Behavior Curious: What is Behavior?

What Radical Behaviorists mean when we say the word "behavior"

When we hear the word “behavior,” most people think of mechanical action. Walking, eating, smoking, twirling, hitting, biting…

But what about thinking? Talking? Writing? Staring at a wall?

All of these are behavior, according to radical behaviorists¹.

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So, what do we mean by “behavior”?

• Anything an organism does, says, thinks, and (sometimes) feels

• Anything that occupies our existence that is not a biological/physiological process

• Includes: Actions, talking, writing, sign language and other types of communication, thoughts, imagining, and basically all of the ways we occupy our time from birth to death, whether they occur “inside the skin” or not

• If a dead man can do it, it’s not behavior (caveat regarding physiological processes)

Why lump everything about our experience (that’s not biology/physiology) into one bucket?

1. Because the focus is function over form (a more complex concept than it sounds)

2. Because there’s no reason to think that the processes that affect our organismic experiences differ depending on what the experience is like

3. Because using one summary term allows us to talk about the many facets of our experience without the trappings of language and associations made therein

4. Because, when we zoom out and stop subcategorizing our experiences based on what they are like under certain conditions, we can more easily identify the common underlying processes that explain and govern all of them

   1. That is, one benefit of scientific explanations for natural phenomena (of which behavior is one) is generality , or the ability to explain many events using the same explanation

5. Natural explanations are the only kind that are manipulable. You ever try to change a made-up variable? You can’t. They leave you stuck. So, you change your behavior to change your behavior!

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If the concept of behavior seems topsy turvy to what you know, it’s because it is.

Staring the late 1920s and for the next 50 years of his life, B.F. Skinner looked at the discipline of psychology and said, in more erudite words:

“You’re studying too many different things, letting lay-language drive the bus of discovery. What if we back up a bit and look at everything we experience as natural phenomena, for which we look for commonalities in observable causes? What if we consider language itself to be behavior— even the language of scientists and psychologists, and even thoughts and ‘internal’ events? What if we take an approach that doesn’t assume there are invisible, unobservable forces controlling us? What if there’s just nature and nothing else we’ve made up? What if we’re too lost in the sauce? Let’s start over, psychology.”

Unfortunately, very few listened. The ones who did, though, set themselves free.

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Learning about behaviorism turns what you know of the world upside down for a bit, and it can take a while to catch a fish. Once you do though, I think you’ll start bobbing with me.

Photo by Barnabas Davoti on Unsplash

1. The ideas and philosophical foundations of behaviorism can be traced to ancient Greece (Morris, et al., 1987). Behaviorism emerged as a subdiscipline in psychology in the early 1900s. Two forms of behaviorism include methodological behaviorism (J.B. Watson) and teleological behaviorism (Howard Rachlin), which preceded and diverged, respectively, from Radical Behaviorism, which was initiated and expounded by B.F. Skinner, starting in the 1920s. Various forms of “Cognitive Behaviorism” (resulting in “CBT”) also emerged and diverged from RB in the mid-1900s. There is also post-Skinnerian behaviorism, contextual science, and other names given to various interpretations and extensions of RB. Clearly, the word “behaviorism” is complex in and of itself. For the purposes of this publication, I’m sticking to Radical Behaviorism.