BEHAVIORISM AND PERSONALITY

Behaviorism, invented by J. B. Watson in the early 20th century, has been the dominant perspective in American psychology for about 100 years. Behaviorism appeals to two core aspects of American culture, pragmatism and democracy. The pragmatic appeal comes from the view that what matters in life is what people do, not what they say, or what they say they think or feel. The democratic appeal concerns the behaviorist view that there are no innate characteristics inside people that set them apart from one another. Everyone begins life on the same footing, with the same innate capabilities. At any time, people are just the sum of their experiences, which means that change is always a possibility.

Behaviorism takes a variety of forms from the micro to the macro level. At the micro level, there is the cerebral rat psychology of the Skinner box which explains behavior in terms of reinforcement contingencies. At the intermediate level is social psychology, which explains behavior in terms of situational and contextual variables. And at the macro level is sociology, which explain behavior in terms of social class and demographic variables such as age, gender, and ethnicity.

Behaviorism has some useful applications. It is the method of choice when training animals, small children, and people with cognitive deficits. For example, my dog usually comes when I called him, but a behaviorist pointed out that the dog would come more reliably if I gave him a treat when he returned to me. And indeed, that is exactly what has happened. The intellectual history of personality psychology over the past 100 years can be seen as an on-going quarrel with the key advocates of behaviorism, and for most of that time the behaviorists won the popular debate.

The argument about the deep causes of human action, forces inside or forces outside the individual, can be seen clearly by contrasting the views of Sigmund Freud, the father of depth psychology, and Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology. For Freud, character is fate; character is defined in terms of each person's superego, which develops around age 5. Superego is conscience, a sense of right and wrong and a capacity for guilt, and Freud thought the development of the superego was a universal process, rooted in evolution and human nature. For Boas, peoples. actions are determined by the culture in which they live, the contents of culture are quite varied, and any generalization about human nature is inherently false, including Freud's view that the process of character development is universal.

Freud was the prototypical personality psychologist, Boas was the prototypical cultural determinist, and behaviorism is nothing but cultural determinism writ small. To summarize this discussion, the most important claim of personality psychology is that peoples. actions are determined by stable and enduring structures inside them; the various personality theorists differ in terms of what they think these structures are, but they all agree about the existence and importance of the stable structures. The most important claim of the behaviorists is that such stable structures do NOT exist, that peoples. actions are determined by situational, cultural, historic, and even economic factors. In their pure forms, these two views are irreconcilable.

The first textbook in personality psychology, written by William McDougall in 1908, was oddly titled Social Psychology. That strategic mistake robbed McDougall of being recognized as the true founder of the discipline. Most people believe personality psychology began with the publication of Gordon Allport's textbook in 1937. However, Allport knew McDougall at Harvard, and anyone familiar with McDougall's work will immediately realize how heavily Allport drew on his ideas. From the outset, personality psychology was a kind of outlaw discipline, very much outside the mainstream of American psychology. In the mid-1920s McDougall debated Watson on nationwide radio. Although observers declared McDougall the winner, the criticism of personality psychology (especially from social psychologists) came in volleys until finally, in the 1960.s, personality psychology seemed on the verge of simply disappearing from the intellectual radar. Personality psychologists couldn.t publish in mainstream academic journals, couldn't obtain federal grants to support their research, and couldn't find academic jobs.

Matters gradually began turning around in the 1980s, and by the 1990s a full scale renaissance in personality psychology was underway. Four factors seem largely responsible for this sea change in opinion. First, research in human behavior genetics in the 1970s showed that scores on well-validated personality measures had a substantial genetic component, the scores reflected something stable and enduring. More importantly, the same research showed (or failed to show) any evidence for family influence on these scores, there was no evidence for the environmental effects on personality that the behaviorists would predict.

Second, social psychologists discovered that they could significantly improve the power of their experimental manipulations by including measures of individual differences (i.e., personality) in their research. Third, the emergence of the Five-Factor Model provided a desperately needed degree of order to the field of personality measurement. From the beginning of personality measurement in the 19th century and for the next 75 years, personality psychology was awash in a bewildering number of scales to measure an equally bewildering number of personality concepts. The FFM showed that there was a surprising degree of order beneath this psychometric tower of Babel. And finally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and its enforcement arm, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, made it illegal for employers to discriminate against women and minorities in the hiring process for gratuitous reasons. In particular, this made the use of measures of cognitive ability for hiring purposes very dicey. This in turn set of a scramble among I/O psychologists to find alternative ways of conducting pre-employment screening. As it turns out, well-validated measures of personality, organized in terms of the FFM, predict occupational performance about as well as measures of cognitive ability, but without the adverse impact.

Personality has now returned with a vengeance, but whatever happened to behaviorism? It is still alive in modern social psychology with its emphasis on situational and contextual influences. In clinical psychology, under the influence of Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel, it has morphed into cognitive behaviorism, a term that would cause poor old J. B. Watson to turn in his grave.