Is All Behaviour Modification ‘Cognitive’?

Abstract

Behaviour modification arose out of the study of animal behaviour in controlled experimental settings. Skinner and others had shown that the behaviour of animals could be considered to be an orderly function of contingencies of reinforcement. As Morse (1966) put it ‘Even people with a minimum of training can follow simple specified procedures for producing stable, standard behaviour patterns of various types in any individual of a variety of different species . . . Furthermore, any member of most species will give a similar performance on the same schedules.’ Apart from the power to change behaviour imparted by this approach an explanatory system was also offered according to which any particular performance, for example on a schedule of reinforcement, could be analysed in terms of the operation of discriminative and reinforcing stimuli. The response was usually the operation of some mechanical device like a lever; the reinforcer was typically food and discriminative stimuli were environmental events such as the illumination of coloured lights. All of these variables were publicly observable events. The creation of explanatory fictions, ‘events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation’ (Skinner, 1950), was eschewed.

The technical trick of conducting our thinking in auditory word-images, instead of in spoken words, does indeed secure secrecy for our thinking, since the auditory imaginings of one person are not seen or heard by another… But this secrecy is not the secrecy ascribed to the postulated episodes of the ghostly shadow world (of mind). It is merely the convenient privacy which characterises the tunes that run in my head and the things that I see in my mind’s eye.

Gilbert Ryle (1949)