid future presentations.
Skinner refers to
this learning process as operant conditioning. If the consequence of a piece of
behaviour is to encourage the repetition of that behaviour, this is termed
positive reinforcement. Consequences that discourage repetition of the behaviour
are termed negative reinforcement. Although Skinner’s primary interest was in
human behaviour, most of his research was on animals in laboratory situations
in the now famous Skinner box.
There were
slightly different versions of the box for different animals; but essentially,
there is a lever of some sort that the animal in the course of exploring the
box will press at some point. When this happens, the animal is rewarded with
food. There is an electronic device attached to the lever to record the
animal’s rate of pressing. What Skinner demonstrated was that after the bar
pressing had resulted in the animal’s being reinforced with food, the rate at
which the animal pressed the bar increased. The animal did not have to be
reinforced every time for learning to occur, and Skinner studied the effects of
different schedules of reinforcement. Much of the detail of this work is not
particularly relevant in the context of personality theory, and we will cover
only the relevant concepts.
Skinner
demonstrated that random or partial reinforcement schedules produce behaviours
that are very resistant to change, as an example will show. In one family, the
teenage son was told that his weekend curfew was 11 p.m. However, every Friday
night, Tim (the teenage son) would plead with his mother to be allowed to stay
out later, and an argument would often ensue. The mother could not understand
why Tim always had to argue and could not just accept that 11 p.m. was the
curfew. She said he was stubborn and argumentative like his dad. In other
words, it was down to his personality. When asked if she ever did allow Tim to
stay out later than 11 p.m. on a Friday, she said that sometimes he just wore
her down; or if she was in a good mood, she sometimes let him have another
hour. In Skinnerian terms, Tim was on a random/partial reinforcement schedule.
The rule was that his curfew was 11 p.m. However, Tim had learnt that it was
always worth challenging this as sometimes his mother gave in and he was
rewarded with a later curfew. So, for Skinner it was unnecessary and
unscientific to refer to internal personality attributes to explain this
behaviour, as learning theory provided an adequate explanation based on
observable events. We are sure that if you reflect on some of the conflicts
that you have experienced over family rules when you were growing up, you will
find that operant conditioning provides a good explanation.
Another relevant Skinnerian concept is shaping. Skinner observed that
when pigeons first entered a Skinner box, it might take them some time before
they found the lever and pressed it. To speed up the process, he would deliver
a food reward when they were facing in the direction of the lever, another
reward when they came close to the lever and so on until the pigeon had
actually achieved the desired response of pressing the lever. Shaping is
applied to many aspects of behaviour where individuals are initially rewarded
for behaviour that approximates the desired goal, and once that behaviour is
established they are rewarded only for behaviour that comes closer to the goal
and so on. Many of the current television programmes that help parents develop
parenting skills areas are based on principles of operant conditioning where desired
behaviours are gradually shaped. The children have a star chart. They are
rewarded for ‘good’ behaviour with a star, and earning stars ‘buys’ treats.
Gradually, as the initial good behaviour becomes established, the parents up the
ante for the child to earn stars. Skinner’s contention is that eventually the
children’s good behaviour will become selfreinforcing as their relationships
will be better, and this is rewarding in itself.
As we have seen, one of the big questions for personality theory is the
nature of human motivation. For Skinner (1971, 1972, 1976) the issue was
straightforward. He believed that human beings aim to produce pleasant events
and to avoid painful events, if possible. All our emotional states can be understood
by analysing the behavioural events in the environment that preceded them. He
does accept that some behaviour is private, but he refuses to accept that
internal private behaviour causes our emotions. You don’t get anxious because
you have an anxious personality, but because something in your environment
stimulates the anxious behaviour.
Skinner devoted a lot of his writing to examining Freudian concepts and
dismissed most of them as unscientific, constructs for which there was no
observable evidence. He agreed with Freud that the early experiences of the
child had long-lasting effects, which could even continue into adulthood.
However, he contended that it was the early conditioning experiences of the
child that shaped their later behaviour, not the influence of inner conflicts
between hypothesised personality structures. For Skinner, demanding individuals
are not governed by their id impulses, as Freud would claim; rather, they have
in the past been rewarded for displaying demanding behaviour by having their
demands met and have therefore learnt to behave in a demanding way. Skinner
(1953) agreed that personality trait names do convey useful information
describing the individual, like how friendly or enthusiastic they are; but they
do not explain, in any empirical way, how they came to be friendly or
enthusiastic. For him the friendly person has been reinforced more for being
friendly than has the unfriendly person and so on. Skinner also denies that
human beings are purposeful. He claims that what we label ‘intentions’ are
really responses to internal stimuli.
