On Behaviorism, Introspection, Psychology and Economics

José M. Edwardsp h a r e - g r e s e, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne**

ON BEHAVIORISM, INTROSPECTION, PSYCHOLOGY AND ECONOMICS... .1

1. Introduction: on the history of psychology and economics.................................................................2

2. From Wundt’s laboratory to early American psychology..................................................................3

3. Early behaviorism...................................................................................................................................5

4. Neobehaviorism and learning: from animal psychology to social control.........................................7

5. American behaviorism meets European psychology.........................................................................10

6. Introspection in early British psychology and economics.................................................................12

7. On the rise and fall of (behaviorist) institutionalism.........................................................................14

8. From introspection to cognition...........................................................................................................17

9. Bypassing control as an economic subject..........................................................................................19

10. References.............................................................................................................................................22

Key Words: Behaviorism, Introspection, Psychology, Economics, Control. JEL Classification: A12, B20, B40, B59.

1. Introduction: on the history of psychology and economics Draft version for discussion purposes at the 11th Summer Institute on Economic History, Philosophy and History of Economic Thought, Paris and Saint-Denis, September 1-5, 2008.** E-mail: josedwar@hotmail.com. Address: g r e s e, Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112 bd. de l'Hôpital, 75647, Paris cedex 13. Tel.: +33 (0) 1 44 07 82 38.

The history of psychology and economics has been repeatedly read as one of common

birth from moral philosophy, separation with the so-called ordinal revolution, and

meeting again with the development of behavioral economics in the late twentieth

century (Hands, 2007). Within this tale, economics is supposed to have escaped from

psychology by getting rid of mentalism (i.e. refusing introspection) and focusing on the

observation of economic choice. This move has often been claimed to be “positivist” or

even “behaviorist” (Lewin (1996), Asso and Fiorito (2003, 2004), Bruni and Sugden

(2007), Angner and Loewenstein (forthcoming)). Recent “economics and psychology”

accounts on the emergence of behavioral economics (Sent (2004), Bruni and Sugden

(2007), Agner and Loewenstein (forthcoming)) focus mainly on recent issues providing

only quick lectures on the earlier history of the two disciplines.

As “psychology” is being considered as a sort of homogeneous entity, the lectures just

mentioned overlook several important elements in its history, namely the rise and fall of

(American) behaviorism during the first half of the twentieth century and its opposition to

other (European) schools of psychology. The following pages provide a lecture focused

on the conflict between behaviorist and introspective (and cognitive) approaches to

human behavior. This gives a different account of the history of psychology and

economics than the standard lecture. Decision theory, the paper claims, has been both

“far away from”, and “strongly opposed to” behaviorism all along its history, for the

economists’ traditional purposive accounts of behavior (focused on rationality and

consciousness) prevented it from adaptive-type accounts coming from behaviorist-type

research methods.

Only recently, economics seems to be giving space to adaptive-type elements within the

core of decision theory (Rabin (1998), Angner and Loewenstein (forthcoming)).

However, the recent emergence of behavioral economics as a mainstream subfield (Sent,

2004) is being read as the result of a cognitive revolution manifestation happening

through behavioral decision research (BDR) analysis between the 1960s and 1970s. The

following pages provide a lecture focused on behaviorism as a main element. They

explain the late reception of adaptation theory in economics as the consequence of the

decline of control as a subject matter in psychology. The decline of control, a founding

stone of behaviorist-type research, seems to have opened the doors of economics to

adaptive-type behavior accounts as promoted, namely by Harry Helson (1964),

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Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and their followers. Recent contributions to behavioral

economics seem to be based as much on stimulus-response analysis coming from

Adaptation-Level Theory (Helson, 1964), as on BDR analysis as the lectures just

mentioned claim.

The paper is structured in two parts:

(1) Sections 2 to 5 are focused on behaviorism and its opposition to introspective and

cognitive psychology starting by an overview of Wilhelm Wundt’s founding program and

its transmission to America in the late nineteenth century (Section 2). The narrative then

turns to the development of early behaviorism (Section 3) and the subsequent transition to

neobehaviorism in the 1930s (Section 4) and to cognitive approaches to human behavior

after WWII (Section 5).

(2) Sections 6 to 9 deal with introspective accounts of behavior as defended by British

psychologists in the late nineteenth century (Section 6), and by economists opposed to

(behaviorist) institutionalism in the first part of the twentieth (Section 7). The narrative of

the paper then turns to the switch made from introspective to cognitive accounts of

behavior in after-war economics (Section 8) supporting the paper’s thesis about

economics by-passing control (i.e. behaviorism) as an economic subject, and concluding

(Section 9).

2. From Wundt’s laboratory to early American psychology

The development of American social sciences in the late nineteenth century (psychology

in particular) was strongly supported by scholars trained in German universities (Boring

and Boring (1948), Ben-David and Collins (1966), Sokal (1984), Mandler (2007)). As

Wilhelm Wundt’s pioneering Leipzig laboratory founded in 1879 was the main training

place for American psychologists, Wundt’s influence was quite strong in America by the

turn of the century.

“[P]ractically all influential psychologists at the turn of the century, Mandler

writes, were students of Wundt’s or were students of his students. Experimental

psychology was defined by the experiences of the Leipzig Laboratory, and

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American laboratories were generally opened by his students with imported

German instruments.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 59)1

The early development of the field in Germany was strongly marked by Wilhelm

Dilthey’s [1833-1911] distinction “between sciences of the mind (Geisteswissenschaften)

and of nature” (Mandler, 2007, p. 54) brought to psychology by Wundt2 who made a

“strict distinction between experimental psychology, on the one hand, and

ethnopsychological and social psychological topics that were not subject to experimental

investigation, on the other hand” (Mandler, 2007, p. 56).

Experimental psychology was supposed to be a natural science (naturwissenschaften) and

was restricted to sensory analysis. “Mental products” such as thinking were considered

too complex to be studied by experimentation. The analysis of mental variables was

considered the object of social psychology (Völkerpsychologie), which was not a natural

science, for Wundt considered human thought as the result of social and historical

contexts3. Wundt, Mandler writes, was responsible of creating an “experimental

psychology that was not social and a social psychology that was not experimental”

(Mandler, 2007, p. 59).

By the turn of the century, American psychology avoided, in general, the study of

complex figures such as “thought”, “memory”, or “emotion”. Though one important

exception to this general setting was William James’ program4, the major part of

American psychology was “German in origin and method” (Mandler, 2007, p. 140).

1 “In 1910, he adds, American psychology was an outpost of German experimental psychology […]. German experimental sensationism and atomism – as exported through the returning travelers or by the sheer intellectual force of the grand old man of American psychology, Edward Bradford Titchener (a German-trained Englishman) – was the dominant force.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 140)2 … and to economics by Max Weber in the early twentieth century.3 Wundt’s experimental psychology, Mandler writes, “was to a large extent sensory psychology. It was strictly scientific, followed rigid rules of experimentation, and did not allow any “softer” concerns. In the same vein and in part due to the influence of Fechner, Wundt adopted statistical error theory in experimental psychology, though he rejected statistical laws for the historical phenomena treated in Völkerpsychologie.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 57).4 William James [1842-1910] (Harvard) met Wundt and the Leipzig laboratory during his formation (Mandler, 2007). Back in America, he established a laboratory where “he appointed Hugo Münsterberg, one of Wundt’s student’s, as the lab’s first director” (Mandler, 2007, p. 62). Though his famous Principles of Psychology (1890) dealt with consciousness and emotions as psychological subjects (Boring (1964), Feinstein (1970)), a few years later James mistrusted consciousness as an entity (James, 1904). For “seven or eight years past, he wrote in 1904, I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and try to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded” (James, 1904, pp. 477-478). See also Buxton (1984, p. 455) on James opposition to both British and German psychology.

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3. Early behaviorism

Besides the German influence, behaviorism was the main force shaping early American

psychology. This arose “not within psychology itself but within American society from

about the 1880s onward” (Mills, 1998, p. 2). As American scientists in general,

behaviorists were influenced by pragmatism, which consisted in conceiving theories as

tools to be “used to make socially useful predictions” (ibid.). As behaviorism dealt with

human and social issues, predictions meant social control. In Mills’ words:

“Because Americans characteristically view science pragmatically, [they] used

what they read as the basis for programs of remedial social actions. Those

programs, in their turn, provided material for further analysis for the social

scientists and, above all, provided the early institutional basis for the growing

social sciences. The essence of behaviorism is the equating of theory with

application, understanding with prediction, and the workings of human mind with

social technology. Those same equations formed the foundations of the thought of

early American social scientists.” (Mills, 1998, p. 2)

John B. Watson’s Psychology as the behaviorist views it (1913) was the starting point of

the development of behaviorism as a movement5. Psychology as the behaviorist views it,

Watson wrote:

“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, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness

with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The

behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes

no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its

refinements and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme

of investigation.” (Watson, 1913, p. 158)

Though diverse in its form (Mills, 1998), behaviorism was the dominant school in

American psychology between the 1910s and 1960s. Behaviorists shared the goal of

prediction and control of behavior, and the rejection of both introspection as a scientific 5 John Broadus Watson [1878-1958] (Chicago, Johns Hopkins) took the entrepreneur role on the development of behaviorism as a discipline (Boring (1964), Madden (1965)). However, the roots of beaviorism can be traced back at least to the 1860s in Russia (I. P. Pavlov (nobel prize, 1904) and V. M. Bekhterev) and to the development of animal psychology under Darwin findings’ influence in the 1890s (C. Lloyd Morgan, Edward L. Thorndike, Jacques Loeb) (Boring, 1964).

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tool, and the study of mental concepts (i.e. related to consciousness). Comparative

psychology (animal v/s human analysis) was central to the discipline and animal

experimentation was present all over the period.

Watson’s manifesto was supposed to give American psychology the status of a natural

science. To reach this status it was supposed to rely on experimental methods. Rather

than “observing” consciousness by introspection, Watson thought psychologists should

narrow the object of the discipline in order to capture observable outcomes. Mentalism

was to be avoided for the study of consciousness, Watson thought, would delude

psychology instead or reinforcing it:

“Psychology, as it is generally thought of, has something esoteric in its

methods. If you fail to reproduce my findings, it is not due to some fault in your

apparatus or in the control of your stimulus, but it is due to the fact that your

introspection is untrained […]. If you can’t observe 3-9 states of clearness in

attention, your introspection is poor. If, on the other hand, a feeling seems

reasonably clear to you, your introspection is again faulty. […] The time seems

to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness;

when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states

the object of observation.” (Watson, 1913, p. 163)

Psychology as Watson viewed it was restricted to observable concepts. Stimulus-response

analysis and habit formation research in animals were central to the development of the

new approach.

“I believe we can write a psychology, Watson wrote, define it as [science of

behavior], and never go back upon our definition: never use the terms

consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery,

and the like. […] It can be done in terms of stimulus and response, in terms of

habit formation6, habit integrations and the like. […] organisms, man and

animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary

and habit equipments. These adjustments may be very adequate or they may be

so inadequate that the organism barely maintains its existence […]. In a system

of psychology completely worked out, given the response the stimuli can be

6 Habit formation was an important element in Watson’s project as in that of neobehaviorists, who dealt mainly with the learning problem. “Whenever we encounter a habit [Watson thought] we should not assume that an animal was striving to achieve some purpose. Instead, we have to discover how the act became a permanent part of the animal’s response repertoire and why it was elicited by a limited range of stimuli” (Mills, 1998, p. 75).

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predicted; given the stimuli the response can be predicted. Such a set of

statements is crass and raw in the extreme, as all such generalizations must be.”

(Watson, 1913, pp. 166-167)

4. Neobehaviorism and learning: from animal psychology to social control

Neobehaviorism as developed by Edward C. Tolman [1886-1959], Clark L. Hull [1884-

1952] and Burrhus F. Skinner [1904-1990]7, was influenced by outsider research

programs as Gestalt psychology, logical positivism and operationism. Unlike early

behaviorism, neobehaviorists were animal scientists producing “highly sophisticated and,

in some cases, comprehensive psychological theories” (Mills, 1998, p. 4). They shared

“the behaviorist commitment to social application” but produced “empirically tested

theories, whose ultimate derivation was the highly controlled environment of the animal

laboratory” (ibid.)8. In this form, behavioral science “enjoyed its heyday in the America

of the 1950s and 1960s” (ibid.). The new behaviorisms, Mills writes, consisted in

“precisely formulated and conceptually rigorous theories”. These were:

“radically different from their predecessors. Empirically, neobehaviorism derived

its support from extensive work in animal laboratories, so that there was a complete

contrast with the speculative behaviorisms of the 1920s. A new movement

demanded a new set of paradigms, a new core speciality from which the rest of

7 E. C. Tolman (California, Berkeley) became well known for his studies of learning in rats using mazes. In his main volume, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932), he used behaviorist methods to understand learning and other processes in humans and other animals. He supported his program with Gestalt theory producing a less mechanistic theory than the ones of Hull or Skinner.

C. L. Hull (Wisconsin, Madison) worked on learning and motivation, showing he could predict and control behavior (Mathematico-Deductive Theory of Rote Learning (1940), Principles of Behavior (1943)). His project on animal learning and conditioning became one of the major learning theories of Hull’s time.

B. F. Skinner (Harvard), the most famous behaviorist, defended Radical Behaviorism as a philosophy of science. His work on experimental analysis on animal behavior (made on what are nowadays known as a Skinner Boxes) conduced him to his well-known work on Verbal Behavior (1957) triggering Noam Chomsky’s cognitive science reply in linguistics.8 The laboratory, Mills writes, “was a place from which socially useful findings had to emerge. However, findings could be socially useful only if they were publicly verifiable and commanded universal assent. That meant, in turn, that the findings from one laboratory could be replicated in another. The first step was to find a common data language, that is, to express all findings in terms of behavior. The next was to gain control over the hidden, the implicit, or the unobservable […], behaviorists gained such control by defining each hidden factor in terms of its behavioral consequences and then devising procedures for producing those consequences in the laboratory. The laboratory thus became a training ground for social technocrats who could induce socially desired outcomes in natural settings.” (Mills, 1998, p. 88)

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psychology could be invaded, and a new epistemological basis. The paradigms

were provided by the now familiar tasks that had to be solved by rats in mazes,

shock boxes, and Skinner boxes and by pigeons in Skinner boxes. The new

speciality was learning theory. The new epistemological basis was the doctrine of

operationism; the rise of operationism was closely tied to the emergence of

learning theory.” (Mills, 1998, p. 83)

Watson’s original program was thus extended by neobehaviorists who started to deal with

learning as a central feature (Boring, 1961). As mentalism was still rejected as a subject

matter, learning was taken as the habituation resulting from repeated stimulus-response

activity. In other words, learning was seen a process by which one acquires “a disposition

to behave in particular ways given the occurrence of a situation that appropriately triggers

the disposition” (Mills, 1998, p. 87). Learning accounts were supported by operationism

as a methodology9.

For B. F. Skinner, as for behaviorists in general, behavior should be explained in terms of

observable phenomena. Within this framework, the “history of past reinforcements” was

supposed to model the way an individual behaved. This consisted in showing how

“seemingly cognitively controlled behaviors could be patiently shaped in the Skinner

box” (Mills, 1998, p. 124). Skinner’s position was thus clearly against the approach of

cognitive psychologists. While Skinner appealed to the history of pas reinforcements,

Mills writes:

“a cognitivist appeals to representations, decisions, and intentions […]. Radical

behaviorists believe that those who say that human or animal actions are guided by

wants, desires, intentions, or beliefs are mistaken. For a radical behaviorist, to want

or desire something is to seek that which has secured positive reinforcement in the

past; to intend to do something is to be guided by one’s history of past

reinforcements; and to believe something is to produce verbalizations (whether

9 The operationist turn in psychology happened mainly at Harvard between the 1920s and 1960s. “In order to excise mentalism altogether from psychology, Mills writes, behaviorists had to define mentalist concepts in some objective way. The solution was to define them operationally” (Mills, 1998, p. 86). Harvard psychologists such as Edwin G. Boring, S. S. Stevens, and B. F. Skinner “became acquainted with Percy Bridgman’s proposal to define all theoretical terms in physics in terms of the procedures whereby they are measured or observed.” (Mills, 1998, p. 87) Certain behaviorists, “of whom Tolman and Skinner were the most prominent, demonstrated that […] hidden factors could be defined operationally and that the behaviorist enterprise could find an accepted place in the social sciences. The use of operational definitions then spread to the rest of the discipline.” (ibid.) See also Stevens (1935) and Skinner (1945).

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explicit or implicit) that reflect one’s past history of reinforcements.” (Mills, 1998,

p. 139)10

Response and reinforcement were central objects in Skinner’s project. Animal work was

controlled by reinforcement schedules and the animal laboratory, Mills writes, “was a

precise simulacrum of society. Its work, Skinnerian views of society.” (Mills, 1998, p.

149)

The behaviorist’s conception of social control promoted social efficiency, productivity,

and “appropriate modes of socialization” as settings leading to “humanist goods (such as

a healthy and well-balanced psychic life)” (Mills, 1998, p. 153). As American

progressives and social scientists of his time did, Skinner “believed that science should

serve the good of society”. He also thought that “it was possible to develop social

technologies to shape human beings” to serve this end11.

Skinner’s ideas were spread to the general public in his Walden Two (1948) novel.

Skinner’s 1976 account on his novel reveals the spirit of his ideas about psychology as a

science. The 1950s, Skinner wrote,

“saw the beginnings of what the public has come to know as behavior

modification. There were early experiments on psychotic and retarded persons, and

then on teaching machines and programmed instruction, and some of the settings in

which these experiments were conducted were in essence communities. And in the

sixties applications to other fields, such as counseling and the design of incentive

systems, came even closer to what I had described in Walden Two.” (Skinner,

1976, pp. vi-vii)

What the American society needed, Skinner thought, was “not a new political leader or a

new kind of government but further knowledge about human behavior and new ways of

applying that knowledge to the design of cultural practices” (Skinner, 1976, p. xvi)12.

10 See Boring (1964) for an account on Skinner’s position on motivation and learning. 11 See Burnham (1960) and Cravens and Burnham (1971) on the influence of the progressive movement and evolutionary naturalism in American psychology. Progressivism, Mandler writes, “was consistent with a number of old and new American cultural and social values. It also had its kindred movements in such developments as the drive for scientific management and the time-and-motion studies of Frederick W. Taylor designed to make the American worker more productive at less cost.” (Mandler, 2007, p.101)12 See also Rogers and Skinner (1956) and Skinner (1964) on social control.

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5. American behaviorism meets European psychology

While behaviorism was being successfully developed, the European tradition (E. B.

Titchener [1867-1927] being the main exception in America13) continued to produce

introspective accounts dealing with mentalism as a psychological subject. Far away from

pragmatism, European accounts were focused on the understanding (rather than the

control) of “complex” subject matters such as memory and thought. The major advances

in the field, Mandler writes, were made by:

“the German successors to the Würzburg school, such as Gestalt theory14, as well

as the advances in the francophone countries.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 109) […] “As in

Germany, French psychology was focused on mental concepts rather than

behavior. Intelligent behavior was the object of French psychologists as Alfred

Binet and Jean Piaget (ibid., p. 99).

Although American psychology had born out of the German tradition, second generation

German psychology became stranger to the behaviorist environment in America15. This

might be explained by theoretical incompatibilities as the following:

“one of the reasons that stimulus-response behaviorism and research on human

memory and thought were incompatible was the physicalism of the S-R position.

The eliciting stimuli were defined in terms of their physical characteristics, and, in

principle were either skeletal/muscular events or their equivalents in theoretical

terms.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 106)16

13 Edward Bradford Titchener [1867-1927] (Cornell), a “German trained englishman” (Mandler, 2007) was in Boring’s words “a cardinal point in the national systematic orietation” of American psychology (Boring, 1927). The “clear-cut opposition, Boring wrote, between behaviorism an its allies, on the one hand, and something else, on the other, remains clear only when the opposition is between behaviorism and Titchener, mental tests and Titchener, or applied psychology and Titchener.” (ibid.). See Titchener (1914) for a critical review of Watson’s (1913) behaviorist manifesto.14 The Würzburg School started with Oswald Külpe [1862-1915] (a former assistant in the Leipzig laboratory) founding the Würzburg laboratory (1896). Unlike Wundt’s project (which avoided the experimental study of higher thought), the Würzburgers designed experiments focused on the processing of complex stimulation. Würzburger Otto Selz [1881-1943], Mandler writes, “was the first voice in the early twentieth century to call for a psychology of thinking that dealt primarily with processes rather than with contents […] the modernity of his ideas was attested by work in midcentury that tied Selz theory to work on problem solving and computer stimulation.” (Mandler, 2007, pp. 111-112)15 For Titchener, as for the Würzburger School, psychological experimentation consisted in controlled introspection” (Mandler, 2007, p. 89). These German approach was rejected by behaviorists “as being irrelevant to the daily concern of people” (ibid., p. 99).16 According to Madden (1965), “The American functionalists and behaviorists differed from the British associationists and the Wundtians on the question of what the nature of psychological variables should be. The associationists, he writes, dealt with variables of only one kind, that is, the “impressions” or “ideas” that become united into complex perceptions according to the laws of contiguity, similarity and so on. The

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However, the main forces shaping psychology as a discipline between the 1930s and

1950s were the National Socialist regime’s impact on German sciences and World War

II. The departure of German psychologists, mainly the Gestalt theory leaders “with the

advent of the National Socialist regime in 1933”, Mandler writes, led German mentalism

to the American side (Mandler, 2007, p. 126). By that time, however, behaviorism was

“too new, too successful, too exciting an enterprise not to fight back spiritedly against the

foreign invaders” (ibid., p. 143). Settled mainly at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, and

Chicago, American psychologists firmly opposed to incoming second generation German

psychology.

Though Gestalt psychology flourished briefly in America, the scientific break imposed by

WWII modified the scene in such a way the movement finally ended up being no more

than “an important set of ideas that unified an immigrant group that might have fallen

apart much faster had it not been held together by the common experience of the

immigration” (Mandler, 2007, p. 163)17.

“By becoming part of the American scene in the long run, Mandler writes, the

German immigrants pushed a young science to greater maturity in an atmosphere

conducive to such development […]. In the long run, the Gestalt immigrants added

to the brew of information-processing, cognitive, and constructivist psychologies

that made up the “cognitive revolution” within a generation of their arrival”

(Mandler, 2007, p. 164).

The dominance of behaviorism decayed in the 1960s in part because of limitations proper

to animal experimentation in psychology. The decay of animal science undermined the

basis of the neobehaviorist program living space to the so-called cognitive revolution to

which the paper comes back in the last two sections.

6. Introspection in early British psychology and economics

Tracing back the history of the use of introspection in economics one finds the British

nineteenth century response to German (physiological) psychology. This episode reveals important shift made by the functionalists and behaviorists under the influence of Darwinian concepts of adaptation, was toward a conception of variables as stimulus and response.” (Madden, 1965, pp. 199-200)17 See Sokal (1984) for a detailed account on the American reception of the main leaders of Gestalt psychology (Max Wertheimer [1880-1943], Kurt Koffka [1886-1941], and Wolfgang Köhler [1887-1967]).

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the values and the science conception defended within the British tradition. The use of

introspection came from moral philosophy and spread to economics mainly through

utilitarianism as read by early (British) marginalists18. British psychology was also based

on introspection as promoted namely by William Hamilton [1788-1856].

According to Daston (1978), Hamilton was one of the main detractors of the German

(Wundtian) physiological approach. He “discounted the relevance of physiology to

psychology” (Daston, 1978, p. 196), his aim being to “systemize the mental experience of

all persons” (ibid. p. 195).

“Those […] who do not allow that mind is matter, he wrote, who hold that there is

in man a principle of action superior to the determination of physical necessity, a

brute or blind fate – must regard the application of the terms of Physiology or

Physics to the doctrine of the mind as either singularly inappropriate, or as

significant of a false hypothesis in regard to the character of the thinking

principle.” (Hamilton (1859) quoted in Daston, 1978, p. 196)

This kind of approach, however, “could not claim to be inductive in a strict sense”,

Daston writes, since introspection “examined only the individual consciousness and could

not, properly speaking, accumulate reinforcing states from the consciousness of another”

(ibid.). Introspection could thus “lay no claim to objectivity” (ibid.).

Strongly fashioned by Scottish enlightenment thinking, British psychology had to support

the tension created by holding both the belief on the “active powers of spirit” (ibid.), and

the commitment to empiricism as a scientific approach. Conditioned by their beliefs on

free-will, choice and volition, several British psychologists would have refused the

materialism implied by the view that the “mental phenomena of volition, sensation,

emotion, and consciousness itself [were] to be paired with, or reduced to, neural

excitations and localized to particular cerebral centers” (Daston, 1978, pp. 196-197).

Several British psychologists, Daston writes, “hoped that introspective and physiological

methods might coexist within a scientific psychology” (ibid. p. 198).

As in psychology, the use of introspection was defended in Britain by late nineteenth

century authors such as J. S. Mill and J. N. Keynes19. Their writings seems to show the

18 The “marginalist revolution” is a well-known episode in the history of psychology and economics. For references to this subject see Sent (2004) and Bruni and Sugden (2007).

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tension between mechanistic v/s mentalist behavior accounts was also an economic issue

by that time20.

On the American side (setting on which this paper is focused as it saw the emergence of

behaviorism as a movement), one finds institutionalism as a turn of the century research

program. Being an American social science, institutionalism (as psychology) was

influenced by “instinct-based theories of human agency” coming from “Darwin’s

introduction of biological explanations into behavioral analysis” (Asso and Fiorito, 2004,

p. 445).

During the first decades of the twentieth century several authors followed Thorstein

Veblen’s [1857-1929] instinct theory explanations of economic institutions. Early

institutionalism as supported by “W. James, W. Mc Dougall, and others” (ibid., p. 456)

instinct psychology:

“was used to attempt to broaden the perspective of economics by paying attention

to those aspects and motivations of the social environment that directly influenced

economic decisions and could not readily fit into the rubrics of traditional

economic theory. Thus, instincts, proclivities, and urges began to acquire the status

of “guiding principles” for a better understanding of human behavior.” (Asso and

Fiorito, 2004, p. 450)

7. On the rise and fall of (behaviorist) institutionalism

As shown in the preceding sections, the assumption of “guiding principles”, (i.e.

motivation), was avoided within the behaviorist program. In economics, criticism to

instinct theory came mainly from the institutionalist camp, the main target being Veblen’s

19 This paper does not deal with the concrete transmission of the mind/matter dualism from British moral philosophy to economics.20 Though written in German, Max Weber’s (1908) reaction to the use of psychophysical insights in economics is a clear example of the economists’ rejection of stimulus-response analysis. In Weber’s words:

“Every attempt to decide a priori which theories from other disciplines should be “fundamental” to political economy is meaningless, as every attempt to establish a “hierarchy” of sciences following Comte’s model. Not only, at least in general, are the general hypotheses and assumptions of the “sciences of nature” (in the usual sense of the word) precisely the less pertinent ones for our discipline. But again, and above all, precisely on the one point that makes the specificity of the questionings of our discipline – the economic theory (“the theory of value”) –, we unravel ourselves perfectly well all alone” (ibid., p. 914).

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conception of the instincts as hereditary traits (Asso and Fiorito, 2004). Behavior, the

critics thought, should be appraised by stimulus-response analysis and habit formation.

According to Lawrence K. Frank [1890-1968]21:

“if we acknowledge that man’s behavior is not uniquely volitional, but is a natural

phenomenon, we see at once that it must be, like all other phenomena, an affait of

antecedent and consequent and therefore a subject for scientific study. […] If we

ask how human behavior may be resolved into a sequence of antecedent and

consequent, we find that under the terms, stimulus and response, we have already

begun to study behavior as a response to an antecedent stimulus. This does not

mean that a stimulus (event, person, or thing) “causes” man’s behavior, but rather

that each person, from birth onward, develops a set of habits or patterns of behavior

by responding to the stimuli of the environment he meets; these habits are “touched

off” whenever the appropriate stimuli appear.” (Frank, 1924, p. 25)

Besides the positivistic motive so often advanced against the use of introspection in

economics, the behaviorist aim of social control was also present in the institutionalist

program as defended by Wesley Clair Mitchell [1874-1948]. According to Mill’s account

on institutional economics:

“The continuity with Progressivism is evident […]. We can see those same

tendencies very clearly in the work of the economist Wesley Clair Mitchell, who

was one of the behaviorists among the institutionalist school of American

economists. He showed his colleagues how economic theory should be transformed

so that it could deal directly with aggregates instead of making deductive

inferences from the needs and feelings of fictional individuals. At the same time,

the new knowledge was to be socially useful.” (Mills, 1998, p. 30)

In Asso and Fiorito’s words:

21 Lawrence K. Frank’s career and writings, Bryson (1998) writes: “represent a compelling case study in the linking of social science knowledge with techniques for improvement and control. An officer with the Rockefeller philanthropies and the Macy foundation during the period 1923-42, Frank was uniquely able to bridge the worlds of inquiry and technology. Thus, while he was an associate and intellectual ally of such important figures in American social science as Wesley C. Mitchell, Robert S. Lynd, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, Erik H. Erikson, and John Dollard, Frank never lost his fundamental concern for applying the knowledge of the social. More specifically, as the architect and administrator of several major foundation-sponsored programs in child development and parent education and in culture and personality, Frank formulated and advanced a sociopolitical project for the development and dissemination of new, “enlightened” methods for socializing children and adolescents. Through such methods, Frank believed, the individual would be securely integrated within the social, and a cooperative and pacified society would result” (Bryson, 1998, p. 403).

14

“much more than Veblen, interwar institutionalists were primarily concerned with

reforming society, expanding economic opportunities, and ameliorating the general

welfare conditions” (Asso and Fiorito, 2004, p. 463).

Finally, according to Mitchell’s own project, not only economics, but all social sciences

should follow the behaviorist turn.

“Psychologists, he wrote, are moving rapidly toward an objective conception and a

quantitative treatment of their problems. Their emphasis upon stimulus and

response sequences, upon conditioned reflexes; their eager efforts to develop

performance tests, their attempts to build up a technique of experiment, favor the

spread of the conception that all of the social sciences have a common aim – the

understanding of human behavor [sic]; a common method – the quantitative

analysis of behavior records; and a common aspiration – to devise ways of

experimenting upon behavior.” (Mitchell, 1925, p. 6)

In order to improve social welfare, Mitchell thought, economists should proceed by

“measuring objective costs and objective results” (Mitchell, 1925, p. 8). That would

“convert society’s blind fumbling for happiness into an intelligent process of

experimentation” (ibid.). Just as B. F. Skinner did (Section 4), Mitchell thought about

developing institutions such as “experimental schools, in which the physical and social

environments of the children are made to vary, with the aim of studying the relations

between the stimuli offered by the schools and the learning response” (Mitchell, 1925, p.

8). Economics too, he added, should be opened to “experiment with different systems of

remunerating labor, different forms of publicity, different organizations for distributing

products, different price policies, different methods of supervising public utilities, and the

like” (ibid.).

Institutionalism decayed from the 1930s because the shift from instinct psychology (on

which early (Veblen’s) institutionalism was based) to behaviorism (leading to a sort of

behaviorist institutionalism) would have “turned out to be exceedingly restrictive” (ibid.).

Behaviorist insitutionalists came to neglect “issues of cognition, motivation, and

creativity on which to build a new theory of human agency” (ibid., p. 446). Despite its

closeness to the American progressive values, institutionalism “began an irreversible

15

declining path” (Asso and Fiorito, 2004, p. 473) motivated by both internal and external

conditions22.

The mainstream economists’ reaction to both mentalism and (behavioral) institutionalism

consisted, it seems, in rejecting both introspection and control as economic subjects. The

so-called ordinal revolution has been claimed to be a behaviorist move within mainstream

economics (Lewin (1996), Asso and Fiorito (2003, 2004), Bruni and Sugden (2007)) for

its aim was to free economics from references to mentalist concepts and to introspection

as a method. In Lewin’s words:

“A behaviorist movement arose in economics, as theorists attempted to free

economics of all psychological elements. This movement contributed to the

replacement of the older theory of cardinal utility, with the new notion of ordinal

preferences.” (Lewin, 1996, p. 1295)

Introspection, however, continued to be used as an economic tool during the whole period

of the so-called ordinalist revolution. This was the case for Pareto (Bruni and Guala,

2001), Slutsky (Hands, 2007), Hicks and Allen (Samuelson, 1938; Hands, 2007), Robbins

(Hands, 2007), and Samuelson (Sen, 1973). According to Lewin’s lecture:

“Behaviorist mainstream economics was doomed to fail, for the theoretical practice

of “behaviorists” such as Samuelson contradicted their own professed

methodological views […] [If] economists were to become behaviorists, they had

to do so whole-heartedly and actually learn from the work of behaviorist

psychologists. But even as they reformulated preference theory so as to make its

behavioral implications more explicit, these mainstream economists nevertheless

ignored the work of behaviorist psychologists. They continued to obtain their

assumptions from introspection or a priori deduction, rather than looking to

rigorous experimental results as their own behaviorist methodology indicated that

they should […]. Inevitably, the professed behaviorism of mainstream economists

backfired. When some began to take seriously the quest for a rigorously empirical

22 For a detailed account on the causes of the decline of institutionalism, see Asso and Fiorito (2004, pp. 464-471). In their 2003 article, the authors also deal with Frank Knight’s reaction to control as an institutionalist feature. “While the behaviorists stressed the relevance of behavioral mechanisms as an instrument for social control, they write, Knight emphasized the role of persuasion through communication. To Knight, control appeared to be more a matter of “art” than of mechanical technique […]. Knight concluded that any attempt to influence or manipulate society through the laws of response to stimuli, although correct from a “scientific” point of view, was doomed to be ineffective.” (Asso and Fiorito, 2003, p. 21)

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economics, they found that utility theory performed quite badly.” (Lewin, 1996, p.

1318, emphasis added)

Let us note, however, that mainstream economics was never behaviorist if one respects

the definition of the term used by behaviorists themselves. With the “escape from

psychology” (Giocoli, 2003), economists were trying to free economic theory of

references to psychic concepts such as “utility” or “preference” as they explicitly

acknowledged. They were intending to free economics from introspection by building a

theory of choice out of (hypothetical) observations which was not at all behaviorism as

psychologists viewed it (Sections 3 and 4). Not only experimentation, but specially

control, was missing.

8. From introspection to cognition

According to Giocoli (2003), the economists’ “escape from psychology” was achieved

with Debreu’s axiomatization of choice theory in 1959 (Theory of Value). Only then the

economic theory became descriptive abandoning motivation as a behavior principle and

embracing an informational (axiomatic) approach to rationality (Giocoli, 2003). After

Debreu, Giocoli writes:

“a rational agent is defined as one whose preferences are complete and transitive.

The two axioms were not originally formulated to capture or mimic any particular

feature of human behaviour, nor did they emerge […] from the desire to find a

formal restriction capable of reproducing a given pattern of observed choices. [The

rational agent] is just a mathematical relation, an indexed complete preordering.”

(Giocoli, 2003, p. 122)23

As economics, postwar American psychology was strongly influenced by technological

(and cultural) changes. By the 1950s, new technology was present in the work of, namely,

23 Debreu’s step, however, may not be pictured as an escape from psychology, for psychology too made the step to an informational (cognitive) approach to behavior. In the “process of the cognitive (r)evolution” in psychology, Mandler writes:

“a variety of notions were offered that were to replace both stimulus-response behaviorism and its blood cousin – classic associationism. Most of the post-1950s developments rejected the associationist S-R behaviorist approaches, called themselves cognitive, and had aspects of organizational principles in their structure.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 181)

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Alan Turing [1912-1954] and John von Neumann [1903-1957] (Mandler, 2007) opening

the computer age doors to the human sciences. Psychologists such as Herbert Simon

(Newell, Shaw and Simon, 1958) started to figure out psychology as a Theory of Human

Problem Solving. The “historical preference of behaviorists”, they wrote:

“for a theory of the brain that pictured it as a passive photographic plate or

switchboard, rather than as an active computer, is no doubt connected with the

struggle against vitalism. The invention of the digital computer has acquainted the

world with a device – obviously a mechanism – whose response to stimuli is

clearly more complex and “active” than the response of more traditional switching

networks. It has provided us with operational and unobjectionable interpretations

of terms like “purpose”, “set”, and “insight.” The real importance of the digital

computer for the theory of higher mental processes lies not merely in allowing us

to realize such processes “in the mental” and outside the brain, but in providing us

with a much profounder idea than we hitherto had of the characteristics a

mechanism must possess if it is to carry out complex information-processing

tasks.” (Newell et al., p. 163)

Mandler’s historical account on the influence of postwar changes on American

psychology summarizes the situation in the following four points:

“In general the following four arguments can be advanced to explain the events

surrounding the cognitive resurgence: (1) part of John B. Watson’s program (and

its insistence on human and animal equivalences) prevented the success of

behaviorism and contributed to its replacement; (2) the change toward cognitive

approaches occurred slowly in different subfields over some ten to fifteen years

without an identifiable flashpoint or leader, so the term revolution is probably

inappropriate because there were no cataclysmic events; (3) the behaviorist dogmas

against which the revolution occurred were essentially confined to the United

States, and while behaviorism reigned in the United States, structuralist, cognitive,

and functionalist psychologies were dominant in Germany, Britain, France, and

even Canada; (4) stimulus-response behaviorism was not suddenly displaced but,

as a cognitive approach evolved, behaviorism faded because of its failure to solve

basic questions about human thought, action, and memory in particular.” (Mandler,

2007, p. 175)

According to this viewpoint, cognitive science slowly overtook behaviorism replacing

stimulus-response analysis as the main approach to behavior analysis. Economics too

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embraced a new rationality concept fashioned in an informational (axiomatic) way (i.e.

“rationality as consistency” replacing “rationality as maximization” (Giocoli, 2003)).

Since the new rationality concept reached the economics core right after the ordinalists’

program, economics seems to have shifted directly from introspective to cognitive

behavior accounts bypassing behaviorism (i.e. control) as an economic subject.

9. Bypassing control as an economic subject

If both psychology and economics embraced cognitive behavior accounts, what happened

then with behavioral economics as a subfield? According to recent lectures, behavioral

economics failed to succeed as a mainstream subfield before the very end of the twentieth

century. Early behavioral economics as promoted namely by Herbert Simon, would have

failed because of its radical departure from mainstream economics (Sent, 2004)24. Instead,

“new” behavioral economics would have succeeded because of its use of the “rationality

assumption of mainstream economics as a benchmark from which to consider deviations”

(ibid. p. 750)25.

Recent surveys about the establishment of behavioral economics place the recent

developments of the subfield in a quite long history of economics and psychology26. As

they deal mostly with the main features of the new approaches, they give a sort of “crude

overview of the historical connections between economics and psychology” (Sent, 2004,

p. 740). They provide quite fast accounts on “psychology” and “behaviorism”

overlooking control as a composing part of American psychology in the twentieth

century. “New” behavioral economics, these lectures claim, would have emerged from

behavioral decision research (BDR) in psychology leading to Kahneman and Tversky’s

24 The “technique used in the early behavioral contributions, Sent writes, was computer simulation […]. Simulation studies allowed the exploration and analysis of previously inaccessible phenomena. Detailed computational models were set up to analyze how people, tasks, and networks are interrelated in complex, dynamic, and adaptive systems.” (Sent, 2004, p. 740)25 According to Sent (2004): “Old behavioral economics relied heavily on the insights of [Herbert] Simon, who started from a conviction that neoclassical economists were not all that serious about describing the formal foundations of rationality, whereas he was” (Sent, 2004, p. 750). However Simon’s ideas, she claims, “are missing from the more recent developments. Instead, these rely on the insights from Kahneman and Tversky that use the rationality assumption of mainstream economics as a benchmark from which to consider deviations.” (Sent, 2004, p. 750)26 See Rabin (1998), Sent (2004), and Angner and Loewenstein (forthcoming).

19

Prospect Theory (1979). Both BDR and Kahneman and Tversky’s theory are pictured as

the result of the cognitive turn in psychology.

According to Mandler’s account, however, Kahneman and Tversky’s paper is not as

cognitive as it is being presented. Prospect theory, Mandler writes:

“deals primarily with human risk behavior and related matters of choice, and

whereas it had little direct influence on the thought and memory field, it has

colored many aspects of contemporary psychology.” (Mandler, 2007, p. 234)

Kahneman and Tversky’s theory deals a lot with perception analysis and seems to be as

influenced by stimulus-response studies as it is by cognitive science. The framing effect

concept, indeed, one of the landmarks of the new subfield, was borrowed from Harry

Helson’s Adaptation-Level Theory, which is far from being a cognitive approach27. In

Kahneman and Tversky’s words:

“An essential feature of the present theory is that the carriers of value are changes

in wealth or welfare, rather than final states. This assumption is compatible with

basic principles of perception and judgment. Our perceptual apparatus is attuned to

the evaluation of changes or differences rather than to the evaluation of absolute

magnitudes. When we respond to attributes such as brightness, loudness, or

temperature, the past and present context of experience defines an adaptation level,

or reference point, and stimuli are perceived in relation to this reference point

[Helson (1964, Adaptation-Level Theory)]. The same principle applies to non-

sensory attributes such as health, prestige, and wealth. The same level of wealth,

for example, may imply abject poverty for one person and great riches for another

– depending on their current assets” (Kahneman et Tversky, 1979, p. 277).

As Kanneman and Tversky’s, Tibor Scitovsky’s forerunner contribution to behavioral

economics (Camerer and Loewenstein (2004), Anger and Loewenstein (forthcoming))

was also based on Helson’s theory. Scitovsky’s Joyless Economy (1976) looks quite close

27 Helson’s theory is based on stimulus-response analysis and looks quite close to L. K. Frank’s view of (behaviorist) psychology as presented in Section 7. The basic premise of the theory, Helson wrote, “is that an individual’s attitudes, values, ways of structuring his experiences, judgments of physical, aesthetic, and symbolic objects, intellectual and emotional behavior, learning, and interpersonal relations all represent modes of adaptation to environmental and organismic forces […]. Stimuli impinge upon organisms already adapted to what has gone before, and internal states depend upon previously existing internal conditions as well as external inciters to action. […] stimuli determines the adjustment or adaptation level underlying all forms of behavior.” (ibid., p. 37)

20

to behaviorism, as it seems to suggest control as an economic practice. Mainstream

economics, Scitovsky wrote:

“overlooks the fact that tastes are highly variable […]. It also overlooks the

possibility that the same influences that modify our tastes might also modify our

ability to derive satisfaction from the things that cater to our tastes. In short, the

economist’s standard procedure of postulating that each consumer knows best what

is good for him and trusting the consumer’s behavior to reflect that knowledge

seems to be unscientific […]. [The economist] does not consider it his business to

question the consumers’ competence at maximizing whatever they maximize, nor

does he advise them how best to do it.” (Scitovsky, 1976, pp. 5-6)

Scitovsky’s advice, and that of his followers, was focused on the influence of habit

formation on economic welfare. The race for “status and rank” was one of the main

targets of this criticism.

“Status and rank, Scitovsky wrote, are themselves habit-forming: losing status and

losing rank can be a source of suffering and the fear of losing them a source of

anxiety. Indeed, competitive pressures, the tensions of modern society, usually

refer to the anxiety due to the ever-present dangers of such loss.” (ibid., p. 132)

The solution to this problem, Scitovsky and others thought, was to be found in education

(Scitovsky (1976), Layard (1980)). In Richard Layard’s (1980) words:

“modern men have been encouraged to think they have a duty to do the best for

themselves, since this will help out the invisible hand […] the utility function could

be changed by education, so that people got more pleasure from the welfare of

others and less from the feeling of being better than others are […]. If we spend so

much time putting people in order, can we really expect ourselves to work for

motives unconnected with rank-order? Yet if we cannot, it is not going to be easy

to improve human welfare […]. If personality is largely constructed in the first six

years of life, perhaps the best hope lies in a moral code which forbids all

comparisons between children until they are, say, six” (Layard, 1980, p. 745).

This was not far from B. F. Skinner’s thoughts about social welfare. In order to control

the American race for consumption, Skinner wrote:

“we do not need to speak of frugality or austerity as if we meant sacrifice. There

are contingencies of reinforcement in which people continue to pursue (and even

21

overtake) happiness while consuming far less than they now consume. The

experimental analysis of behavior has clearly shown that it is not the quantity of

goods that counts (as the law of supply and demand suggests) but the contingent

relation between goods and behavior […]. In an experimental community

contingencies of reinforcement which encourage unnecessary spending can be

corrected.” (Skinner, 1976, p. x)

Would it not be that adaptive-type behavior accounts were longtime rejected from

economics because of its close ties to control?

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