0.16 Learning theory and personality development  (Page 8/24)

Personality Development

Based upon the principles of operant conditioning, Skinner proceeded to address the full range of human behavior, including personality development, education, language, mental illness and psychotherapy, and even the nature of society itself.

Skinner believed that the terms “self” and “personality” are simply ways in which we describe the characteristic patterns of behavior engaged in by an individual. Skinner also referred to the self as “a functionally unified system of responses” (Skinner, 1953), or “at best a repertoire of behavior imparted by an organized set of contingencies” (Skinner, 1974). Skinner acknowledges that critics of the science of behavior claim that behaviorists neglect the person or the self. However, Skinner claims that the only thing neglected is a vestige of animism , which in its crudest form attributes behavior to spirits. If behavior is disruptive, the spirit is a demon; if behavior is creative, the spirit is a muse or guiding genius (Skinner, 1974). Indeed, Skinner’s arguments describing the self sound quite similar to the Buddhist perspective we will examine later in this book:

When a man jams his hands into his pockets to keep himself from biting his nails, who is controlling whom ? When he discovers that a sudden mood must be due to a glimpse of an unpleasant person, who discovers whose mood to be due to whose visual response? Is the self which works to facilitate the recall of a name the same as the self which recalls it? When a thinker teases out an idea, is it the teaser who also eventually has the idea? (pg. 283; Skinner, 1953)

If the self, or the personality, does not exist, but is instead simply a collection of behavioral attributes and functions, then it is an irrelevant concept that needs to be discarded. Skinner did not discount the value of Freud’s explanation of human behavior, since Skinner acknowledged that many sciences take time to develop. But now that behavioral science was advancing, according to Skinner, it became time to discard Freudian concepts of an unconscious mind and mental functioning. Curiously, this is very similar to the way in which Freud addressed religion: as something that had served its purpose in the course of human development, but which should now be discarded in favor of the science of psychoanalysis.

Since no two people have exactly the same experiences (not even identical twins, who do share an identical genetic make-up), each individual is truly unique. When any one of us seems to have an experience of identity, a feeling of self, it always exists within the unique circumstances of our experiential contingencies, the reinforcers, punishers, discriminative stimuli, etc. that have determined our behavioral patterns. Thus, Skinner argues that we do have a unique individuality, but we are not an originating agent, not a self that decides to act a certain way. Instead, we are a locus , a point of convergence for genetic and environmental conditions which have come together and that will determine our next act (Skinner, 1974).