THE LEGACY OF JOHN B. WATSON’S BEHAVIORIST MANIFESTO FOR APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

THE LEGACY OF JOHN B. WATSON’S BEHAVIORIST MANIFESTO FOR APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

1. Watson’s Legacy: Applied Behavior Analysis

   • As for applied behavior analysis, Baer et al. (1968) described its seven dimensions in the following order: The field “must be applied, behavioral, and analytic. In addition, it should be technological, conceptually systematic, and effective, and it should display some generality.
     • “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science”
     • its legacy for the latter’s conceptual systems dimension.

2. The Conceptual Systems Dimension: Naturalism

   • listed this dimension fifth among the seven dimensions of applied behavior analysis. By then, behavior analysis was psychology’s leading neobehaviorism and well-enough established as a system that other dimensions were more important for founding applied behavior analysis
   • did not specify a particular system, it was Skinner’s
   • They referred only to operant principles (e.g., reinforcement), operant processes (e.g., fading), and operant concepts

3. Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It

   • His article did not defend naturalism so much as criticize the psychology of consciousness and advance the psychology of behavior, as follows.

4. The psychology of consciousness.

   • In both cases, consciousness was their subject matter, but not, in both cases, what they studied
     • In the first psychology of consciousness, human consciousness was psychology’s only subject matter and what it studied through introspection
       • Structuralism studied conscious states and their elements, in particular, sensations, feelings, and images. Functionalism studied conscious processes, for instance, sensing, thinking, and remembering
       • They were dualistic in assuming that consciousness existed independent of behavior
       • In the second psychology of consciousness, consciousness was psychology’s subject matter, but not what it studied. It studied behavior for methodological reasons: Consciousness could not be objectively defined, directly observed, or accurately and reliably measured

5. The psychology of behavior

   • The psychology of behavior Watson (1913b) advanced also came in two varieties
   • In both, behavior was their subject matter and what they studied, but for different reasons
   • Watson’s (1913b) methodological behaviorism did not deny the existence of consciousness. As he wrote in his introductory paragraph, “Introspection forms no essen‑ tial part of [psychology’s] methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretations in terms of consciousness”

6. The Behavioral Dimension: Objectivity

   • listed the behavioral dimension second among the seven dimensions of applied behavior analysis
   • However, he did not use the term behavioral, but instead, the term, objective: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science

7. The Behavioral Dimension

   • usually studies what subjects can be brought to do rather than what they can be brought to say; unless, of course, a verbal response is of interest. Accordingly a subject’s verbal description of his own non-verbal behavior usually would not be accepted as a measure of his actual behavior unless it were independently substantiated