A Little History of Behaviorism

Any day when I can avoid scurrilous nonsense about ABA is a good day. But I am motivated to write in the context of the general social view of behaviorism essentially having been reluctant at best, and hostile at worst basically from its post S-R developments, which went much further
taking operant conditioning into verbal behavior, emotions and thought, and essentially putting a nail in any cartesian myths left standing.
But as a hard science, relying heavily on the scientific method, empiricism, determinism, parsimony, philosophic doubt, etc., it required measuring & manipulating dependent and independent variables. These contingencies are hard to arrange due to the complexity of an adult human life.
Generally coming out of the field of psychology, it was at a disadvantage toward other approaches - we would say "mentalistic", which rely on theoretical models of psychological functioning that are difficult to analyze experimentally, but broadly descriptive and general enough to be of use.
Behaviorists had limited access to the vast data in one's learning history that would be required to identify relevant variables. And as a relatively young field, had not yet built up larger tested theories to allow for explanations of complex events such as language, thought and emotion.
But within decades, the data was pointing towards a startlingly powerful insight into human behavior - everything we do or think - is ruled by the interaction between our phylogeny and our ontogeny, our genetics and learning history.
All of our thoughts and actions that could be measured were found to be under the control of environmental contingencies. A strict relationship was found between environmental stimuli, the organism's previous interactions with it, and future stimuli.
The frequency, intensity, and duration of a behavior (bx) is under the control of these elements.
Let me give an example:
If John has engaged in eating an apple in the past, we know his body "enjoys" apples (the presence of apples has produced eating, we call this "reinforcement").
If he sees an apple (stimuli), he will be likely to eat one if he has not had one in a while (we call this the "establishing operation", the condition in which one is either deprived or satiated on a stimulus).
Here's the mind-blowing part: any bx John engages in just before receiving the apple with be strengthened (more likely to occur in the future). This could be walking, talking or thinking.
It could be morally good or bad bx, but it will be strengthened. Washes the dishes + apple = strengthened. Plays on his phone instead + apple = strengthened.
But the opposite is true. Dishes + no apple = weakened. Dishes plus no phone = weakened.
And further, if John doesn't "enjoy" something after the bx (we call this "punishment", it will also weaken. Dishes + grating music = weakened.
This is much more advanced than the classical conditioning in which only the stimuli *before the bx* is analyzed.
e.g. Pavlov's bell rang before he got the meat powder (which always induced salivation), so the bell came to produce salivation. In operant conditioning, we look at the stimuli provided both before (the antecedent) and after (the consequence) the bx.
But it goes further and looks at behaviors that need to be learned. Unlike automatic bx such as salivation, sneeze, etc. , the bx of talking, riding a bike, waiting, etc. need to be learned. From here we get to the relations of verbal operants which identifies how different types of language get reinforced.
Skinner broke them down into categories, each consisting of a verbal stimulus (a bird), the verbal bx (saying bird) and consequent stimuli (reinforcers or punishers). The mand is requesting: verbal bx reinforced by receiving reinforcement from the thing requested, or removal of an aversive.
The tact is labeling: verbal bx reinforced by occurring in the presence of something. (look at the bird!)
The intraverbal is abstract thought: verbal bx reinforced in the absence of a thing. (birds come from eggs)
There are more, but you get the idea. The nice thing about seeing these relationships is they provide a window into how, why and when we say different things. They identify a learning history between stimuli and bx.
It turns out that any bx you can measure will be constrained by what we call the 4-term contingency: the establishing operation (EO), the stimuli, the bx, and the consequence (R or P). Bx more difficult to measure (Skinner calls them "within the skin", which I always found macabrely funny).
I forgot to mention stimulus and response generalization. These are key to how our bx repertoire grows. A learning history with stimuli x will generalize to stimuli Y according to its degree of feature similarity: color, shape, texture, etc.
Response generalization is a variation in response that produces the same effect: response X and Y both produce effect Z.
Stimulus equivalence is a crucial to understand more complex and abstract behavior, as it provides a framework to analyze environmental contingencies of the organism*.
* btw, behaviorism appears to be at work in any animal that behaves. Early models used rats and pigeons as their environmental variables were most easy to control.
A more recent branch of behaviorism has been relational frame theory (RFT), which may be most popularly known clinically as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and developed in large part by the work of Stephen Hayes.
It takes the notion of stimulus equivalence and expands verbal operants into much more complex relational areas (frames), such as size, value, categorization, etc. Each of these operants identifies additional relationships between stimuli and bx that can be measured and manipulated.
All of this within the hard science philosophy of empiricism, determinism, parsimony, etc.
Due to the complexity of relations in our learning history between the stimuli in our environment and our responses, a predictive analysis of human behavior will always be incredibly difficult.
A phrase I've liked is "we are swimming in a sea of reinforcement", referring to the overwhelming number of relations going on in our lives, each involving all of our senses: the temperature of the air, the feel of our clothes, our interactions with others, etc.
How both the preferences our DNA builds for us, as well as how environmental stimuli has interacted previously and is currently, with those preferences to shape our future bx, is crucial to understanding about why we all do what we do.

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