the engineered self: behaviorism, conditioning and control
TRANSCRIPT
The Engineered Self: Behaviorism,
Conditioning and Control
Edward Thorndike’s Puzzle Box c. 1898 Yerkes Papers, Yale Manuscripts & Archives
From Human Psychologyto Animal Psychology
• Edward Thorndike’s Puzzle Box
• Models of Learning
• Systems of Reward and Punishment
• 1910 Journal of Animal Psychology, editors Robert Yerkes and John B. Watson
John B. Watson (1878-1958)Operationalize Behavior
Psychology’s goal: the prediction and control of
behavior
1908 set up laboratory at Johns Hopkins
1912 head of new Psychology Dept. at Johns
Hopkins
1914 President of APA
New York Times, January 1, 1907
“I don’t believe the psychologist is studying consciousness any more than we are and I am willing to say that consciousness is merely a tool, a fundamental assumption with which the chemist works, the physiologist and every one else who observes. All of our sensory work, memory work, attention, etc. are part of definite modes of behavior.”
Watson to Yerkes, 1910
Testing tonic grasp reflex in Newborns, 1916Unconditioned emotions: Fear, Rage and Love
Conditioning: U: Unconditioned, C: Conditioned
S: Stimulus, R: Response Watson (1929)
“Little Albert” Experiments
Watson and “Little Albert”
“Treat them as if they were young adults…Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning…Try it out. In a week’s time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kind. You will be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.”
Watson, The Psychological Care of the Infant and Child (1928)
1932
ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963)
Brave New World Revisited1958
B.F.Skinner (1904-1990)
Original, non-electrified Skinner Boxes
Pigeon Pecking in Skinner Box
OPERANT CONDITIONING: tooperate on one’s environment; organism acts
to control environment
Skinner and his Skinner Box
Behavior of Organisms
1938
Modernized Skinner Box
Debbie in a Baby Tender
Skinner’s Baby Tender
Eve Skinner playing with Debbie
Skinner’s Baby Tender
Time Magazine
B.F. Skinner,“Baby in a Box”October, 1945
Skinner tried to market
invention as“Heir Conditioner”
Skinner’s Teaching Machines, 1958
Walden Two (1948)
Beyond Freedom & Dignity (1971)
Skinner Caricature Darwin Caricature c. 1970 1871
“A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous man and turns the control he has been said to exert over to the environment…. Man himself may be controlled by the environment, but it is an environment which is almost wholly of his own making…The evolution of a culture is in fact a kind of gigantic exercise in self-control.”
Beyond Freedom & Dignity, pp 205-206
Skinner in his own “box”
c. 1980
Photo Dana Fineman/SYGMA
Token Economies• Behavior modification system designed to
increase desirable behavior and decrease undesirable behavior with the use of tokens. Individuals receive tokens for desirable behavior. The tokens are later exchanged for a meaningful object or privilege.
• Allyon & Azrin, The Token Economy: A Motivational System for Therapy and Rehabilitation (Prentice-Hall, 1968).
• Instituted in mental hospitals and prison settings beginning in 1960s
• Aim was to establish patients’ daily living skills.
ID: Grand Hysteria• A term designating an complex form of hysteria as put
forth by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, at the Salpetriere hospital in the 1880s. There were 4 distinct phases or stages that an hysteric would go through, including: tonic rigidity, clownism or dramatic movements, passionate states, and delirium. Charcot emphasized the physical and visual aspects of the disorder, documenting these phases with photography, a scientific and clinical tool in the asylum. The significance of this term was that it stressed the physical aspects of hysteria, and generated debate as to the interaction of suggestion and pathology. Other Comments regarding Significance:
• Broad influence of Charcot in 1880s (trained Freud)• Debates over responsibility in hysteria (Bompard case)• Linked religious and pathological views in his
assessment of hysteria• Could replicate stages with hypnosis—connected
hypnosis with pathology