WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PSYCHOLOGY

AS THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOR?

B. E SKINNER

There can scarcely be anything more familiar than human behavior. We are always in the
presence of at least one behaving person. Nor can there be anything more important, whether
it is our own behavior or that of those whom we see every day or who are responsible for what
is happening in the world at large. Nevertheless it is certainly not the thing we understand best.
Granted that it is possibly the most difficult subject ever submitted to scientific analysis, it is
still puzzling that so little has been done with the instruments and methods that have been so
productive in the other sciences. Perhaps what is wrong is that behavior has seldom been thought
of as a subject matter in its own right, but rather has been viewed as the mere expression or
symptom of more important happenings inside the behaving person.
The Homeric Greeks thought they knew the very organs. The thumos, or heart, was one
of them. It was a vital organ (when it stopped, the person died), but for the Greeks it was also
the seat of such things as hunger, joy, fear, will, and thought. To be undecided about something,
for example, was to have a divided thumos. We may smile at that, but we do much the same
thing ourselves. Here are some of the definitions of the word heart in Webster’sThird New
International Dictionary ( 1981):the whole personality (“deep in one’s heart”), intelligence (“knowing
something by heart”), character (“look into the heart of a person”), compassion (“have a heart”),
mood (“a heavy heart”), opinion (“a change of heart”), affection (“a broken heart”), goodwill
(“with all my heart”), courage (“a stout heart”), and taste (“a man after one’s own heart”). Of
course, we do not mean the real heart, but the Greeks may not have meant that either. The
point is that, like them, we appeal to something inside a person to explain what that person
does.
Reprinted from the American Psychologist, 42, 780-786. (1987). Copyright 0 1987 by the American Psychological Association.
The author thanks Margaret E. Vaughan and Julie S. Vargas for much needed help in the preparation of this article.

J 05
 When Galen described human anatomy in greater detail, especially the nerves connecting
the brain with sense organs and muscles, it was clear that the Greeks had got the wrong organ.
They should have said brain. It was Descartes who showed how the brain and nerves could
explain the kind of behavior that was later called reflex. Although the notion of a stimulus
suggested an external cause, the search for internal causes did not stop. During the 19th and
early 20th centuries, reflexes were studied by physiologists. Sherrington’s ( 1906) book was called
The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, and Pavlov’s (1927) book had the subtitle The
Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.
It was hard to find plausible organs for many kinds of behavior, of course, and Plato and
others gave up the attempt. Speculation could then be freer. Although we think we see the
object we are looking at, for example, it was said that we must see only an internal copy of it,
because we can still see it with our eyes closed and even recall it from memory later on. Before
we act, moreover, we can merely think of acting; we can have intentions, expectations, or ideas
and do nothing more about them. Somewhere inside the body, in short, there seemed to be
another person made of a different kind of stuff. For 2,500 years philosophers and psychologists
have discussed the nature of that stuff, but for our present purposes we may accept the famous
dismissal that appeared in Punch in 1855:
What is Matter?-Never mind.
What is Mind?-No matter (quoted in Bartlett, 1968, p. 810A).
Mind or matter, it was something inside a person that determined what that person did.

EARLY BEHAVIORISM
The theory of evolution raised a different question about those internal causes. Nonhuman
animals had reflexes and organs, but did they have minds? Darwin, committed to the continuity
of species, said yes, and he and his contemporaries could cite examples that seemed to prove him
right. It was Lloyd Morgan who objected that the examples could be explained in other ways
and Watson who took the inevitable next step and contended that the same thing could be said
of human animals. An early form of behaviorism was born.
The predilection for internal causes survived, however. Probably as a reaction to the heavily
mentalistic psychology of the time, a central issue in early behaviorism was the existence of
consciousness. Experiments were designed to show that animals either could or could not do
everything traditionally attributed to feelings and states of mind. If they could not, something
like a mental life would have to be recognized. Perhaps because Watson first studied instincts,
he replaced feelings and states of mind with habits. He may have meant nothing more than the
behavior said to show the presence of instincts and habits, but he turned later to conditioned
reflexes, and his associate, Lashley, went still further into the nervous system. Later, Tolman
restored purpose to the organism and still later installed cognitive maps and hypotheses. Clark
Hull built an elaborate system of internal processes that, as in “afferent neural interaction,” for
example, became increasingly physiological. In short, 3,000 years after the Homeric Greeks,
mentalistic and behavioristic psychologists alike were still looking inside the organism for expla-
nations of its behavior. To say that the habit of doing so must have been deeply ingrained would
be to give another example.

RADICAL BEHAVIORISM
Behavior seems to have been first accepted as a subject matter in its own right when
organisms were studied that were too small, and their behavior too simple, to suggest internal

106 8. F: SKINNER
initiating processes. H. S. Jennings’s (1906) The Behavior of the Lower Organisms was the great
classic, of course, but more to the point were the work and theories of Jacques Loeb. Loeb’s
formulation of tropisms and his emphasis on “forced movement” dispensed with internal expla-
nations. The thing to be studied was the behavior of the “organism as a whole” (Loeb, 1916).
(For an excellent account of Loeb’s contributions, see Pauly [1987].) And that could be said of
larger organisms, as well.
Equally important were new developments in the philosophy of science. Concepts began
to be more carefully defined in terms of the operations from which they were inferred. Ernst
Mach, especially with his Science of Mechanics (Mach, 1915), was an important figure. Later, P.
W. Bridgman (1927) took a similar line in his Logic of Modern Physics. In Philosophy (Russell,
1927), a book said to have been written as a potboiler, Bertrand Russell anticipated the logical
positivists by several years and “behavioristicallyconsidered” a number of psychological processes.
(For a full discussion of behaviorism and logical positivism, see Smith [1986].) My thesis, “The
Concept of the Reflex in the Description of Behavior” (Skinner, 1931), was in that tradition. A
reflex, I argued, was not something that happened inside the organism; it was a law of behavior.
All we actually observed was that a response was a function of a stimulus. It could also be a
function of variables in the fields of conditioning, motivation, and emotion, but they too were
outside the organism. I called them “third variables,” but Tolman later put them back inside and
called them “intervening.”
It was easy to make my case because reflexes, conditioned or unconditioned, were only a
small part of the behavior of more complex organisms. The research I was doing at the time,
however, had a broader scope: The environment not only triggered behavior, it selected it.
Consequences seemed, indeed, to be more important than antecedents. Their role had, of course,
long been recognized-for example, as reward or punishment. It was Thorndike who first studied
their effects experimentally. Given several possible ways of solving a problem, a cat eventually
took the successful one when incorrect ways, or “errors,” dropped out.
I studied the same process in a different way. Prompted by Pavlov’s emphasis on the control
of conditions, I made sure that all Thorndike’s “errors” were eliminated before a successful
response could be made. A single “reinforcing” consequence was then enough; the response was
immediately and rapidly repeated. I called the process operant conditioning. Thorndike had
attributed his effect to feelings of satisfaction and annoyance, which were inside the organism,
of course, but I traced the strengthening effect of an operant reinforcer to its survival value in
the natural selection of the species.
My first arrangement of setting, response, and consequence was quite simple, but I reported
the effects of more complex “contingencies of reinforcement” in The Behavior of Organisms
(Skinner, 1938). Still more elaborate ones have been studied for more than 50 years in labora-
tories throughout the world. Most of the work has been done with nonhuman animals in order
to cover a wider range of conditions than would be feasible with human subjects and to avoid
“verbal contaminat ion.”
The contamination has also been studied, however. Verbal behavior differs from nonverbal
in certain features of the contingencies of reinforcement. The verbal stimuli we call advice,
rules, or laws describe or allude to contingencies of reinforcement. People who have been advised
or who follow rules and obey laws behave for either of two very different reasons: Their behavior
has been directly reinforced by its consequences, or they are responding to descriptions of
contingencies. How and why they respond to descriptions must also be explained by analyzing
verbal contingencies of reinforcement.
A better understanding of verbal contingencies has also brought two important fields of
psychology within range of an operant analysis. One is self-observation. The analysis neither
“ignores consciousness’’nor brings it back into a behavioral science; it simply analyzes the way

PSYCHOLOGY AS THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOR 107

in which verbal contingencies of reinforcement bring mvute events into control of the behavior
called introspecting. Only when we are asked about what we have done, are doing, or are about
to do, and why, have we any reason to observe or recall our behavior or its controlling variables.
All behavior, human and nonhuman, is unconscious; it becomes “conscious” when verbal en-
vironments provide the contingencies necessary for self-observation. (It is the person, of course,
who is “conscious” or “unconscious,”not the behavior.) Other verbal contingencies generate the
behavior called self-management or thinking, in which problems are solved by manipulating
either contingencies (as in practical problem solving) or rules (as in “reasoning”).
Much of this is at the moment only an interpretation, but that is common scientific
practice. Astronomers interpret the waves and particles reaching Earth from outer space by using
what has been learned under controllable conditions in the laboratory-for example, in high
energy physics. In a similar way we use what has been learned from an experimental analysis to
explain behavior that cannot, at the moment at least, be brought under experimental control,
such as covert behavior or behavior observed casually in daily life.
The traditional preoccupation with internal explanatory agents broke behavior into frag-
ments. Psychophysicists, for example, study the effects of stimuli, but only up to the point at
which they are supposedly received by an inner agent. Psycholinguists record changes in the
number of words or the length of sentences a child speaks over a period of time, but usually with
no record of what happened when the child heard similar words or sentences or of what
consequences followed when they spoke them. Psychologists study verbal learning by asking their
subjects to memorize and recall nonsense syllables, but the word nonsenJe makes it clear that
they are not interested in all of the variables controlling the behavior. Somehow the internal
entity or process acts as a starting or stopping place. A bit of sensing is studied by one psychol-
ogist, a bit of behaving by another, and a bit of changing by still another. The experimental
analysis of behavior puts Humpty Dumpty together again by studying relatively complete episodes,
each with a history of reinforcement, a current setting, a response, and a reinforcing
consequence.
Many of the facts, and even some of the principles, that psychologists have discovered
when they may have thought they were discovering something else are useful. We can accept,
for example, what psychophysicists tell us about responses to stimuli without agreeing that they
show a mathematical relation between mental and physical worlds. We can accept many of the
facts reported by cognitive psychologists without believing that their subjects were processing
information or storing representations or rules. We can accept what happens when subjects
respond to descriptions of contingencies of reinforcement without believing that they are “sub-
jectively evaluating expected utilities.”
The relation between analysis of behavior as such and physiology is no problem. Each of
these sciences has instruments and methods appropriate to part of a behavioral episode. There
are inevitable gaps in a behavioral account. Stimulus and response are separated in time and
space, for example, and so are a reinforcement on one day and stronger behavior on the next.
The gaps can be filled only with the instruments and methods of physiology. They cannot be
filled by introspection, because there are no sensory nerves going to the right parts of the
brain.
For more than half a century the experimental analysis of behavior as a function of
environmental variables and the use of that analysis in the interpretation and modification of
behavior in the world at large have reached into every field of traditional psychology. Yet they
have not become psychology, and the question is, Why not? Perhaps answers can be found in
looking at three formidable obstacles that have stood in the path of an experimental analysis of
behavior.

108 A. E SKINNER
OBSTACLE 1: HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

Many people find the implications of a behavioral analysis disturbing. The traditional
direction of action of organism and environment seems to be reversed. Instead of saying that the
organism sees, attends to, perceives, “processes,” or otherwise acts upon stimuli, an operant
analysis holds that stimuli acquire control of behavior through the part they play in contingencies
of reinforcement. Instead of saying that an organism stores copies of the contingencies to which
it is exposed and later retrieves and responds to them again, it says that the organism is changed
by the contingencies and later responds as a changed organism, the contingencies having passed
into history. The environment takes over the control formerly assigned to an internal, originating
agent.
Some long-admired features of human behavior are then threatened. Following the lead of
evolutionary theory, an operant analysis replaces creation with variation and selection. There is
no longer any need for a creative mind or plan, or for purpose or goal direction. Just as we say
that species-specificbehavior did not evolve in order that a species could adapt to the environment
but rather evolved when it adapted, so we say that operant behavior is not strengthened by
reinforcement in order that the individual can adjust to the environment but is strengthened when
the individual adjusts (where “adapt” and “adjust” mean “behave effectively with respect to”).
.The disenthronement of a creator seems to threaten personal freedom (Can we be free if
the environment is in control?) and personal worth (Can we take credit for our achievements if
they are nothing more than the effects of circumstances?). It also seems to threaten ethical,
religious, and governmental systems that hold people responsible for their conduct. Who or what
is responsible if unethical, immoral, or illegal behavior is due to heredity or personal history?
Humanistic psychologists have attacked behavioral science along these lines. Like creationists in
their attack on secular humanists (with the humanists on the other side), they often challenge
the content or selection of textbooks, the appointment of teachers and administrators, the design
of curricula, and the allocation of funds.

OBSTACLE 2: PSYCHOTHERAPY

Certain exigencies of the helping professions are another obstacle in the path of a scientific
analysis of behavior. Psychotherapists must talk with their clients and, with rare exceptions, do
so in everyday English, which is heavy laden with references to internal causes-“I ate because
I was hungry,” “I could do it because I knew how to do it,” and so on. All fields of science tend
to have two languages, of course. Scientists speak one with casual acquaintances and the other
with colleagues. In a relatively young science, such as psychology, the use of the vernacular may
be challenged. How often have behaviorists heard, “You just said ‘It crossed my mind!’ I thought
there wasn’t supposed to be any mind.” It has been a long time since anyone challenged a
physicist who said, “That desk is made of solid oak,” by protesting, “But I thought you said that
matter was mostly empty space.”
The two languages of psychology raise a special problem. What we feel when we are hungry
or when we know how to do something are states of our bodies. We do not have very good ways
of observing them, and those who teach us to observe them usually have no way at all. We were
taught to say “I’m hungry,” for example, by persons who knew perhaps only that we had not
eaten for some time (“You missed your lunch; you must be hungry”) or had observed something
about our behavior (“You are eating ravenously. You must be hungry”). Similarly, we were taught
to say ‘‘I know” by persons who had perhaps only seen us doing something (“Oh, you know how

PSYCHOLOGY AS T H E SClENCE OF BEHAVIOR 109

to do that!”) or had told us how to do something and then said “NOWyou know.” The trouble
is that private states are almost always poorly correlated with the public evidence.
References to private events are, nevertheless, often accurate enough to be useful. If we
are preparing a meal for a friend, we are not likely to ask, “How long has it been since you last
ate?” or “Will you probably eat a great deal?” We simply ask, “How hungry are you?” If a friend
is driving us to an appointment, we are not likely to ask, “Have you driven there before?” or
“Has anyone told you where it is?” Instead we ask, “DOyou know where it is?” Being hungry and
knowing where something is are states of the body resulting from personal histories, and what is
said about them may be the only available evidence of those histories. Nevertheless, how much
a person eats does depend upon a history of deprivation, not upon how a deprived body feels,
and whether a person reaches a given destination does depend upon whether he or she has driven
there before or has been told how to get there, not upon introspective evidence of the effects.
Psychotherapists must ask people what has happened to them and how they feel because
the confidential relationship of therapist and client prevents direct inquiry. (It is sometimes
argued that what a person remembers may be more important than what actually happened, but
that is true only if something else has happened, of which it would also be better to have
independent evidence.) But although the use of reports of feelings and states of mind can be
justified on practical grounds, there is no justification for their use in theory making. The
temptation, however, is great. Psychoanalysts, for example, specialize in feelings. Instead of
investigating the early lives of their patients or watching them with their families, friends, or
business associates, they ask them what has happened and how they feel about it. It is not
surprising that they should then construct theories in terms of memories, feelings, and states of
mind or that they should say that an analysis of behavior in terms of environmental events lacks
“depth.”

OBSTACLE 3: COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

A curve showing the appearance of the word cognitiw in the psychological literature would
be interesting. A first rise could probably be seen around 1960; the subsequent acceleration would
be exponential. Is there any field of psychology today in which something does not seem to be
gained by adding that charming adjective to the occasional noun? The popularity may not be
hard to explain. When we became psychologists, we learned new ways of talking about human
behavior. If they were “behavioristic,” they were not very much like the old ways. The old terms
were taboo, and eyebrows were raised when we used them. But when certain developments
seemed to show that the old ways might be right after all, everyone could relax. Mind was back.
Information theory was one of those developments, computer technology another. Trouble-
some problems seemed to vanish like magic. A detailed study of sensation and perception was
no longer needed; one could simply speak of processing information. It was no longer necessary
to construct settings in which to observe behavior; one could simply describe them. Rather than
observe what people actually did, one could simply ask them what they would probably do.
That mentalistic psychologists are uneasy about these uses of introspection is clear from
the desperation with which they are turning to brain science, asking it to tell them what
perceptions, feelings, ideas, and intentions “really are.” And brain scientists are happy to accept
the assignment. To complete the account of an episode of behavior (for example, to explain what
happens when a reinforcement brings an organism under the control of a given stimulus) is not
only beyond the present range of brain science, it would lack the glamour of a revelation about
the nature of mind. But psychology may find it dangerous to turn to neurology for help. Once

110 B. E SKINNER
you tell the world that another science will explain what your key terms really mean, you must
forgive the world if it decides that the other science is doing the important work.
Cognitive psychologists like to say that “the mind is what the brain does,” but surely the
rest of the body plays a part. The mind is what the body does. It is what the person does. In
other words, it is behavior, and that is what behaviorists have been saying for more than half a
century. To focus on an organ is to rejoin the Homeric Greeks.
Cognitive psychologists and brain scientists have formed a new discipline called cognitive
science. It is enormously appealing. From a single page in a book review in the New York Times
titled “Inside the Thinking Animal” (Restak, 1985), we learn that the separation of mind and
brain, as represented by the separation of psychiatry and neurology, is now blurring, that bio-
chemistry will tell us about depression, that in dreams information is processed very differently
from in the waking state, that cognitive neuroscientists would not explain forgetting a friend’s
name as repression but as a breakdown of memory retrieval, that psychoanalysis was a precursor
to current developments in the neurosciences, and that quantum physics offers the most satisfying
answer to understanding the mind and brain relationship and the nature of reality itself. Very
rich fare, indeed, until one counts the calories. The bodily state felt as depression will no doubt
eventually be understood by biochemists (it is now being changed with the biochemicals we call
drugs). Dreaming is no doubt different from the waking state, but whether “information” is
“processed” in either state is still a question. Is there any difference between “forgetting” and
“failing to retrieve a memory” except the gratuitous metaphor in the latter expression? Is it likely
that neurology will eventually find the elaborate “mental apparatus” of psychoanalysis? And
must we wait for quantum physics before saying anything useful about the mind-brain relation-
ship, let alone reality itself?
A preference for rule-governed rather than contingency-shaped behavior explains the
warmth with which cognitive psychologists have also welcomed artificial intelligence. The arti-
ficial organisms that show artificial intelligence are much more complex than the automata that
inspired the reflex theory of Descartes, but both do only what they are told to do. Fairly simply
models have been built that are changed by the consequences of their behavior, and they are
much more like real organisms, but cognitive psychologists naturally prefer those that follow
rules, including rules for deriving new rules from old. Logicians and mathematicians have been
discovering, composing, and testing rules of the latter sort for centuries. Machines can do some
of the work and, like a hand calculator, do it much faster. Mathematicians and logicians have
never given very consistent accounts of how they work, in part because they have tried to discover
their “thought processes.” If an artificial organism can be designed to do what logicians and
mathematicians do, or even more than they have ever done, it will be the best evidence we have
that intuitive mathematical and logical thinking is only following rules, no matter how obscure.
And following a rule is behaving.

DAMAGE AND REPAIR

By their very nature, the antiscience stance of humanistic psychology, the practical exi-
gencies of the helping professions, and the cognitive restoration of the royal House of Mind have
worked against the definition of psychology as the science of behavior. Perhaps that could be
justified if something more valuable had been achieved, but has that happened? Is there a better
conception of psychology? To judge from the psychological literature, there are either many
conceptions, largely incompatible, or no clear conception at all. Introductory textbooks do not
help because, with an eye on their books’ being adopted, the authors call their subject the

PSYCHOLOGY AS THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOR 111

“science of behavior and mental life” and make sure that every field of interest is covered. What
the public learns from the media is equally confusing.
Is there a rapidly expanding body of facts and principles? Of our three obstacles, only
cognitive psychology offers itself as an experimental science. It usually does so with a certain
Eclat, but have its promises been kept? When the journal Psychology Today celebrated its 15th
anniversary, it asked 10 psychologists to name the most important discoveries made during that
period of time. As Nicolas Wade (1982) has pointed out, no 2 of the 10 agreed on a single
achievement that could properly be called psychology. For more than two years Science has not
published a single article on psychology, except one on memory citing work on brain-operated
and brain-damaged people and one on the neurological basis of memory retrieval. Apparently
the editors of Science no longer regard psychology itself as a member of the scientific community.
Nor has psychology developed a strong technology. Internal determiners get in the way of
effective action. An article on “Energy Conservation Behavior” in the American Psychologist
(Costanzo, Archer, Aronson, & Pettigrew, 1986), carries the significant subtitle, “The Difficult
Path From Information to Action.” If you take the “rational-economic,’ path and tell people
about the consequences of what they are doing or of what they might do instead, they are not
likely to change. (And for good reason: Information is not enough; people seldom take advice
unless taking other advice has been reinforced.) If, on the other hand, you adopt the “attitude-
change” approach, people are also not likely to change. Attitudes are inferences from the behavior
that is said to show their presence and are not directly accessible. If I turn off unnecessary lights
and appliances in my home, it is not because I have a “positive attitude” toward conservation,
but because doing so has had some kind of reinforcing consequence. To induce people to conserve
energy, one must change contingencies of reinforcement, not attitudes. No one should try to
beat a “path from information to action,” because action is the problem and contingencies the
solution.
Unable to offer a useful conception of its subject matter, psychology has not formed good
relations with other sciences. As we have seen, it has given neurologists an impossible assign-
ment, and the search for internal determiners has obscured any help it could give genetics. Once
you have formed the noun “ability” from the adjective “able,” you are in trouble. Aqua regia has
the ability to dissolve gold; but chemists will not look for an ability, they will look for atomic and
molecular processes. Much of the controversy about the heritability of intelligence, schizophre-
nia, delinquency, and so on is due to the conceptualization of abilities and traits of character as
explanatory entities. Longevity is a “heritable trait,” but rather than try to assign it to a gene,
geneticists will look at the processes that contribute to a long life. The genetics of behavior can
be much more directly studied by interbreeding members of a species that behave in different
ways under the controlled conditions of the laboratory.
Psychology gives very little help to the “behavioral sciences”-sociology, anthropology,
linguistics, political science, and economics. They have their own technical vocabularies, but
beyond them-except for brief flirtations with utilitarianism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the
like-they use the vernacular, with all its references to internal causes. Their data are usually
more objective than those of psychology, but hypothetical explanations still flourish.
Beyond the current reach of all of the sciences lies an issue that cannot be safely neglected
by any of them-the future of the world. For a variety of reasons all three of our “obstacles”
have had special reasons for neglecting it. Humanistic psychologists are unwilling to sacrifice
feelings of freedom and worth for the sake of a future, and when cognitive psychologists turn to
feelings and states of mind for theoretical purposes and psychotherapists for practical ones, they
emphasize the here and now. Behavior modification, in contrast, is more often preventive than
remedial. In both instruction and therapy, current reinforcers (often contrived) are arranged to
strengthen behavior that student and client will find useful in the future.

112 B. E SKINNER
 When Gandhi was asked, “What are we to do!” he is said to have replied, “Think of the
poorest man you have ever met and then ask if what you are doing is of any benefit to him.” But
he must have meant “of any benefit to the many people who, without your help, will be like
him.” To feed the hungry and clothe the naked are remedial acts. We can easily see what is
wrong and what needs to be done. It is much harder to see and do something about the fact that
world agriculture must feed and clothe billions of people, most of them yet unborn. It is not
enough to advise people how to behave in ways that will make a future possible; they must be
given effective reasons for behaving in those ways, and that means effective contingencies of
reinforcement now.
Unfortunately, references to feelings and states of mind have an emotional appeal that
behavioral alternatives usually lack. Here is an example: “If the world is to be saved, people must
learn to be noble without being cruel, to be filled with faith, yet open to truth, to be inspired
by great purposes without hating those who thwart them.” That is an “inspiring” sentence. We
like nobility, faith, truth, and great purposes and dislike cruelty and hatred. But what does it
inspire us to do? What must be changed if people are to behave in noble rather than cruel ways,
to accept the word of others but never without questioning it, to do things that have consequences
too remote to serve as reinforcers, and to refrain from attacking those who oppose them? The
fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars nur in ourselves that we are underlings. The fault is in the
world. It is a world that we have made and one that we must change if the species is to survive.
For at least 2500 years philosophers and psychologists have proceeded on the assumption
that because they were themselves behaving organisms, they had privileged access to the causes
of their behavior. But has any introspectively observed feeling or state of mind yet been unam-
biguously identified in either mental or physical terms? Has any ability or trait of character been
statistically established to the satisfaction of everyone? Do we know how anxiety changes inten-
tion, how memories alter decisions, how intelligence changes emotion, and so on? And, of
course, has anyone ever explained how the mind works on the body or the body on the mind?
Questions of that sort should never have been asked. Psychology should confine itself to
its accessible subject matter and leave the rest of the story of human behavior to physiology.

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difficult path from information to action. American Psychologist, 41, 521-528.
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