As an academic psychologist, Skinner was famous for the ingenious tools and techniques he invented to study animal behavior—first in the ancient murky basement of Memorial Hall and later on the seventh floor of the newly constructed William James Hall—as well as the insights that he and his students developed into the shaping of that behavior: pigeons and levers, pigeons and pellets, pigeons on hotplates, rats in mazes. His early research broke new ground as he engineered variable “schedules of reinforcement” to produce detailed patterns of activity that were foreign to an animal’s original behavioral repertoire, work that he called “operant conditioning.”
Inspired by his effort during World War II to transform a flock of pigeons into the conditioned intelligence for guided missiles (one that did not ultimately come to fruition), Skinner set out on a new path defined by the promise of behavioral engineering. In 1947 he told a symposium, “It is not a matter of bringing the world into the laboratory, but of extending the practices of an experimental science to the world at large. We can do this as soon as we wish to do it.”33 The missile project had cast the meaning of his experimental work “in a new light,” he reflected years later in his autobiography. “It was no longer merely an experimental analysis. It had given rise to a technology.”34
Skinner was eager to apply his laboratory insights to the world’s ills despite precious few grounds for his inferential leaps. As a public intellectual, he spent nearly seven decades trying to persuade the public that his radical behaviorism offered the principles of social organization necessary to defend civilization from cataclysm. He brashly extrapolated from the conduct of beleaguered animals to grand theories of social behavior and human evolution in books such as his 1948 “utopian” novel Walden Two and his 1971 social philosophy Beyond Freedom & Dignity. In 1974 Skinner published About Behaviorism, another explanation of the radical behaviorist project, this time addressed to a general readership. It aimed to counter the opposition to his views that had grown even more virulent since the unusual—and, to many, repugnant—arguments advanced in Beyond Freedom & Dignity. He regarded such opposition as the result of an “extraordinary misunderstanding,” and he was tireless in his efforts to reverse public opinion. He believed that once people correctly understood his meaning, they would certainly agree with his message.
In the very first pages of About Behaviorism, Skinner ignores the outrage generated by Beyond Freedom & Dignity, instead delving into behaviorism’s roots and its earliest theorists and practitioners. He places much of the blame for the antipathy toward behaviorism on the man who is widely regarded as its founder, John B. Watson.35 It was Watson who famously announced in 1913 the behaviorist point of view: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods.… The behaviorist… recognizes… no dividing line between man and brute.”36 But Watson turned out to be as much showman as scientist, and Skinner bitterly criticizes his extreme claims and “shortage of facts” that cast lasting doubt on radical behaviorism.
Having identified Watson as the main author of the problem, Skinner then credits the work of Max Meyer, an obscure early-twentieth-century German-trained experimental psychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Missouri, as key to the solution. Meyer had pursued his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin, where his dissertation advisor, Max Planck, was destined to become one of the most celebrated physicists of all time. Planck insisted on the unity of the physical world and the discoverability of the natural laws that would disclose their secrets only through mathematical analysis, including the laws of human behavior.37 “The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute,” Planck wrote. “The quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared… as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.”38 Meyer carried Planck’s teaching into his quest for the principles that would finally elevate the study of human behavior to true scientific status.
According to Skinner, Meyer succeeded in achieving the breakthrough that finally allowed psychology to assume its rightful place alongside the disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology.39 Why did Skinner extol this work that had been largely ignored, even in its own time? Skinner singles out for special praise a 1921 textbook that bore the ominous-sounding title Psychology of the Other-One. It received scant attention when it was published—Meyer had written it primarily for his own students—and had since fallen into total obscurity.40 Nonetheless, Skinner praised the book for establishing the epistemological and methodological foundations of modern behaviorism: “consider only those facts which can be objectively observed in the behavior of one person in its relation to his prior environmental history.”41 In Skinner’s formulation, Meyer’s book was a turning point, bravely combining psychology and physics in the quest for absolutes. It asserted the essence of the behaviorist’s point of view, where “the world within the skin of the Other-One loses its preferred status.”42
The phrase that captured the new scientific perspective was the “Other-One.” Human behavior would yield to scientific research only if psychologists learned to view humans as others. This “viewpoint of observation” was an absolute requirement for an “objective science of human behavior” that ceased to confuse inner experience with external action.43 Central to this new viewpoint was his notion of the human being as organism. The human being is recast as an “it,” an “other,” a “they” of organisms: an “organism among organisms,” distinguishable from a lettuce, a moose, or an inchworm only in degree of complexity.44 A scientific psychology would restrict its interests to the social and therefore visible behaviors of this “organism as an organism.” It would be “the study of the life of the Other-One—but of his life in so far as it is of social significance rather than as it is of significance for himself.… We are studying the Other-One in preference to Our-Selves.”45
The logical consequences of the new viewpoint necessitated a reinterpretation of the higher-order human experiences that we call “freedom” and “will.” Meyer echoed Planck in positing that “freedom of action in the animal world signifies the same that is meant by accidents in the world of physics.”46 Such accidents are simply phenomena for which there are insufficient information and understanding. And so it goes with freedom. The liberal idea of freedom persists in an inverse relationship to the growth of scientific knowledge, especially in the field of psychological science. Knowledge and freedom are necessarily adversaries. As Meyer wrote, “The Other-One’s conduct is free, uncaused, only in the same sense in which the issue of a disease, the outcome of a war, the weather, the crops are free and uncaused; that is, in the sense of general human ignorance of the particular causes of the particular outcome.”47
Decades later, this worldview would define the core of the controversial social philosophy espoused in Beyond Freedom & Dignity, in which Skinner argues that knowledge does not make us free but rather releases us from the illusion of freedom. In reality, he writes, freedom and ignorance are synonyms. The acquisition of knowledge is heroic in that it rescues us from ignorance, but it is also tragic because it necessarily reveals the impossibility of freedom.
For Meyer and for Skinner, our attachments to notions such as freedom, will, autonomy, purpose, and agency are defense mechanisms that protect us from the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance. I think of Dickens’s Scrooge when he first encounters the doleful, chain-dragging ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley and denies the apparition, saying, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” So it is with freedom: an undigested bit of fear, a crumb of denial that, once metabolized, will dispel the apparition and deliver us to reality. The environment determines behavior, and our ignorance of precisely how it does so is the void that we fill with the fantasy of freedom.
Meyer took great pains to insist that the signi
ficance of human inwardness—“soul,” “self,” “mind,” “consciousness”—is restricted to the subjective life of the individual. It can have no scientific value because it cannot be observed and measured: “We do not deny the soul, but we do not devote our time to it. We find enough, and more than enough, to do studying the body.” The soul is “your own business,” an intimate experience and irreducible mystery that are formally exempt from scientific inquiry: “Human societies can thus be understood as originating from natural laws, not in the sense of groups of souls tho, but in the sense of groups of organisms.”48
Meyer argued that the future of the social sciences and of civilization itself rested on this shift from soul to other, inside to outside, lived experience to observable behavior. The otherization of humanity was to be the road to a new kind of political liberation. History’s grim cavalcade of repression, torture, massacre, enslavement, and genocide had been prosecuted in the name of the domination of the human soul for the sake of religious or political power. From Meyer’s vantage point in the Missouri of 1921 during those years after the Great War, his solution for an efficient and rational modernity must have felt like a matter of life and death:
He whose interest is centered in souls thinks, when he has forced others to speak his prayer, pronounce his creed, kneel before his altar, that he has saved their souls, and fails to admit that he has merely forced their bodies.… Political terrorism, too, has its main and inexhaustible source in the human tendency to think of other beings, not as bodies open to scientific investigation, but as souls, as mysterious beings, to be governed either by magic, or, if magic fails as it naturally must, by torture and death.… Recall the horrors of the torture… of such courts as the Spanish inquisition or the witch-craft courts of the 17th century.… These atrocities were due to the fact that the judge was serving as a mind reader, and that the accused was regarded primarily as a soul.49
In Meyer’s thinking, the shift in perspective from “the human being as a soul” to “the human being as an organism” explained “why the trend of history is in the direction of democracy.” As science overtakes civilization, Meyer assumed a new global recognition of equality and democratic fellowship rooted in the basic fact of our overwhelming similarity as fellow organisms. The divisions that haunt society, politics, and economics based on class, wealth, liberality, race, and so on would become ridiculous: “In real world-wide human life, the differences among individuals are entirely swamped by their likenesses. To him who accepts the scientific view that human society is a group of organisms, it is an absurd proposition to divide… into… classes.…”50
Meyer believed that every social science that aspired to true scientific status would embrace the viewpoint of the Other-One—psychology, of course, but also sociology, economics, criminology, history, and the psychology of religion: “Christ going among his fellow men, an organism among organisms.…”51 Otherizing would pave the way to a rational future, with its bleak satisfactions that resign humanity to the forfeit of freedom as the price of knowledge.
V. Against Freedom
Skinner’s commitment to the viewpoint of the Other-One was unshakable, and it is through his elaboration of this viewpoint that we can begin to grasp the essence of instrumentarian power. From the opening page of Skinner’s first book, The Behavior of Organisms, published in 1938, he sounds Meyer’s (and Planck’s) caution: freedom is merely ignorance waiting to be conquered. “Primitive systems of behavior” assign causality to “entities beyond man.” Equally inadequate are the “advanced systems of behavior” that ascribe control to vague fictions such as the “self” or “free will.” “The inner organism,” he wrote, “may in resignation be called free, as in the case of ‘free will,’ when no further investigation is held to be possible.”52
Skinner called his work “radical behaviorism,” insisting that the only meaningful object of behavioral study was observation of action devoid of subjective attributions. That’s what made it radical. “Behavior is what an organism is doing—or more accurately what it is observed by another organism to be doing,” he declared in his first book’s opening pages. “Operant” behavior was his term for this active, observable “doing.” The vocabulary for rendering descriptions of operant behavior was to be purged of inwardness: an organism cannot be said to “see” but rather to “look toward.” Only such objective descriptions can render measurable behavioral facts that, in turn, lead to patterns and ultimately to the documentation of causal relationships between environment and behavior.53
Skinner published Science and Human Behavior in 1951, positing that all observation, even of one’s own behavior, must be enacted from the viewpoint of the Other-One. This discipline makes it possible to take almost anything as an object of behavioral analysis, including inferred behaviors such as “making choices” or “problem solving,” the very perspective that would later be amply exploited by the new discipline of behavioral economics:
When a man controls himself, chooses a course of action, thinks out the solution to a problem, or strives toward an increase in self-knowledge, he is behaving. He controls himself precisely as he would control the behavior of anyone else—through the manipulation of variables of which behavior is a function. His behavior in so doing is a proper object of analysis, and eventually it must be accounted for with variables lying outside the individual himself.54
In nearly every book and article, Skinner declared the truth that Planck taught Meyer and Meyer imparted to his students, the single truth that can be grasped only through the viewpoint of the Other-One: freedom is ignorance. The felt experience of free will is but a bit of undigested denial, produced by a lack of information about the actual determinants of behavior. Like Meyer and Planck before him, Skinner regarded freedom as an “accident,” arguing that the very notion of “accident” is illusory, a snapshot in time that reveals a lacuna waiting to be filled and eventually transformed by advancing knowledge into an expression of a lawful, predictable pattern. Under the behaviorist’s gaze, these lacunae of ignorance that we mistake for free will are queuing up for explanation, rather like someone who consigns his or her body to cryonic preservation in the hope of some future awakening and cure.
In the most audacious of Skinner’s literary efforts, the extended philosophical essay published in 1971 as Beyond Freedom & Dignity, he repeats: “There is no virtue in the accidental nature of an accident.”55 That entire work was trained on what Skinner continued to regard as the chief impediment to social progress: the conceptual confusion that cloaks our deepest ignorance in the sacred robes of freedom and dignity. Skinner argued that our allegiance to these lofty notions is simply the way we protect ourselves from the hard truths of “unsuspected controlling relations between behavior and environment.”56 They are a psychological “escape route” that slowly closes “as new evidences of the predictability of human behavior are discovered. Personal exemption from a complete determinism is revoked as a scientific analysis progresses… the achievements for which a person himself is to be given credit seem to approach zero… the behavior we admire is therefore the behavior we cannot yet explain.”57
Richard Herrnstein, one of Skinner’s most-accomplished students, later his colleague in Harvard’s Psychology Department, and a luminary of radical behaviorism, once explained to me that any action regarded as an expression of free will is simply one for which “the vortex of stimuli” that produced it cannot yet be adequately specified. We merely lack the means of observation and calculation. I was a twenty-three-year-old student, and the term was new and startling to me. I never forgot that conversation, perhaps because it came as close as any to summarizing the behaviorist’s conception of God. Indeed, there was a time when if you took the elevator to Skinner’s lab on the seventh floor of the Psychology Department, the first thing you would see was a sign reading “God is a VI,” a variable interval of behavioral reinforcement plucked from the vortex.
In this view, “freedom” or “accidents” sh
rink as our developing capabilities in measurement and computation provide more information about the vortex of stimuli. Ignorance about human behavior is like a melting iceberg on a warming planet, destined to yield to the mounting heat as we invent the means and methods smart enough to first decipher and then control the vortex of stimuli that shapes each fact of human behavior. Skinner pointed to weather forecasting as the iconic example of this transformation from ignorance to law, just as Meyer had done decades earlier:
The problems imposed by the complexity of a subject matter must be dealt with as they arise. Apparently hopeless cases often become manageable in time. It is only recently that any sort of lawful account of the weather has been possible.… Self-determination does not follow from complexity.… Difficulty in calculating the orbit of the fly does not prove capriciousness, though it may make it impossible to prove anything else.58
VI. A Technology of Human Behavior
Through six decades of academic and popular writing, Skinner would insist that “further investigation” is always possible. In the first pages of Beyond Freedom & Dignity he calls for a technological solution to ignorance: “We need to make vast changes in human behavior, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology, no matter how hard we try… what we need is a technology of behavior… comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology.…”59
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 45
