Post on 15-Jul-2018
On Behaviorism, Introspection, Psychology and Economics
José M. Edwardsp h a r e - g r e s e, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne**
ON BEHAVIORISM, INTROSPECTION, PSYCHOLOGY AND ECONOMICS... .1
1. Introduction: on the history of psychology and economics.................................................................2
2. From Wundt’s laboratory to early American psychology..................................................................3
3. Early behaviorism...................................................................................................................................5
4. Neobehaviorism and learning: from animal psychology to social control.........................................7
5. American behaviorism meets European psychology.........................................................................10
6. Introspection in early British psychology and economics.................................................................12
7. On the rise and fall of (behaviorist) institutionalism.........................................................................14
8. From introspection to cognition...........................................................................................................17
9. Bypassing control as an economic subject..........................................................................................19
10. References.............................................................................................................................................22
Key Words: Behaviorism, Introspection, Psychology, Economics, Control. JEL Classification: A12, B20, B40, B59.
1. Introduction: on the history of psychology and economics Draft version for discussion purposes at the 11th Summer Institute on Economic History, Philosophy and History of Economic Thought, Paris and Saint-Denis, September 1-5, 2008.** E-mail: josedwar@hotmail.com. Address: g r e s e, Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112 bd. de l'Hôpital, 75647, Paris cedex 13. Tel.: +33 (0) 1 44 07 82 38.
The history of psychology and economics has been repeatedly read as one of common
birth from moral philosophy, separation with the so-called ordinal revolution, and
meeting again with the development of behavioral economics in the late twentieth
century (Hands, 2007). Within this tale, economics is supposed to have escaped from
psychology by getting rid of mentalism (i.e. refusing introspection) and focusing on the
observation of economic choice. This move has often been claimed to be “positivist” or
even “behaviorist” (Lewin (1996), Asso and Fiorito (2003, 2004), Bruni and Sugden
(2007), Angner and Loewenstein (forthcoming)). Recent “economics and psychology”
accounts on the emergence of behavioral economics (Sent (2004), Bruni and Sugden
(2007), Agner and Loewenstein (forthcoming)) focus mainly on recent issues providing
only quick lectures on the earlier history of the two disciplines.
As “psychology” is being considered as a sort of homogeneous entity, the lectures just
mentioned overlook several important elements in its history, namely the rise and fall of
(American) behaviorism during the first half of the twentieth century and its opposition to
other (European) schools of psychology. The following pages provide a lecture focused
on the conflict between behaviorist and introspective (and cognitive) approaches to
human behavior. This gives a different account of the history of psychology and
economics than the standard lecture. Decision theory, the paper claims, has been both
“far away from”, and “strongly opposed to” behaviorism all along its history, for the
economists’ traditional purposive accounts of behavior (focused on rationality and
consciousness) prevented it from adaptive-type accounts coming from behaviorist-type
research methods.
Only recently, economics seems to be giving space to adaptive-type elements within the
core of decision theory (Rabin (1998), Angner and Loewenstein (forthcoming)).
However, the recent emergence of behavioral economics as a mainstream subfield (Sent,
2004) is being read as the result of a cognitive revolution manifestation happening
through behavioral decision research (BDR) analysis between the 1960s and 1970s. The
following pages provide a lecture focused on behaviorism as a main element. They
explain the late reception of adaptation theory in economics as the consequence of the
decline of control as a subject matter in psychology. The decline of control, a founding
stone of behaviorist-type research, seems to have opened the doors of economics to
adaptive-type behavior accounts as promoted, namely by Harry Helson (1964),
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Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and their followers. Recent contributions to behavioral
economics seem to be based as much on stimulus-response analysis coming from
Adaptation-Level Theory (Helson, 1964), as on BDR analysis as the lectures just
mentioned claim.
The paper is structured in two parts:
(1) Sections 2 to 5 are focused on behaviorism and its opposition to introspective and
cognitive psychology starting by an overview of Wilhelm Wundt’s founding program and
its transmission to America in the late nineteenth century (Section 2). The narrative then
turns to the development of early behaviorism (Section 3) and the subsequent transition to
neobehaviorism in the 1930s (Section 4) and to cognitive approaches to human behavior
after WWII (Section 5).
(2) Sections 6 to 9 deal with introspective accounts of behavior as defended by British
psychologists in the late nineteenth century (Section 6), and by economists opposed to
(behaviorist) institutionalism in the first part of the twentieth (Section 7). The narrative of
the paper then turns to the switch made from introspective to cognitive accounts of
behavior in after-war economics (Section 8) supporting the paper’s thesis about
economics by-passing control (i.e. behaviorism) as an economic subject, and concluding
(Section 9).
2. From Wundt’s laboratory to early American psychology
The development of American social sciences in the late nineteenth century (psychology
in particular) was strongly supported by scholars trained in German universities (Boring
and Boring (1948), Ben-David and Collins (1966), Sokal (1984), Mandler (2007)). As
Wilhelm Wundt’s pioneering Leipzig laboratory founded in 1879 was the main training
place for American psychologists, Wundt’s influence was quite strong in America by the
turn of the century.
“[P]ractically all influential psychologists at the turn of the century, Mandler
writes, were students of Wundt’s or were students of his students. Experimental
psychology was defined by the experiences of the Leipzig Laboratory, and
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American laboratories were generally opened by his students with imported
German instruments.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 59)1
The early development of the field in Germany was strongly marked by Wilhelm
Dilthey’s [1833-1911] distinction “between sciences of the mind (Geisteswissenschaften)
and of nature” (Mandler, 2007, p. 54) brought to psychology by Wundt2 who made a
“strict distinction between experimental psychology, on the one hand, and
ethnopsychological and social psychological topics that were not subject to experimental
investigation, on the other hand” (Mandler, 2007, p. 56).
Experimental psychology was supposed to be a natural science (naturwissenschaften) and
was restricted to sensory analysis. “Mental products” such as thinking were considered
too complex to be studied by experimentation. The analysis of mental variables was
considered the object of social psychology (Völkerpsychologie), which was not a natural
science, for Wundt considered human thought as the result of social and historical
contexts3. Wundt, Mandler writes, was responsible of creating an “experimental
psychology that was not social and a social psychology that was not experimental”
(Mandler, 2007, p. 59).
By the turn of the century, American psychology avoided, in general, the study of
complex figures such as “thought”, “memory”, or “emotion”. Though one important
exception to this general setting was William James’ program4, the major part of
American psychology was “German in origin and method” (Mandler, 2007, p. 140).
1 “In 1910, he adds, American psychology was an outpost of German experimental psychology […]. German experimental sensationism and atomism – as exported through the returning travelers or by the sheer intellectual force of the grand old man of American psychology, Edward Bradford Titchener (a German-trained Englishman) – was the dominant force.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 140)2 … and to economics by Max Weber in the early twentieth century.3 Wundt’s experimental psychology, Mandler writes, “was to a large extent sensory psychology. It was strictly scientific, followed rigid rules of experimentation, and did not allow any “softer” concerns. In the same vein and in part due to the influence of Fechner, Wundt adopted statistical error theory in experimental psychology, though he rejected statistical laws for the historical phenomena treated in Völkerpsychologie.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 57).4 William James [1842-1910] (Harvard) met Wundt and the Leipzig laboratory during his formation (Mandler, 2007). Back in America, he established a laboratory where “he appointed Hugo Münsterberg, one of Wundt’s student’s, as the lab’s first director” (Mandler, 2007, p. 62). Though his famous Principles of Psychology (1890) dealt with consciousness and emotions as psychological subjects (Boring (1964), Feinstein (1970)), a few years later James mistrusted consciousness as an entity (James, 1904). For “seven or eight years past, he wrote in 1904, I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and try to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded” (James, 1904, pp. 477-478). See also Buxton (1984, p. 455) on James opposition to both British and German psychology.
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3. Early behaviorism
Besides the German influence, behaviorism was the main force shaping early American
psychology. This arose “not within psychology itself but within American society from
about the 1880s onward” (Mills, 1998, p. 2). As American scientists in general,
behaviorists were influenced by pragmatism, which consisted in conceiving theories as
tools to be “used to make socially useful predictions” (ibid.). As behaviorism dealt with
human and social issues, predictions meant social control. In Mills’ words:
“Because Americans characteristically view science pragmatically, [they] used
what they read as the basis for programs of remedial social actions. Those
programs, in their turn, provided material for further analysis for the social
scientists and, above all, provided the early institutional basis for the growing
social sciences. The essence of behaviorism is the equating of theory with
application, understanding with prediction, and the workings of human mind with
social technology. Those same equations formed the foundations of the thought of
early American social scientists.” (Mills, 1998, p. 2)
John B. Watson’s Psychology as the behaviorist views it (1913) was the starting point of
the development of behaviorism as a movement5. Psychology as the behaviorist views it,
Watson wrote:
“is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal
is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of
its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness
with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The
behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes
no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its
refinements and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme
of investigation.” (Watson, 1913, p. 158)
Though diverse in its form (Mills, 1998), behaviorism was the dominant school in
American psychology between the 1910s and 1960s. Behaviorists shared the goal of
prediction and control of behavior, and the rejection of both introspection as a scientific 5 John Broadus Watson [1878-1958] (Chicago, Johns Hopkins) took the entrepreneur role on the development of behaviorism as a discipline (Boring (1964), Madden (1965)). However, the roots of beaviorism can be traced back at least to the 1860s in Russia (I. P. Pavlov (nobel prize, 1904) and V. M. Bekhterev) and to the development of animal psychology under Darwin findings’ influence in the 1890s (C. Lloyd Morgan, Edward L. Thorndike, Jacques Loeb) (Boring, 1964).
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tool, and the study of mental concepts (i.e. related to consciousness). Comparative
psychology (animal v/s human analysis) was central to the discipline and animal
experimentation was present all over the period.
Watson’s manifesto was supposed to give American psychology the status of a natural
science. To reach this status it was supposed to rely on experimental methods. Rather
than “observing” consciousness by introspection, Watson thought psychologists should
narrow the object of the discipline in order to capture observable outcomes. Mentalism
was to be avoided for the study of consciousness, Watson thought, would delude
psychology instead or reinforcing it:
“Psychology, as it is generally thought of, has something esoteric in its
methods. If you fail to reproduce my findings, it is not due to some fault in your
apparatus or in the control of your stimulus, but it is due to the fact that your
introspection is untrained […]. If you can’t observe 3-9 states of clearness in
attention, your introspection is poor. If, on the other hand, a feeling seems
reasonably clear to you, your introspection is again faulty. […] The time seems
to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness;
when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states
the object of observation.” (Watson, 1913, p. 163)
Psychology as Watson viewed it was restricted to observable concepts. Stimulus-response
analysis and habit formation research in animals were central to the development of the
new approach.
“I believe we can write a psychology, Watson wrote, define it as [science of
behavior], and never go back upon our definition: never use the terms
consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery,
and the like. […] It can be done in terms of stimulus and response, in terms of
habit formation6, habit integrations and the like. […] organisms, man and
animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary
and habit equipments. These adjustments may be very adequate or they may be
so inadequate that the organism barely maintains its existence […]. In a system
of psychology completely worked out, given the response the stimuli can be
6 Habit formation was an important element in Watson’s project as in that of neobehaviorists, who dealt mainly with the learning problem. “Whenever we encounter a habit [Watson thought] we should not assume that an animal was striving to achieve some purpose. Instead, we have to discover how the act became a permanent part of the animal’s response repertoire and why it was elicited by a limited range of stimuli” (Mills, 1998, p. 75).
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predicted; given the stimuli the response can be predicted. Such a set of
statements is crass and raw in the extreme, as all such generalizations must be.”
(Watson, 1913, pp. 166-167)
4. Neobehaviorism and learning: from animal psychology to social control
Neobehaviorism as developed by Edward C. Tolman [1886-1959], Clark L. Hull [1884-
1952] and Burrhus F. Skinner [1904-1990]7, was influenced by outsider research
programs as Gestalt psychology, logical positivism and operationism. Unlike early
behaviorism, neobehaviorists were animal scientists producing “highly sophisticated and,
in some cases, comprehensive psychological theories” (Mills, 1998, p. 4). They shared
“the behaviorist commitment to social application” but produced “empirically tested
theories, whose ultimate derivation was the highly controlled environment of the animal
laboratory” (ibid.)8. In this form, behavioral science “enjoyed its heyday in the America
of the 1950s and 1960s” (ibid.). The new behaviorisms, Mills writes, consisted in
“precisely formulated and conceptually rigorous theories”. These were:
“radically different from their predecessors. Empirically, neobehaviorism derived
its support from extensive work in animal laboratories, so that there was a complete
contrast with the speculative behaviorisms of the 1920s. A new movement
demanded a new set of paradigms, a new core speciality from which the rest of
7 E. C. Tolman (California, Berkeley) became well known for his studies of learning in rats using mazes. In his main volume, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932), he used behaviorist methods to understand learning and other processes in humans and other animals. He supported his program with Gestalt theory producing a less mechanistic theory than the ones of Hull or Skinner.
C. L. Hull (Wisconsin, Madison) worked on learning and motivation, showing he could predict and control behavior (Mathematico-Deductive Theory of Rote Learning (1940), Principles of Behavior (1943)). His project on animal learning and conditioning became one of the major learning theories of Hull’s time.
B. F. Skinner (Harvard), the most famous behaviorist, defended Radical Behaviorism as a philosophy of science. His work on experimental analysis on animal behavior (made on what are nowadays known as a Skinner Boxes) conduced him to his well-known work on Verbal Behavior (1957) triggering Noam Chomsky’s cognitive science reply in linguistics.8 The laboratory, Mills writes, “was a place from which socially useful findings had to emerge. However, findings could be socially useful only if they were publicly verifiable and commanded universal assent. That meant, in turn, that the findings from one laboratory could be replicated in another. The first step was to find a common data language, that is, to express all findings in terms of behavior. The next was to gain control over the hidden, the implicit, or the unobservable […], behaviorists gained such control by defining each hidden factor in terms of its behavioral consequences and then devising procedures for producing those consequences in the laboratory. The laboratory thus became a training ground for social technocrats who could induce socially desired outcomes in natural settings.” (Mills, 1998, p. 88)
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psychology could be invaded, and a new epistemological basis. The paradigms
were provided by the now familiar tasks that had to be solved by rats in mazes,
shock boxes, and Skinner boxes and by pigeons in Skinner boxes. The new
speciality was learning theory. The new epistemological basis was the doctrine of
operationism; the rise of operationism was closely tied to the emergence of
learning theory.” (Mills, 1998, p. 83)
Watson’s original program was thus extended by neobehaviorists who started to deal with
learning as a central feature (Boring, 1961). As mentalism was still rejected as a subject
matter, learning was taken as the habituation resulting from repeated stimulus-response
activity. In other words, learning was seen a process by which one acquires “a disposition
to behave in particular ways given the occurrence of a situation that appropriately triggers
the disposition” (Mills, 1998, p. 87). Learning accounts were supported by operationism
as a methodology9.
For B. F. Skinner, as for behaviorists in general, behavior should be explained in terms of
observable phenomena. Within this framework, the “history of past reinforcements” was
supposed to model the way an individual behaved. This consisted in showing how
“seemingly cognitively controlled behaviors could be patiently shaped in the Skinner
box” (Mills, 1998, p. 124). Skinner’s position was thus clearly against the approach of
cognitive psychologists. While Skinner appealed to the history of pas reinforcements,
Mills writes:
“a cognitivist appeals to representations, decisions, and intentions […]. Radical
behaviorists believe that those who say that human or animal actions are guided by
wants, desires, intentions, or beliefs are mistaken. For a radical behaviorist, to want
or desire something is to seek that which has secured positive reinforcement in the
past; to intend to do something is to be guided by one’s history of past
reinforcements; and to believe something is to produce verbalizations (whether
9 The operationist turn in psychology happened mainly at Harvard between the 1920s and 1960s. “In order to excise mentalism altogether from psychology, Mills writes, behaviorists had to define mentalist concepts in some objective way. The solution was to define them operationally” (Mills, 1998, p. 86). Harvard psychologists such as Edwin G. Boring, S. S. Stevens, and B. F. Skinner “became acquainted with Percy Bridgman’s proposal to define all theoretical terms in physics in terms of the procedures whereby they are measured or observed.” (Mills, 1998, p. 87) Certain behaviorists, “of whom Tolman and Skinner were the most prominent, demonstrated that […] hidden factors could be defined operationally and that the behaviorist enterprise could find an accepted place in the social sciences. The use of operational definitions then spread to the rest of the discipline.” (ibid.) See also Stevens (1935) and Skinner (1945).
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explicit or implicit) that reflect one’s past history of reinforcements.” (Mills, 1998,
p. 139)10
Response and reinforcement were central objects in Skinner’s project. Animal work was
controlled by reinforcement schedules and the animal laboratory, Mills writes, “was a
precise simulacrum of society. Its work, Skinnerian views of society.” (Mills, 1998, p.
149)
The behaviorist’s conception of social control promoted social efficiency, productivity,
and “appropriate modes of socialization” as settings leading to “humanist goods (such as
a healthy and well-balanced psychic life)” (Mills, 1998, p. 153). As American
progressives and social scientists of his time did, Skinner “believed that science should
serve the good of society”. He also thought that “it was possible to develop social
technologies to shape human beings” to serve this end11.
Skinner’s ideas were spread to the general public in his Walden Two (1948) novel.
Skinner’s 1976 account on his novel reveals the spirit of his ideas about psychology as a
science. The 1950s, Skinner wrote,
“saw the beginnings of what the public has come to know as behavior
modification. There were early experiments on psychotic and retarded persons, and
then on teaching machines and programmed instruction, and some of the settings in
which these experiments were conducted were in essence communities. And in the
sixties applications to other fields, such as counseling and the design of incentive
systems, came even closer to what I had described in Walden Two.” (Skinner,
1976, pp. vi-vii)
What the American society needed, Skinner thought, was “not a new political leader or a
new kind of government but further knowledge about human behavior and new ways of
applying that knowledge to the design of cultural practices” (Skinner, 1976, p. xvi)12.
10 See Boring (1964) for an account on Skinner’s position on motivation and learning. 11 See Burnham (1960) and Cravens and Burnham (1971) on the influence of the progressive movement and evolutionary naturalism in American psychology. Progressivism, Mandler writes, “was consistent with a number of old and new American cultural and social values. It also had its kindred movements in such developments as the drive for scientific management and the time-and-motion studies of Frederick W. Taylor designed to make the American worker more productive at less cost.” (Mandler, 2007, p.101)12 See also Rogers and Skinner (1956) and Skinner (1964) on social control.
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5. American behaviorism meets European psychology
While behaviorism was being successfully developed, the European tradition (E. B.
Titchener [1867-1927] being the main exception in America13) continued to produce
introspective accounts dealing with mentalism as a psychological subject. Far away from
pragmatism, European accounts were focused on the understanding (rather than the
control) of “complex” subject matters such as memory and thought. The major advances
in the field, Mandler writes, were made by:
“the German successors to the Würzburg school, such as Gestalt theory14, as well
as the advances in the francophone countries.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 109) […] “As in
Germany, French psychology was focused on mental concepts rather than
behavior. Intelligent behavior was the object of French psychologists as Alfred
Binet and Jean Piaget (ibid., p. 99).
Although American psychology had born out of the German tradition, second generation
German psychology became stranger to the behaviorist environment in America15. This
might be explained by theoretical incompatibilities as the following:
“one of the reasons that stimulus-response behaviorism and research on human
memory and thought were incompatible was the physicalism of the S-R position.
The eliciting stimuli were defined in terms of their physical characteristics, and, in
principle were either skeletal/muscular events or their equivalents in theoretical
terms.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 106)16
13 Edward Bradford Titchener [1867-1927] (Cornell), a “German trained englishman” (Mandler, 2007) was in Boring’s words “a cardinal point in the national systematic orietation” of American psychology (Boring, 1927). The “clear-cut opposition, Boring wrote, between behaviorism an its allies, on the one hand, and something else, on the other, remains clear only when the opposition is between behaviorism and Titchener, mental tests and Titchener, or applied psychology and Titchener.” (ibid.). See Titchener (1914) for a critical review of Watson’s (1913) behaviorist manifesto.14 The Würzburg School started with Oswald Külpe [1862-1915] (a former assistant in the Leipzig laboratory) founding the Würzburg laboratory (1896). Unlike Wundt’s project (which avoided the experimental study of higher thought), the Würzburgers designed experiments focused on the processing of complex stimulation. Würzburger Otto Selz [1881-1943], Mandler writes, “was the first voice in the early twentieth century to call for a psychology of thinking that dealt primarily with processes rather than with contents […] the modernity of his ideas was attested by work in midcentury that tied Selz theory to work on problem solving and computer stimulation.” (Mandler, 2007, pp. 111-112)15 For Titchener, as for the Würzburger School, psychological experimentation consisted in controlled introspection” (Mandler, 2007, p. 89). These German approach was rejected by behaviorists “as being irrelevant to the daily concern of people” (ibid., p. 99).16 According to Madden (1965), “The American functionalists and behaviorists differed from the British associationists and the Wundtians on the question of what the nature of psychological variables should be. The associationists, he writes, dealt with variables of only one kind, that is, the “impressions” or “ideas” that become united into complex perceptions according to the laws of contiguity, similarity and so on. The
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However, the main forces shaping psychology as a discipline between the 1930s and
1950s were the National Socialist regime’s impact on German sciences and World War
II. The departure of German psychologists, mainly the Gestalt theory leaders “with the
advent of the National Socialist regime in 1933”, Mandler writes, led German mentalism
to the American side (Mandler, 2007, p. 126). By that time, however, behaviorism was
“too new, too successful, too exciting an enterprise not to fight back spiritedly against the
foreign invaders” (ibid., p. 143). Settled mainly at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, and
Chicago, American psychologists firmly opposed to incoming second generation German
psychology.
Though Gestalt psychology flourished briefly in America, the scientific break imposed by
WWII modified the scene in such a way the movement finally ended up being no more
than “an important set of ideas that unified an immigrant group that might have fallen
apart much faster had it not been held together by the common experience of the
immigration” (Mandler, 2007, p. 163)17.
“By becoming part of the American scene in the long run, Mandler writes, the
German immigrants pushed a young science to greater maturity in an atmosphere
conducive to such development […]. In the long run, the Gestalt immigrants added
to the brew of information-processing, cognitive, and constructivist psychologies
that made up the “cognitive revolution” within a generation of their arrival”
(Mandler, 2007, p. 164).
The dominance of behaviorism decayed in the 1960s in part because of limitations proper
to animal experimentation in psychology. The decay of animal science undermined the
basis of the neobehaviorist program living space to the so-called cognitive revolution to
which the paper comes back in the last two sections.
6. Introspection in early British psychology and economics
Tracing back the history of the use of introspection in economics one finds the British
nineteenth century response to German (physiological) psychology. This episode reveals important shift made by the functionalists and behaviorists under the influence of Darwinian concepts of adaptation, was toward a conception of variables as stimulus and response.” (Madden, 1965, pp. 199-200)17 See Sokal (1984) for a detailed account on the American reception of the main leaders of Gestalt psychology (Max Wertheimer [1880-1943], Kurt Koffka [1886-1941], and Wolfgang Köhler [1887-1967]).
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the values and the science conception defended within the British tradition. The use of
introspection came from moral philosophy and spread to economics mainly through
utilitarianism as read by early (British) marginalists18. British psychology was also based
on introspection as promoted namely by William Hamilton [1788-1856].
According to Daston (1978), Hamilton was one of the main detractors of the German
(Wundtian) physiological approach. He “discounted the relevance of physiology to
psychology” (Daston, 1978, p. 196), his aim being to “systemize the mental experience of
all persons” (ibid. p. 195).
“Those […] who do not allow that mind is matter, he wrote, who hold that there is
in man a principle of action superior to the determination of physical necessity, a
brute or blind fate – must regard the application of the terms of Physiology or
Physics to the doctrine of the mind as either singularly inappropriate, or as
significant of a false hypothesis in regard to the character of the thinking
principle.” (Hamilton (1859) quoted in Daston, 1978, p. 196)
This kind of approach, however, “could not claim to be inductive in a strict sense”,
Daston writes, since introspection “examined only the individual consciousness and could
not, properly speaking, accumulate reinforcing states from the consciousness of another”
(ibid.). Introspection could thus “lay no claim to objectivity” (ibid.).
Strongly fashioned by Scottish enlightenment thinking, British psychology had to support
the tension created by holding both the belief on the “active powers of spirit” (ibid.), and
the commitment to empiricism as a scientific approach. Conditioned by their beliefs on
free-will, choice and volition, several British psychologists would have refused the
materialism implied by the view that the “mental phenomena of volition, sensation,
emotion, and consciousness itself [were] to be paired with, or reduced to, neural
excitations and localized to particular cerebral centers” (Daston, 1978, pp. 196-197).
Several British psychologists, Daston writes, “hoped that introspective and physiological
methods might coexist within a scientific psychology” (ibid. p. 198).
As in psychology, the use of introspection was defended in Britain by late nineteenth
century authors such as J. S. Mill and J. N. Keynes19. Their writings seems to show the
18 The “marginalist revolution” is a well-known episode in the history of psychology and economics. For references to this subject see Sent (2004) and Bruni and Sugden (2007).
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tension between mechanistic v/s mentalist behavior accounts was also an economic issue
by that time20.
On the American side (setting on which this paper is focused as it saw the emergence of
behaviorism as a movement), one finds institutionalism as a turn of the century research
program. Being an American social science, institutionalism (as psychology) was
influenced by “instinct-based theories of human agency” coming from “Darwin’s
introduction of biological explanations into behavioral analysis” (Asso and Fiorito, 2004,
p. 445).
During the first decades of the twentieth century several authors followed Thorstein
Veblen’s [1857-1929] instinct theory explanations of economic institutions. Early
institutionalism as supported by “W. James, W. Mc Dougall, and others” (ibid., p. 456)
instinct psychology:
“was used to attempt to broaden the perspective of economics by paying attention
to those aspects and motivations of the social environment that directly influenced
economic decisions and could not readily fit into the rubrics of traditional
economic theory. Thus, instincts, proclivities, and urges began to acquire the status
of “guiding principles” for a better understanding of human behavior.” (Asso and
Fiorito, 2004, p. 450)
7. On the rise and fall of (behaviorist) institutionalism
As shown in the preceding sections, the assumption of “guiding principles”, (i.e.
motivation), was avoided within the behaviorist program. In economics, criticism to
instinct theory came mainly from the institutionalist camp, the main target being Veblen’s
19 This paper does not deal with the concrete transmission of the mind/matter dualism from British moral philosophy to economics.20 Though written in German, Max Weber’s (1908) reaction to the use of psychophysical insights in economics is a clear example of the economists’ rejection of stimulus-response analysis. In Weber’s words:
“Every attempt to decide a priori which theories from other disciplines should be “fundamental” to political economy is meaningless, as every attempt to establish a “hierarchy” of sciences following Comte’s model. Not only, at least in general, are the general hypotheses and assumptions of the “sciences of nature” (in the usual sense of the word) precisely the less pertinent ones for our discipline. But again, and above all, precisely on the one point that makes the specificity of the questionings of our discipline – the economic theory (“the theory of value”) –, we unravel ourselves perfectly well all alone” (ibid., p. 914).
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conception of the instincts as hereditary traits (Asso and Fiorito, 2004). Behavior, the
critics thought, should be appraised by stimulus-response analysis and habit formation.
According to Lawrence K. Frank [1890-1968]21:
“if we acknowledge that man’s behavior is not uniquely volitional, but is a natural
phenomenon, we see at once that it must be, like all other phenomena, an affait of
antecedent and consequent and therefore a subject for scientific study. […] If we
ask how human behavior may be resolved into a sequence of antecedent and
consequent, we find that under the terms, stimulus and response, we have already
begun to study behavior as a response to an antecedent stimulus. This does not
mean that a stimulus (event, person, or thing) “causes” man’s behavior, but rather
that each person, from birth onward, develops a set of habits or patterns of behavior
by responding to the stimuli of the environment he meets; these habits are “touched
off” whenever the appropriate stimuli appear.” (Frank, 1924, p. 25)
Besides the positivistic motive so often advanced against the use of introspection in
economics, the behaviorist aim of social control was also present in the institutionalist
program as defended by Wesley Clair Mitchell [1874-1948]. According to Mill’s account
on institutional economics:
“The continuity with Progressivism is evident […]. We can see those same
tendencies very clearly in the work of the economist Wesley Clair Mitchell, who
was one of the behaviorists among the institutionalist school of American
economists. He showed his colleagues how economic theory should be transformed
so that it could deal directly with aggregates instead of making deductive
inferences from the needs and feelings of fictional individuals. At the same time,
the new knowledge was to be socially useful.” (Mills, 1998, p. 30)
In Asso and Fiorito’s words:
21 Lawrence K. Frank’s career and writings, Bryson (1998) writes: “represent a compelling case study in the linking of social science knowledge with techniques for improvement and control. An officer with the Rockefeller philanthropies and the Macy foundation during the period 1923-42, Frank was uniquely able to bridge the worlds of inquiry and technology. Thus, while he was an associate and intellectual ally of such important figures in American social science as Wesley C. Mitchell, Robert S. Lynd, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, Erik H. Erikson, and John Dollard, Frank never lost his fundamental concern for applying the knowledge of the social. More specifically, as the architect and administrator of several major foundation-sponsored programs in child development and parent education and in culture and personality, Frank formulated and advanced a sociopolitical project for the development and dissemination of new, “enlightened” methods for socializing children and adolescents. Through such methods, Frank believed, the individual would be securely integrated within the social, and a cooperative and pacified society would result” (Bryson, 1998, p. 403).
14
“much more than Veblen, interwar institutionalists were primarily concerned with
reforming society, expanding economic opportunities, and ameliorating the general
welfare conditions” (Asso and Fiorito, 2004, p. 463).
Finally, according to Mitchell’s own project, not only economics, but all social sciences
should follow the behaviorist turn.
“Psychologists, he wrote, are moving rapidly toward an objective conception and a
quantitative treatment of their problems. Their emphasis upon stimulus and
response sequences, upon conditioned reflexes; their eager efforts to develop
performance tests, their attempts to build up a technique of experiment, favor the
spread of the conception that all of the social sciences have a common aim – the
understanding of human behavor [sic]; a common method – the quantitative
analysis of behavior records; and a common aspiration – to devise ways of
experimenting upon behavior.” (Mitchell, 1925, p. 6)
In order to improve social welfare, Mitchell thought, economists should proceed by
“measuring objective costs and objective results” (Mitchell, 1925, p. 8). That would
“convert society’s blind fumbling for happiness into an intelligent process of
experimentation” (ibid.). Just as B. F. Skinner did (Section 4), Mitchell thought about
developing institutions such as “experimental schools, in which the physical and social
environments of the children are made to vary, with the aim of studying the relations
between the stimuli offered by the schools and the learning response” (Mitchell, 1925, p.
8). Economics too, he added, should be opened to “experiment with different systems of
remunerating labor, different forms of publicity, different organizations for distributing
products, different price policies, different methods of supervising public utilities, and the
like” (ibid.).
Institutionalism decayed from the 1930s because the shift from instinct psychology (on
which early (Veblen’s) institutionalism was based) to behaviorism (leading to a sort of
behaviorist institutionalism) would have “turned out to be exceedingly restrictive” (ibid.).
Behaviorist insitutionalists came to neglect “issues of cognition, motivation, and
creativity on which to build a new theory of human agency” (ibid., p. 446). Despite its
closeness to the American progressive values, institutionalism “began an irreversible
15
declining path” (Asso and Fiorito, 2004, p. 473) motivated by both internal and external
conditions22.
The mainstream economists’ reaction to both mentalism and (behavioral) institutionalism
consisted, it seems, in rejecting both introspection and control as economic subjects. The
so-called ordinal revolution has been claimed to be a behaviorist move within mainstream
economics (Lewin (1996), Asso and Fiorito (2003, 2004), Bruni and Sugden (2007)) for
its aim was to free economics from references to mentalist concepts and to introspection
as a method. In Lewin’s words:
“A behaviorist movement arose in economics, as theorists attempted to free
economics of all psychological elements. This movement contributed to the
replacement of the older theory of cardinal utility, with the new notion of ordinal
preferences.” (Lewin, 1996, p. 1295)
Introspection, however, continued to be used as an economic tool during the whole period
of the so-called ordinalist revolution. This was the case for Pareto (Bruni and Guala,
2001), Slutsky (Hands, 2007), Hicks and Allen (Samuelson, 1938; Hands, 2007), Robbins
(Hands, 2007), and Samuelson (Sen, 1973). According to Lewin’s lecture:
“Behaviorist mainstream economics was doomed to fail, for the theoretical practice
of “behaviorists” such as Samuelson contradicted their own professed
methodological views […] [If] economists were to become behaviorists, they had
to do so whole-heartedly and actually learn from the work of behaviorist
psychologists. But even as they reformulated preference theory so as to make its
behavioral implications more explicit, these mainstream economists nevertheless
ignored the work of behaviorist psychologists. They continued to obtain their
assumptions from introspection or a priori deduction, rather than looking to
rigorous experimental results as their own behaviorist methodology indicated that
they should […]. Inevitably, the professed behaviorism of mainstream economists
backfired. When some began to take seriously the quest for a rigorously empirical
22 For a detailed account on the causes of the decline of institutionalism, see Asso and Fiorito (2004, pp. 464-471). In their 2003 article, the authors also deal with Frank Knight’s reaction to control as an institutionalist feature. “While the behaviorists stressed the relevance of behavioral mechanisms as an instrument for social control, they write, Knight emphasized the role of persuasion through communication. To Knight, control appeared to be more a matter of “art” than of mechanical technique […]. Knight concluded that any attempt to influence or manipulate society through the laws of response to stimuli, although correct from a “scientific” point of view, was doomed to be ineffective.” (Asso and Fiorito, 2003, p. 21)
16
economics, they found that utility theory performed quite badly.” (Lewin, 1996, p.
1318, emphasis added)
Let us note, however, that mainstream economics was never behaviorist if one respects
the definition of the term used by behaviorists themselves. With the “escape from
psychology” (Giocoli, 2003), economists were trying to free economic theory of
references to psychic concepts such as “utility” or “preference” as they explicitly
acknowledged. They were intending to free economics from introspection by building a
theory of choice out of (hypothetical) observations which was not at all behaviorism as
psychologists viewed it (Sections 3 and 4). Not only experimentation, but specially
control, was missing.
8. From introspection to cognition
According to Giocoli (2003), the economists’ “escape from psychology” was achieved
with Debreu’s axiomatization of choice theory in 1959 (Theory of Value). Only then the
economic theory became descriptive abandoning motivation as a behavior principle and
embracing an informational (axiomatic) approach to rationality (Giocoli, 2003). After
Debreu, Giocoli writes:
“a rational agent is defined as one whose preferences are complete and transitive.
The two axioms were not originally formulated to capture or mimic any particular
feature of human behaviour, nor did they emerge […] from the desire to find a
formal restriction capable of reproducing a given pattern of observed choices. [The
rational agent] is just a mathematical relation, an indexed complete preordering.”
(Giocoli, 2003, p. 122)23
As economics, postwar American psychology was strongly influenced by technological
(and cultural) changes. By the 1950s, new technology was present in the work of, namely,
23 Debreu’s step, however, may not be pictured as an escape from psychology, for psychology too made the step to an informational (cognitive) approach to behavior. In the “process of the cognitive (r)evolution” in psychology, Mandler writes:
“a variety of notions were offered that were to replace both stimulus-response behaviorism and its blood cousin – classic associationism. Most of the post-1950s developments rejected the associationist S-R behaviorist approaches, called themselves cognitive, and had aspects of organizational principles in their structure.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 181)
17
Alan Turing [1912-1954] and John von Neumann [1903-1957] (Mandler, 2007) opening
the computer age doors to the human sciences. Psychologists such as Herbert Simon
(Newell, Shaw and Simon, 1958) started to figure out psychology as a Theory of Human
Problem Solving. The “historical preference of behaviorists”, they wrote:
“for a theory of the brain that pictured it as a passive photographic plate or
switchboard, rather than as an active computer, is no doubt connected with the
struggle against vitalism. The invention of the digital computer has acquainted the
world with a device – obviously a mechanism – whose response to stimuli is
clearly more complex and “active” than the response of more traditional switching
networks. It has provided us with operational and unobjectionable interpretations
of terms like “purpose”, “set”, and “insight.” The real importance of the digital
computer for the theory of higher mental processes lies not merely in allowing us
to realize such processes “in the mental” and outside the brain, but in providing us
with a much profounder idea than we hitherto had of the characteristics a
mechanism must possess if it is to carry out complex information-processing
tasks.” (Newell et al., p. 163)
Mandler’s historical account on the influence of postwar changes on American
psychology summarizes the situation in the following four points:
“In general the following four arguments can be advanced to explain the events
surrounding the cognitive resurgence: (1) part of John B. Watson’s program (and
its insistence on human and animal equivalences) prevented the success of
behaviorism and contributed to its replacement; (2) the change toward cognitive
approaches occurred slowly in different subfields over some ten to fifteen years
without an identifiable flashpoint or leader, so the term revolution is probably
inappropriate because there were no cataclysmic events; (3) the behaviorist dogmas
against which the revolution occurred were essentially confined to the United
States, and while behaviorism reigned in the United States, structuralist, cognitive,
and functionalist psychologies were dominant in Germany, Britain, France, and
even Canada; (4) stimulus-response behaviorism was not suddenly displaced but,
as a cognitive approach evolved, behaviorism faded because of its failure to solve
basic questions about human thought, action, and memory in particular.” (Mandler,
2007, p. 175)
According to this viewpoint, cognitive science slowly overtook behaviorism replacing
stimulus-response analysis as the main approach to behavior analysis. Economics too
18
embraced a new rationality concept fashioned in an informational (axiomatic) way (i.e.
“rationality as consistency” replacing “rationality as maximization” (Giocoli, 2003)).
Since the new rationality concept reached the economics core right after the ordinalists’
program, economics seems to have shifted directly from introspective to cognitive
behavior accounts bypassing behaviorism (i.e. control) as an economic subject.
9. Bypassing control as an economic subject
If both psychology and economics embraced cognitive behavior accounts, what happened
then with behavioral economics as a subfield? According to recent lectures, behavioral
economics failed to succeed as a mainstream subfield before the very end of the twentieth
century. Early behavioral economics as promoted namely by Herbert Simon, would have
failed because of its radical departure from mainstream economics (Sent, 2004)24. Instead,
“new” behavioral economics would have succeeded because of its use of the “rationality
assumption of mainstream economics as a benchmark from which to consider deviations”
(ibid. p. 750)25.
Recent surveys about the establishment of behavioral economics place the recent
developments of the subfield in a quite long history of economics and psychology26. As
they deal mostly with the main features of the new approaches, they give a sort of “crude
overview of the historical connections between economics and psychology” (Sent, 2004,
p. 740). They provide quite fast accounts on “psychology” and “behaviorism”
overlooking control as a composing part of American psychology in the twentieth
century. “New” behavioral economics, these lectures claim, would have emerged from
behavioral decision research (BDR) in psychology leading to Kahneman and Tversky’s
24 The “technique used in the early behavioral contributions, Sent writes, was computer simulation […]. Simulation studies allowed the exploration and analysis of previously inaccessible phenomena. Detailed computational models were set up to analyze how people, tasks, and networks are interrelated in complex, dynamic, and adaptive systems.” (Sent, 2004, p. 740)25 According to Sent (2004): “Old behavioral economics relied heavily on the insights of [Herbert] Simon, who started from a conviction that neoclassical economists were not all that serious about describing the formal foundations of rationality, whereas he was” (Sent, 2004, p. 750). However Simon’s ideas, she claims, “are missing from the more recent developments. Instead, these rely on the insights from Kahneman and Tversky that use the rationality assumption of mainstream economics as a benchmark from which to consider deviations.” (Sent, 2004, p. 750)26 See Rabin (1998), Sent (2004), and Angner and Loewenstein (forthcoming).
19
Prospect Theory (1979). Both BDR and Kahneman and Tversky’s theory are pictured as
the result of the cognitive turn in psychology.
According to Mandler’s account, however, Kahneman and Tversky’s paper is not as
cognitive as it is being presented. Prospect theory, Mandler writes:
“deals primarily with human risk behavior and related matters of choice, and
whereas it had little direct influence on the thought and memory field, it has
colored many aspects of contemporary psychology.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 234)
Kahneman and Tversky’s theory deals a lot with perception analysis and seems to be as
influenced by stimulus-response studies as it is by cognitive science. The framing effect
concept, indeed, one of the landmarks of the new subfield, was borrowed from Harry
Helson’s Adaptation-Level Theory, which is far from being a cognitive approach27. In
Kahneman and Tversky’s words:
“An essential feature of the present theory is that the carriers of value are changes
in wealth or welfare, rather than final states. This assumption is compatible with
basic principles of perception and judgment. Our perceptual apparatus is attuned to
the evaluation of changes or differences rather than to the evaluation of absolute
magnitudes. When we respond to attributes such as brightness, loudness, or
temperature, the past and present context of experience defines an adaptation level,
or reference point, and stimuli are perceived in relation to this reference point
[Helson (1964, Adaptation-Level Theory)]. The same principle applies to non-
sensory attributes such as health, prestige, and wealth. The same level of wealth,
for example, may imply abject poverty for one person and great riches for another
– depending on their current assets” (Kahneman et Tversky, 1979, p. 277).
As Kanneman and Tversky’s, Tibor Scitovsky’s forerunner contribution to behavioral
economics (Camerer and Loewenstein (2004), Anger and Loewenstein (forthcoming))
was also based on Helson’s theory. Scitovsky’s Joyless Economy (1976) looks quite close
27 Helson’s theory is based on stimulus-response analysis and looks quite close to L. K. Frank’s view of (behaviorist) psychology as presented in Section 7. The basic premise of the theory, Helson wrote, “is that an individual’s attitudes, values, ways of structuring his experiences, judgments of physical, aesthetic, and symbolic objects, intellectual and emotional behavior, learning, and interpersonal relations all represent modes of adaptation to environmental and organismic forces […]. Stimuli impinge upon organisms already adapted to what has gone before, and internal states depend upon previously existing internal conditions as well as external inciters to action. […] stimuli determines the adjustment or adaptation level underlying all forms of behavior.” (ibid., p. 37)
20
to behaviorism, as it seems to suggest control as an economic practice. Mainstream
economics, Scitovsky wrote:
“overlooks the fact that tastes are highly variable […]. It also overlooks the
possibility that the same influences that modify our tastes might also modify our
ability to derive satisfaction from the things that cater to our tastes. In short, the
economist’s standard procedure of postulating that each consumer knows best what
is good for him and trusting the consumer’s behavior to reflect that knowledge
seems to be unscientific […]. [The economist] does not consider it his business to
question the consumers’ competence at maximizing whatever they maximize, nor
does he advise them how best to do it.” (Scitovsky, 1976, pp. 5-6)
Scitovsky’s advice, and that of his followers, was focused on the influence of habit
formation on economic welfare. The race for “status and rank” was one of the main
targets of this criticism.
“Status and rank, Scitovsky wrote, are themselves habit-forming: losing status and
losing rank can be a source of suffering and the fear of losing them a source of
anxiety. Indeed, competitive pressures, the tensions of modern society, usually
refer to the anxiety due to the ever-present dangers of such loss.” (ibid., p. 132)
The solution to this problem, Scitovsky and others thought, was to be found in education
(Scitovsky (1976), Layard (1980)). In Richard Layard’s (1980) words:
“modern men have been encouraged to think they have a duty to do the best for
themselves, since this will help out the invisible hand […] the utility function could
be changed by education, so that people got more pleasure from the welfare of
others and less from the feeling of being better than others are […]. If we spend so
much time putting people in order, can we really expect ourselves to work for
motives unconnected with rank-order? Yet if we cannot, it is not going to be easy
to improve human welfare […]. If personality is largely constructed in the first six
years of life, perhaps the best hope lies in a moral code which forbids all
comparisons between children until they are, say, six” (Layard, 1980, p. 745).
This was not far from B. F. Skinner’s thoughts about social welfare. In order to control
the American race for consumption, Skinner wrote:
“we do not need to speak of frugality or austerity as if we meant sacrifice. There
are contingencies of reinforcement in which people continue to pursue (and even
21
overtake) happiness while consuming far less than they now consume. The
experimental analysis of behavior has clearly shown that it is not the quantity of
goods that counts (as the law of supply and demand suggests) but the contingent
relation between goods and behavior […]. In an experimental community
contingencies of reinforcement which encourage unnecessary spending can be
corrected.” (Skinner, 1976, p. x)
Would it not be that adaptive-type behavior accounts were longtime rejected from
economics because of its close ties to control?
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