Behaviorism – a mindless psychology

There is probably no field of science as contaminated by ideology and prejudice as the one about the heritability of intelligence. This is best documented by a group of psychologists advocating a high heritability of intelligence and a genetically based intellectual inferiority of coloured people: Hans-Jürgen Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Philippe Rushton, and Arthur Jensen, all of them having been supported by the “Pioneer Fund,” a racist organisation as documented in great detail by William Tucker (2002).

A further highly detrimental effect of the ongoing propaganda about a high heritability of intelligence is the creation of a whole new branch of science, “Sociogenomics,” in the wake of ever cheaper and simpler methods of DNA analysis. It tries to find a genetic basis of all kinds of psychological traits and functions, intelligence among them. It is based on molecular genetics and totally ignores the fact, based on quantitative genetics, that the heritability of mental traits is largely a function of environmental variation (see above). Contrary to permanent claims about molecular genetic indicators for it, most forcefully proclaimed by Robert Plomin, no valid data supporting the heritability of mental traits exist. So even in modern science, where no dogma is enforced by an outside authority, unscientific ideas may be proclaimed with no end in sight. As will be seen, such aberration may be rare, but is by no means unique.

Behaviorism – a mindless psychology

A science robbing itself of its own subject matter, i.e. intentionally ignoring what it had initially planned to study, is unique in the history of science. It happened, though, in psychology with behaviorism being widely espoused. For nearly half a century the idea was seen as a really good one by the majority of psychologists.

Behaviorism, the ideology dominating psychology for more than forty years, was based on the idea that psychology should proceed in the manner of a natural science, i.e. be based on objective observation. The idea was born under the impression of spectacular advances in physics, chemistry, and biology in the late19th and early 20th century. The problem with this idea: human psychological processes can only be observed directly by self observation (introspection), a method producing only subjective and thus quite unreliable data. Watson’s (1913) solution: kick all those psychological processes out of psychology. The problem with that idea: you now have a psychology that does

not study psychological processes. But psychologists operating under the ideology that psychology must be a natural science were undeterred by the paradox and started the program of a psychology exclusively based on what is objectively observable in animals and humans: behavior. The most prominent among them were, after Watson had to leave academia in 1920, Clark Hull and Burrhus Skinner. Let us have a look at their creations under the ideology.

Hull in all earnest undertook it to explain and predict human behavior on the basis of mathematically describing behavioral elements shown by rats in a maze. Small as those behavioral elements may have been, it took a lot of mathematics to describe them (In Hull’s central opus Principles of Behavior we find a seven pages long list of mathematical symbols used). All those mathematics impressed many at the time, mistaking the use of mathematics for the essence of what constitutes a science. Some psychologists still think so today. It impressed Hull himself so much that he found that “[…] there is good reason to hope that the behavioral sciences will presently display a development comparable to that manifested by the physical sciences in the age of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton” (Hull, 1943, p. 400).

Still more outlandish than Hull’s program (if that is at all possible) was the attempt by Skinner, one of the most popular scientists in America at his time, to explain language. Everything mental prohibited by the behaviorist ideology, he tried to explain language, a means obviously developed in order to transmit meaning, without referring to the concept of meaning and by just using the mechanisms of reinforcement (“instrumental conditioning” in his case), i.e. the reinforcement of the emissions of sounds produced when speaking. Ideology outdoing reason at that time made him not recognize the sheer absurdity of his undertaking and led to a hopeless debate with Noam Chomsky who just stated the obvious: language is about meaning, not just the production of sounds.

Needless to say that hardly anyone today refers to the approach to mental phenomena as it was advocated by psychology’s Galileos and Newtons. Hardly anyone, except for a small group of psychologists, the Gestalt Psychologists7 (“Gestaltists”) and Sigmund Koch realized that a mindset, an ideology,

7 After the misdevelopment had occurred and the damage to science had been done, the Gestaltists proclaimed the fact, actually a triviality, that human mental processes must be studied in a meaningful context, a human context.