The Rise of Environmental Behaviorism

Abstract

Science is influenced by the society that produces it. It may be that it is impossible for human beings to directly perceive reality without some degree of mental filtering and processing that shapes their perception. Certainly, observers differ in their interpretation of nature. This may be due, in part, to temperament, to background, to conviction, or to training. Institutional culture and historical trends also influence the questions scientists ask of nature, and the interpretations that they create. All these factors played significant roles in the struggle between evolutionary psychologists and environmental behaviorists to dominate science. In this case, by 1930 historical events had sufficient impact on the debate to tip the balance in favor of the environmental behaviorists. Thereafter, the affects of the Depression and the reaction against Nazi racial hygiene would fuel a thoroughgoing repudiation of evolutionary psychology. This chapter will attempt to explain how individuals, institutions, and historical forces interacted to lead to the death of the nascent sciences of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and to the triumph of environmental behaviorism as the sole acceptable interpretation of human nature for several generations.

No science should go beyond the descriptive level. Specific stimuli determine specific responses; given a stimulus, a definite response can be predicted. What else do we need besides this for the scientific description of behavior?

Zing Yang Kuo, “The Net Result of the Anti-Heredity Movement in Psychology,” p. 191

Nature only answers those questions which we ask her; indeed, she only gives the observer those answers which he expects from her.

Friedrich Alverdes¹

[I] f our conception of human nature is to be altered, it must be by means of truths conforming to the canons of scientific evidence and not a new dogma however devoutly wished for.

Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 35