psychology.gatech/psyc3031

1. WEB SITE FOR LECTURE MATERIALS AND READINGS http://www.psychology.gatech.edu/psyc3031

2. ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT BEHAVIOR • 1. What kinds of events does (or should) a psychologist study? a. What do we mean by “behavior”? b. behavior as a feature of the whole organism • 2. How should be behavior be studied? a. Bernardian vs. Fisherian b. Legacy of physics and physiology/pharmacology • 3. What constitutes an account? a. functional vs. mediational • 4. What are the goals of a behavior science? a. prediction, control, and understanding. • 5. What are the relations between behavior science and other sciences? a. behavior analysis as a natural science.

3. WHAT KINDS OF EVENTS SHOULD (OR DOES) A PSYCHOLOGIST STUDY? • A. Physiological events (These are never in themselves behavior, though may be related to behavior). • B. “Simple” behavioral measures (Almost never of interest in themselves—they reflect model systems). • C. Various individual human activities (Behavior is a holistic term—what whole organisms do—overt and covert). • D. Social behavior (Behavior controlled by the behavior of others). In humans, the most significant example is verbal behavior • E. Comment on methods (Behavior as a discrete versus continuous variable. The issue of applications).

4. HOW SHOULD BEHAVIOR BE STUDIED?

5. BERNARDIAN (Behavior Analysis) Methods derived from Bacon, Galileo, Newton, and ultimately physiology and pharmacology. Carefully controlled conditions with small samples and emphasis on direct and systematic replication. Mostly interested in “big” effects; little emphasis on traditional inferential statistics, though the orderliness revealed through a careful behavior analysis can yield powerful mathematical models.

6. FISHERIAN (Traditional Psychology) Traditional methods derived from agriculture. Relatively large variations in effects with concomitant need for large samples. Emphasis on testing “theories” or “hypotheses” as in null-hypothesis methods—which are fatally flawed at their core. To address these difficulties, there are other statistical methods (e.g., Bayesian, distribution analyses, time series analysis, curve fitting, replicability, etc.) that are of value, some of which are also used in behavior analysis.

7. WHAT CONSTITUTES AN ACCOUNT? • Mediational (usually metaphorical)—”The Inside story.” Long history beginning with S-O-R accounts in methodological behaviorism, the precursor to modern cognitive psychology with its many “box and arrow” models. • Functional: B = F (x1, x2, x3, …xi…xn). Basic task is to discover those variables controlling a given behavior, and, if possible, the function F. We call this a functional analysis. The underlying explanatory concept is contingency, a specification of the relations or interactions between behavior and the environment.

10. The goal of any science is to reduce the apparent complexity of nature to relatively simple accounts, principles, or mechanisms all of which manifest a causal structure.

11. ENVIROMENTAL VERSUS ORGANISM-CENTERED ACCOUNTS Very difficult issues here, but they must be confronted in understanding how, for instance, psychology can claim to be a science, as well as addressing its possible relations to other sciences. Behavior Analysis places special emphasis on behavior-environmental interactions—a complex dynamical system. By the environment is meant not simply “what’s happening now,” but individual, genetic, developmental, cultural, and evolutionary HISTORY—these are the principal sources of our behavior. For humans a verbal history is especially powerful in its effects. “Organism-centered” can mean many things, most of them rejected by behavior analysts: agency, mental causes, mind-body dualism, various folk-psychological accounts, “consciousness” as a primary cause of our behavior, metaphorical mediational “processes,” behavior as “symptom,” etc. “There is a general disease of thinking which always looks for (and finds) what would be called a mental [or neuro-physiological] state from which all our acts spring as from a reservoir.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, brackets added.

12. NAGEL’S CATEGORIES • HOMOGENEOUS REDUCTION 2. HETEROGENOUS REDUCTION

13. SKINNER’S “HETEROGENEOUS” REDUCTION “…any explanation of an observed fact which appeals to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms, and measured, if at all, in different dimensions.”

14. “The physiologist of the future will tell us all that can be known about what is happening inside the behaving organism. His account will be an important advance over a behavior analysis, because the latter is necessarily “historical”—that is to say, it is confined to functional relations showing temporal gaps. Something is done today which affects the behavior of an organism tomorrow. No matter how clearly that fact can be established, a step is missing, and we must wait for the physiologist to supply it…What he discovers cannot invalidate the laws of a science of behavior, but it will make the picture of human action more nearly complete. B. F. Skinner, About behaviorism, p. 215.

15. GENERAL FUND OF BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION • Molecular (biochemical/biophysical) • Cellular function • Tissue/ organ function • Morphogenic/developmental • Behavior/environmental • Species adaptation/evolution

19. “Nothing in neurobiology makes sense except in the light of behavior.” Gordon Shepherd, Neurobiology, p. 9.

20. Issues of Homogeneous Reduction in Behavior Analysis 1. Definition of behavior and functional classifications 2. Role of behavior in the natural sciences 3. Patterns of explanation 4. Contingency—the fundamental explanatory concept in behavior analysis

21. SKINNER’S RADICAL BEHAVIORISM • A naturalscience of behavior is possible. 2. The science will be thoroughgoing—a “complete” science of human behavior. • No functional distinction between “public” and “private events”—there is no separate “mental” world. 4. Causes of behavior found in: a) current context, b) individual/cultural history, and c) evolutionary history. 5. Non-mediational—nothing theoretical comes between # 4 and behavior, but physiology can and will provide a more complete account. 6. The fundamental explanatory concept is contingency.

22. WITTGENSTEIN QUOTES “The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by its being a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. “There is a general disease of thinking which always looks for (and finds) what would be called a mental [or neuro-physiological] state from which all our acts spring as from a reservoir.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, brackets added.