What do the following scenes have in common? A hospital patient suffering
from depression makes her bed in the morning, dresses herself, and shows upto breakfast on time. A staff member hands the patient three tickets for com-
pleting these three acts. A middle-aged man attends a workshop to overcome
a fear of snakes. He watches another middle-aged man, who shows no out-
ward signs of fear, pick up a snake. A college student declines her friends ’re-
quest to join them at a party. She knows people will be smoking there and istrying to break her habit.
In each of these scenes, someone is attempting to modify behavior by ap-
plying basic principles of learning. Psychologists have studied how people andanimals learn for almost as long as there have been psychologists. The list oftopics examined from the behaviorist ’s perspective includes attitude change,
language acquisition, psychotherapy, student –teacher interactions, problem
solving, gender roles, and job satisfaction. Naturally, such a far-reachingapproach to the understanding of human behavior also provides a model
for explaining why people engage in consistent behavior patterns —that is, a
model for personality.
Behavioral accounts of personality have gone through a slow but steady
transition over the years. Early behaviorists limited their descriptions to ob-
servable behaviors. Later, social learning theorists expanded the scope of the
approach to include nonobservable concepts like thoughts, values, expectan-
cies, and individual perceptions. Social learning psychologists also recognized
that people can learn simply by watching someone else or even hearing about
another person’ s behavior. More recently, many behavioral psychologists
have moved toward invoking more cognitive explanations of behavior, so
that today the line between behavioral and cognitive approaches to personal-
ity is sometimes blurred. It is not uncommon these days for counselors to
refer to themselves as “cognitive-behavioral ”therapists. Nonetheless, both
traditional behaviorism —presented next —and the cognitive approaches to
personality described in later chapters have a lot to tell us about the causesof personality and avenues for behavior change.
BEHAVIORISM
In 1913 a young and brash psychologist named John B. Watson published an
article titled “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. ”This article signaled
the beginning of a new movement in psychology called behaviorism. By
1924, with the publication of his book Behaviorism, Watson had made signifi-
cant progress in his effort to redefine the discipline. He argued that if psychol-
ogy were to be a science, psychologists must stop examining mental states.
Researchers who concerned themselves with consciousness, the mind, andthoughts were not engaging in legitimate scientific study. Only the observable
was reasonable subject matter for a science. Because our subjective inner feel-
ings cannot be observed or measured in an agreed-upon, accurate manner,they have no place in an objective science. The sooner psychology abandons
these topics, Watson maintained, the sooner it can become a respectable
member of the scientific community.Behaviorism 341