THE EVOLVING BEHAVIORIST/MENTALIST DISAGREEMENTS

Abstract

While introspective structural analyses of consciousness faded from psychological discourse, awareness and rationality within psychological interpretation were issues of contention throughout much of the 20th century. Behaviorist positions evolved, with neobehaviorism adhering to Watson’s position and the Skinnerian system (behavior analysis as method; radical behaviorism as philosophy) providing alternatives. Mentalistic psychology evolved as well, with the ”cognitive” label appearing after mid-century along with theoretical constructs modeled upon the digital computer. Debate raged over behaviorists’ experiments on the reinforcement of verbal behavior: Behaviorists found no necessary role of awareness in this; cognitivists vociferously objected. Then in recent decades, with cognitivist’s own experiments yielding data on nonconscious functioning, discussions of implicit (thus, nonconscious) processes — memory, attitudes, etc. — have become typical fare in the literature. Cognitivist interpretations of these phenomena show no recognition of their contradicting a major premise of past cognitivist critiques of behavioral work. Recently, the term, “behavioral” has been rather widely adopted — notably in behavioral economics, where assumptions of psychological rationality have been discredited, but with little recognition that core concepts originated within (or at least were anticipated by) behavior analysis.