Behaviorism

“ Conduct consists only in voluntary human actions.
(2) Conduct is behaviour. But not all behaviour is conduct. We speak of the behaviour of the lower animals. The physiologist studies the behaviour of the frogs on which he experiments. But we do not ascribe conduct to the lower animals. Conduct is self-conscious behaviour. Conduct involves self-consciousness; and no animal is self-conscious. Self-consciousness implies the capacity to represent to oneself some end or aim, and to will the course of action necessary to attain that end. ”

“ The useful in the sense of the pleasure-giving must approximately coincide with the useful in the sense of the life-preserving. All conduct may be considered as a set of habits, to each of which there is a corresponding instinct—the word habit being used to designate any mode of conduct, automatic or voluntary, which may be brought under a general rule, instinct denoting all conscious impulses to action, whether including more or less reasoned choice, and whether innate or acquired. ”

“ In discussing habit and impulse we have repeatedly met topics where reference to the work of thought was imperative. Explicit consideration of the place and office of intelligence in conduct can hardly begin otherwise than by gathering together these incidental references and reaffirming their significance. The stimulation of reflective imagination by impulse, its dependence upon established habits, and its effect in transforming habit and regulating impulse forms, accordingly, our first theme.
Habits are conditions of intellectual efficiency. They operate in two ways upon intellect. ”

“ Purposive Behavior
Now it would be a great mistake to rule these purposeful individuals out of our psychology. We wish to understand busy people as well as idlers. What makes a man busy is some inner purpose or motive. He still responds to present stimuli--otherwise he would be in a dream or trance and out of all touch with what was going on about him--but his actions are in part controlled by an inner motive.
To complete the foundations of our psychology, then, we need to fit purpose into the general plan of stimulus and response. ”

“ Voluntary actions may, by constant repetition, become quasi-reflex in character. The intellectual phase is abbreviated away. Habits are once voluntary and deliberated actions becoming mechanical in this way, and slipping out of the sphere of mind. ”

“ I employ this word “tendency” as synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires; it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis, the root of 3the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are satisfied or opposed. ”

“ Each class as we defined it in behavioristic terms turned out to imply an action-tendency that played an important part in the behavior of human beings while in the pursuit of the objects they desire, or in the attainment of their ends, however variously conceived or projected. Let us, then, bring the whole matter to a focus by saying that whenever we [Pg 115] describe a behavior situation in which the dominant feature is the controlling and directing of human energies, the employment of technique to further man’s purposes, or the attaining of any good whatsoever, the critical word is “right.” ”

“ Conflict of habits releases impulsive activities which in their manifestation require a modification of habit, of custom and convention. That which was at first the individualized color or quality of habitual activity is abstracted, and becomes a center of activity aiming to reconstruct customs in accord with some desire which is rejected by the immediate situation and which therefore is felt to belong to one's self, to be the mark and possession of an individual in partial and temporary opposition to his environment. ”

“ Attitude and, as ordinarily used, disposition suggest something latent, potential, something which requires a positive stimulus outside themselves to become active. If we perceive that they denote positive forms of action which are released merely through removal of some counteracting "inhibitory" tendency, and then become overt, we may employ them instead of the word habit to denote subdued, non-patent forms of the latter. ”

“ Any moral theory which is seriously influenced by current psychological theory is bound to emphasize states of consciousness, an inner private life, at the expense of acts which have public meaning and which incorporate and exact social relationships. A psychology based upon habits (and instincts which become elements in habits as soon as they are acted upon) will on the contrary fix its attention upon the objective conditions in which habits are formed and operate. ”

“ Similarly, the term habit may be given to an act that we have had to learn or to the bond which we ourselves establish between response and stimulus. In this book we shall usually mean by instinct an action depending upon inherited structure and by habit an act depending upon a bond established during lifetime. A good part of our early lives is spent in building up bonds between stimuli and responses. This establishing of bonds or connections is called learning. ”

“ Now the thing which is closest to us, the means within our power, is a habit. Some habit impeded by circumstances is the source of the projection of the end. It is also the primary means in its realization. The habit is propulsive and moves anyway toward some end, or result, whether it is projected as an end-in-view or not. The man who can walk does walk; the man who can talk does converse—if only with himself. ”

“ Even instinctive actions are dependent in many cases upon habits which may be altered by proper attention and care; and still more the nature of the connections between sensation and action, the associations of memory and motive, may be voluntarily modified if I choose to try. The habit of choosing among motives is one which may be acquired and strengthened by practice, and the strength of particular motives, by continually directing attention to them, may be almost indefinitely increased or diminished. ”

“ The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving-power by which all mental activities are sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but a means toward those ends, is but the instrument by which these impulses seek their satisfactions.... These impulses are the mental forces that maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies, and in them we are confronted with the central mystery of life and mind and will. ”

“ These traits of a bad habit are precisely the things which are most instructive about all habits and about ourselves. They teach us that all habits are affections, that all have projectile power, and that a predisposition formed by a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious choices. All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. ”

“ Response to the earlier stimulation may have had painful consequences and so the rule or habit in this situation is changed. We call this ability the power of inhibition, and it is dependent on the fact that the nervous system carries memories or records of past experiences. 42At this point the determination of action no longer comes exclusively from outside sources but is located within the organism itself.
Preliminary to any self-determined act of behavior there is always a stage of examination and deliberation which we may call the definition of the situation. ”

“ The measurement of the influence is the definition of the situation preliminary to action.
Now the world in which we live presents to the child influences comparable with those artificially prepared in this experiment, and the first task of behavior studies is to measure these influences as shown in their effect on personality development.
There are in society organized sources of influence, institutions, and social agencies, including the family, the school, the community, the reformatory, the penitentiary, the newspaper, the moving picture. ”

“ Habits of action are acquired only through action. As has been pointed out in the preceding pages, continued action of a definite kind develops a tendency to this particular action. One’s character is the sum of his tendencies to action. These tendencies can be developed only through practice, through repetition. Moral training, therefore, has the same basis as all other training, that is, in habits. The same procedure that we use in teaching the child the multiplication table is the one to use in developing honesty. ”

“ This experience being constantly repeated, the tendency to do the proper thing when the circumstances occur gradually takes the shape of an instinct, intuition, habit, or law of duty. Henceforward, all persons who have the impulse which has thus been formed will act in the same way when the circumstances arise, but two persons who have not the impulse will follow their individual judgments, and may or may not act alike. ”

“ It is true, however, that certain lessons tend to involve one type of activity predominantly. There are lessons which seek primarily to fix habits, others in which thinking of the inductive type is primarily involved, and still others in which deductive thinking or appreciation are the ends sought. As has already been indicated in the discussion of habit, thinking, and appreciation in the previous chapters, these types of mental activity are not to be thought of as separate and distinct. Habit formation may involve thinking. ”

“ When, in the course of a long series of generations, any desire, experience, or disinclination, etc., has led to some voluntary action, then, as often as the same or any analogous associated experience is undergone, there will arise a tendency to the realization of a similar action. This action may no longer have any use but is inherited and generally becomes a mere reflex. ”

“ Example in conduct, therefore, even in apparently trivial matters, is of no light moment, inasmuch as it is constantly becoming inwoven with the lives of others, and contributing to form their natures for better or for worse. The characters of parents are thus constantly repeated in their children; and the acts of affection, discipline, industry, and self-control, which they daily exemplify, live and act when all else which may have been learned through the ear has long been forgotten. ”

“ Interrelation of Physical, Mental and Moral Development. — As to the interrelation of physical, mental and moral development, it must never be forgotten that the mind and the body must be studied together, 5 and that this is particularly true in considering the mind in management. 6 For the best results of the mind, the body must be cared for, and provided for, fully as much as must the mind, or the best results from the mind will not, and cannot, be obtained. ”

“ The dynamic force of habit taken in connection with the continuity of habits with one another explains the unity of character and conduct, or speaking more concretely of motive and act, will and deed. Moral theories have frequently separated these things from each other. One type of theory, for example, has asserted that only will, disposition, motive counts morally; that acts are external, physical, accidental ”

“ In conduct, some are hesitating and uncertain, others just the reverse; some very open to suggestions, others scarcely touched at all by it; some can act in accordance with principle, others only in terms of particular associations with a definite situation. So one might run the whole gamut of human traits, and in each one any group of individuals will vary: in attention, in thinking, in ideals, in habits, in interests, in sense discrimination, in emotions, and so on. ”

“ Now, with regard to the control through which consciousness is effective in the guidance of behaviour, it is necessary, in view of these considerations, to distinguish its intelligent from its rational exercise. ”

“ If, to prevent a boy sucking his thumb we administer bitter aloes, we trust to intelligent control through the immediate effects of experience; but if he be induced to give up the habit because it is babyish, he so far exercises rational control. What we call self-control is of this type. Only one more distinction need be drawn. Intelligent behaviour, founded on direct association gained through previous experience, we shall attribute to impulse ”

“ It is purely the result of education, and is preceded by a consciousness of the purpose to be attained and a distinct mandate of the will. It is a 'voluntary act.' Thus the animal's reflex and voluntary performances shade into each other gradually, being connected by acts which may often occur automatically, but may also be modified by conscious intelligence. ”

“ But Habit may be a Lever.--But habit, to be the lever to lift the child, must work contrary to nature, or at any rate, independently of her.
Directly we begin to look out for the working of habit on these lines, examples crowd upon us: there are the children trained in careful habits, who never soil their clothes; those trained in reticent habits, who never speak of what is done at home, and answer indiscreet questions with 'I don't know' ”