The Brilliance of Behaviourism and the Consequences of the Development of Psychology Arising from the Emergence of Cognitive Science

The behaviourist approach to psychology was dominant for the first half of the twentieth century. When psychological research began, introspection was the primary method for examining consciousness. Gradually, this approach led to a crisis as knowledge failed to advance adequately, and findings required increasingly complicated theories to explain them. Then came the behaviourist revolution, which diminished the importance of introspection and consciousness, replacing them with experimentation and the observation of behaviour (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013).

Behaviourism owes its position mainly to the significant contributions of John B. Watson (1878–1958), who was a leading promoter of this psychological approach. The American psychologist Watson was influenced by the work of Thorndike and his comparative psychology, the study of animal behaviour. Human functioning in light of evolutionary theory was a central idea of this approach.

Watson became a professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1907, and shortly after assuming this position, he also became the editor of Psychological Review, where he had full control. Primarily because of this important role, Watson could promote a series of animal study results. Taking advantage of his position’s privileges, Watson became a promoter of behaviourism, the new approach to psychology. In 1913, Watson published an article describing the lack of scientific rigour in psychological laboratories. Watson (1913) described psychology as the behaviourist views it: a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. Introspection does not form an essential part of its methods, nor does the scientific value of its data depend on how readily they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. In his efforts to establish a unitary scheme of animal response, the behaviourist recognises no dividing line between man and brute. This manifesto has been marked as the beginning of behaviourism. The impact of evolutionary theory on American psychology was the transition from introspection to observation. According to this theory, the attitude is that those who survived owe their existence to their behaviour, not their thoughts.

In his article, Watson cast a dark light on Titchener’s structuralism, criticising his research techniques. Watson also acknowledged that within a few years, the world of psychology might be able to oust concepts such as consciousness, mind, mental state, or imagery and replace them with the notions of stimulus and response (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013). According to Watson, psychology should focus on observable behaviour and ignore everything related to concepts like consciousness, thinking, feelings, or knowledge. Watson noted in his manifesto that for the past fifty years, psychologists had been obsessed with seeking answers to the question of what consciousness is, whereas they should instead focus on finding simple and explicit answers concerning human behaviour (Watson, 1913). Watson hardened his assumptions by stating that anything not observable is unimportant.

In 1920, Watson, along with Rosalie Rayner, successfully carried out the Little Albert study to confirm the impact of classical conditioning on humans. Watson developed his laboratory and wrote about raising academic standards in his articles. Scientific discoveries in technology, chemistry, and physics contributed to progress in the philosophical approach known as positivism (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013).

Within the context of positivism, philosophers proclaimed that scientific findings are always true because their studies were based on observations and experimentation, and scientific theories were grounded in empirical evidence. Progress in science and technology was seen as resulting from infallible scientific knowledge.

Looking at other fields of science, behaviourists adopted important mathematical laws as relevant to their area: operational definition as a necessary distinction between dependent and independent variables (stimuli–response) and the assumption that every science should be verifiable.

Watson ended his scientific career as suddenly as it began. Due to an extramarital affair with Rayner, Watson was forced to resign from his professorship at the university and his editorship at Psychological Review. His work on behaviourism seemed to fade by the 1930s. Watson’s legacy was continued by three major successors. The first was Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990). Skinner was the father of radical behaviourism, which precluded any relevance of information processing in the mind and insisted only on stimulus–response associations. In Skinner’s (1974) popular paper, he argued that the brain is said to use data, make hypotheses, and make choices, as the mind was once said to have done. In a behaviourist account, it is the person who does these things. It is often said that a science of behaviour studies the human organism but neglects the person or self. What is neglected is a vestige of animism; traces of the doctrine survive when we speak of personality, an ego, or an “I” who says he knows what he is going to do and uses his body to do it.

Thus, Skinner was considered the greatest behaviourist (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013). However, fascination with behaviourism by others did not mean that every psychologist who was a behaviourist strictly followed the ideas designated by Skinner. Furthermore, Clark Hull introduced his research sequence Stimulus–response–stimulus–Response (S–r–s–R). He implemented four empirical methods: simple observation, systematic controlled observation, experimental testing of hypotheses, and the hypothetico-deductive method (establish postulates, deduce experimentally testable hypotheses, and submit them to experimental test).

Notwithstanding, Edward Tolman (1886–1959), who did not recognise operant conditioning within the meaning of Skinner, proclaimed that operant conditioning could not be understood in simple S–R terms (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013), a view confirmed by several studies. Tolman’s student, Hugh Blodgett (1929), conducted an experiment in which rats were observed under three conditions. The first showed that despite a few errors, rats quickly learned to navigate a maze, running towards food. In the second condition, the rats did not run directly to the end of the maze for the first two days when food was not immediately available. On the third day, the rats were given food. On the fourth day, it was observed that the rats ran to the place where they could find food without errors. In the third condition, where rats found food on the seventh day, the same behaviour as in the second condition could be observed on the eighth day. Tolman (1948) wrote about the result of this experiment that the rats had been building up a cognitive map and could utilise it as soon as they were motivated to do so.

Tolman believed that the rats developed a cognitive map of the maze. The rats were assigned the term latent learning, which refers to the acquisition of knowledge that is not demonstrated in observable behaviour (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013). Based on this and other studies he conducted, Tolman postulated the thesis that both human and animal behaviour is motivated by goals. Purposive behaviourism is related to Tolman’s view of psychology. Tolman agreed with Watson and Skinner that behaviourism as a psychological approach should focus on observable behaviour, although Tolman did not see any sense in psychology as a science dealing only with the S–R method. Questions posed by earlier psychologists and philosophers about concepts such as mind or consciousness should find answers.

Tolman’s theory was more influential for further researchers than those of Hull or Skinner. However, of course, it was much more difficult to address something unobservable than simply observing behaviour. Thus, voices against behaviourism increased significantly during the Second World War (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013). In 1948, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a group of researchers presented their theories at a conference entitled Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior. The research focus was related to the problem of how the nervous system controls behaviour. One of the speakers, John von Neumann, considered the differences between the electronic computer and the human brain. On the other hand, another scientist, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, discussed how we process information through the brain. The most important trigger for changes in thinking about general psychology was the development of technology, mathematics, and physics. Hostilities, which included sending information over long distances, required a strong commitment from scientists to invent new methods. It was necessary to encode information so that the enemy could not decipher it, leading to innovative solutions and more intensive research into code-breaking.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, mathematicians upheld the idea that any type of information could be arranged logically using the values 0 and 1, known as Boolean operations. In subsequent years, scientists realised that a well-designed machine could operate on Boolean principles. The British mathematician Alan Turing proved that the simplest machine operating on the principle of binary code (Boolean operation) could result in more complex machines operating on the same model (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013). Such a basic machine became known as a Turing machine (the machine was not actually built, as the whole argument could be made theoretically).

Although the scientific world was focused on finding solutions for information processing by machines, the world of psychology eventually met it on the same path. According to Brysbaert and Rastle (2013), Warren McCulloch and the logician Walter Pitts argued in their paper for an association between the human brain and a Boolean device. They showed that under certain assumptions, the operations of a neuron and its connections with other neurons could be modelled in terms of Boolean logic. This meant that in principle, the human brain was capable of storing and transforming information in the same way as computers.

In connection with the discovery that the Turing machine, based on Boolean logic, could cope with processing information from stimuli, another speaker at the Caltech conference, Karl Lashley, pondered the meaning of the existence of S–R models. Brysbaert and Rastle (2013) wrote that Karl Lashley pointed out in his speech that words unfold with a rapidity that makes it unlikely that each word is based on an S–R association with the previous one. In addition, the speech errors made by individuals often include the anticipation of words that have not yet occurred in the sequence. In the following years, it was proved that human grammar indeed required a Turing machine and could not be captured by a model with S–R connections.

Computers became another tool for psychologists to conduct research on thought processes, this time via computer programs. The test designed by Alan Turing, subsequently called the Turing Test, shows the interaction of a human with another human and a machine. When a human sees no difference between a human and a machine, the machine passes the Turing Test. This means the machine operates on a human level. Curiosity about the functioning of the human brain and computers increased to the degree of creating a new field of research called Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The development of computers and algorithms gave psychologists further scope for manoeuvre. Knowledge of computer anatomy—how a computer program receives, encodes, stores, and replicates information—allowed for the emergence of new ideas for research into the human brain and the function of the nervous system.

The twentieth century was a century of major discoveries, and research and the development of its methodology increased pressure on behaviourism. In 1956, George Miller published an article considering the limits of human short-term memory. In his publication, Miller reviewed experimental evidence indicating that humans could report only seven (plus or minus two) unrelated items presented at a rate of about one stimulus per second (precursors of this discovery can already be found in the works of Wundt, James, Ebbinghaus, Jacobs, and Binet). This finding was the first empirical evidence that the human mind could be considered a computer with a limited working memory (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013).

Miller’s work significantly influenced psychologists to start thinking about the human brain as a computer and provided clues for new research ideas concerning the human brain (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013).

In 1959, the American linguist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Noam Chomsky, published A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, in which he criticised one of Skinner’s greatest books. Chomsky rejected Skinner’s theories concerning the identification of the variables that control this behaviour and the specification of how they interact to determine a particular verbal response (as cited in Chomsky, 1959). Chomsky is known for his highly influential works on linguistics. According to Chomsky, human language is a unique mode of communication, associated only with humans and not used by animals. Chomsky became the most pre-eminent intellectual in the cognitive revolution, known as a father of cognitive science (Shallice & Cooper, 2011).

An important event for the new psychological approach was the 1967 publication of a book by Ulric Neisser titled Cognitive Psychology. This book contained a summary of previous findings on information processing in the mind. With this book’s title, the concept of cognitive psychology was adopted as a new approach to psychology (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013). As used by Neisser, the term cognition refers to all processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon.

Just before the end of the 1970s, psychologists in most university laboratories worldwide had chosen the cognitive approach as their primary method for further testing. However, from the beginning, it was only one dimension of research on information processing; at this point, the cognitive approach to psychology had expanded to the extent that any experimental study of the mind was considered cognitive.

Notwithstanding, both behaviourists and cognitive scientists have their research methods and theories, which in most cases are intertwined. The continuation of psychological research in light of each of these approaches can result in the correction of test results. Thus, it could be concluded that neither approach is worse, more backward, or outdated. Test results are not always incompatible; they can improve each other and lead to new conclusions, pushing further to pose new hypotheses. The development of science and technology and the combination of different scientific fields have allowed psychologists to explore human functioning and states of mind across different categories. Already, we can distinguish specialisations in psychology that deal with research within their scope while also drawing data from the results of other research.