Introduction

            In this blog post I will discuss Noam Chomsky’s 1971 paper ‘Psychology and Ideology’ where Chomsky critiques Skinner’s popular science book ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner claimed that freewill was an illusion and we could explain it away using an effective behavioural science. And once we did this we would be in a position to use behavioural science to engineer a more effective society than the one we currently live in.

I will argue that while Chomsky sometimes caricatures Skinner, and he is blind to the strengths of behaviourism as a discipline, his criticisms still hit the mark. Skinner’s remarks in ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’, exaggerated what the science of behaviour was capable of in 1971, and is still beyond what behavioural science can achieve 50 years later. To this end, Chomsky’s 1971 paper did the field of psychology and philosophy a favour with its terse criticism of Skinner’s attempt at popular science.

Psychology and Ideology

 At the beginning of ‘Psychology and Ideology’ Chomsky noted when reflecting on psychological claims that we need to ask two different kinds of questions: (1) What is the scientific status of the claims, (2) What social or ideological needs do they serve. He correctly noted that these two claims are logically independent. He argues that Skinner’s empirical claims are vacuous and completely without scientific merit. And he argues that because of their null scientific status they can serve the purposes of any would be dictator as rhetoric whether the dictator was on the left or the right.

            Chomsky even goes as far to argue that the these of ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ results in the whole project being incoherent:

 “But if his thesis is true, then there is also no point in his having written the book or our reading it. For the only point could be to modify behavior, and behavior, according to the thesis, is entirely controlled by arrangement of reinforcers. Therefore, reading the book can modify behavior only if it is a reinforcer, that is, if reading the book increases the probability of the behavior which led to reading the book (assuming an appropriate state of deprivation).” (Psychology and Ideology: p.21).

This is a forced choice it is probable that there are some true claims in the book and some false claims in the book. The cause of us reading the book could be specified in various manners; being reinforced by reading that class of book in the past; a book recommendation from a friend whose recommendations in the past have been reinforcing. But Chomsky doesn’t ask what the cause of reading it is; he asks what the point of reading it. He says on Skinner’s central thesis, the only point of reading the book, is that it will modify behaviour. And it will only modify behaviour if it is a reinforcer, that is if reading the book increases the probability of the behaviour which led to reading the book (ibid p. 21). This is a strange interpretation of Skinner’s project. We have already discussed possible causes of reading the book. Possible consequences of reading the book are negative reinforcement; reading the book takes away boredom and increases the probability of reading more books like this in the future. Or the reader could be punished as a result of finding the book unintelligible, and excruciating to read, which will decrease the probability of reading books of this class in the future. Or the person could find the book positively reinforcing and this may lead to reading more books of this class and possible seeking a career in behavioural psychology.

            It is important to note that behavioural psychology doesn’t stand or fall based on what point each individual gets from reading one popular book by B.F. Skinner, there are now over a hundred years of behavioural research. And behavioural science should be evaluated on its own terms, which are the degree to which their principles have given us the ability to predict and control the behaviour of various organisms.

            Chomsky goes on to argue as follows:

“Consider the claim that reading the book might reinforce such behavior. Unfortunately, the claim is clearly false, if we use the term ‘reinforce’ with anything like its technical meaning. Recall that reading the book reinforces the desired behavior only if it is a consequence of the behavior; and obviously putting our fate in the hands of behavioural technologists is not behavior that led to (and hence can be reinforced by) reading Skinner’s book. Therefore, the claim can be true only if we deprive the term ‘reinforce’ of its technical meaning.” (Ibid p. 22)

Reading books in the past has been reinforced positively in our school and college environment. Doing so has led to reinforcing consequences in the past. Reading behavioural books in the past (Watson’s Psychology as the Behaviourist Views it), led Skinner to pursue a career in behaviourism, this has been reinforcing in terms of (discovering things which he finds reinforcing), and a long career (which he found reinforcing). Similarly, for us, the general public, reading in the past has been reinforced, if ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ is in the stimulus class of popular science books people found reinforcing in the past then this may lead to people reading it. Lots of people reading it could influence behavioural change which will alter the probability of how people behave in the future. What courses they study, how they manage selection by consequences etc[1].

Chomsky’s critique though goes beyond the idea of reinforcing consequences of reading the Beyond, Freedom, and Dignity. He is also critical of Skinner’s casual manner of translating ordinary discourse into behaviourist language, and at the perceived lack of progress in behavioural science.

“Because of this unwillingness, there is also no discernible progress – today’s formulations in this domain are hardly different from those of 15 or 20 years ago – and no convincing refutation, for those who are untroubled by the fact that explanations can be invented on the spot, whatever the facts may be, within a system that is devoid of substance.” (Ibid pp 29-30)

Here it is fair to say Chomsky does have a point. Skinner had a penchant for inventing explanations for any behaviour or cognitive capacities in terms of reinforcement. And there was little indication that Skinner was overly concerned about testing the empirical validity of his claims about various complex behaviour being explicable in terms of reinforcement. Even today some behaviourists who have been heavily influenced by Skinner are critical of him for this tendency:

Evolution was for many years dramatically gene-centric…ontogenetic evolution was virtually ignored…behaviour analysis seemed to have made the opposite error…A good example is provided by the transcript of the recorded interview between B.F. Skinner and E.O. Wilson, in which almost every specialized, evolutionarily established behaviour put forward by Wilson was promptly interpreted by in Operant terms (Hayes and Sanford 2014 p. 115).

So, Chomsky’s criticism of Skinner casually translating every complex trait into something explicable in terms of operant conditioning is to the point. However, his criticism about a lack of advancement in behavioural science doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny. Chomsky wrote ‘Ideology and Psychology’ in 1971 and his claim that there hadn’t been a huge advancement in behavioural science since around 1950 isn’t true.

             Behavioural science since 1950 had undergone rapid changes. Breland and Breland’s (1963) work on animal training demonstrated that instinctual drift would mean that non-human animals’ behaviour wasn’t as malleable as earlier naïve behaviourists thought. Skinner, who had long stressed both phylogenetic and ontogenetic factors playing a role in animal behaviour welcomed the work of the Breland’s. On Skinner’s way of thinking it was the behaviourists job to discover the different ways behaviour could be shaped and controlled through different schedules of reinforcement. The behaviourist wasn’t in the game of stipulating how malleable different organisms were. Nonetheless, despite the Breland’s work being congenial to Skinner’s behaviourism, for the public, instinctive drift made the thoughts of behaviourists gaining control over people and shaping their behaviour seem less threatening.

             As behavioural scientists continued to study human’s operating under schedules of reinforcement there was more reason to think that humans couldn’t be just shaped at a whim through schedules of reinforcement. Hundreds of behavioural studies on rule governed behaviour[2], have demonstrated that when humans were operating under rules this made them less sensitive to the contingencies of reinforcement. Children below the age of 5 could be shaped under schedules of reinforcement in a similar way to a rat, but once they passed 5 and could follow rules their behaviour became less sensitive to the contingencies of reinforcement (Bentall).

            Like the Breland’s work, work on rule-following sprung up from within behaviourism (Skinner 1963) and demonstrated that human behaviour was more complex than the behaviour of other organisms. The year Skinner wrote ‘Ideology and Psychology Sidman (1971) experimentally demonstrated that humans could derive untrained stimulus equivalence. And in the years since Steven Hayes (1989) demonstrated that humans could derive untrained relational frames (coordination, comparison, hierarchy, etc). The human under behavioural science began to closer resemble the human as described by cognitive scientists (built with innate constraints, have a species-specific capacity for productive reasoning etc), than it did the human as described by early behaviourists.  

Now Chomsky would parse some of these studies as resulting in the death of behaviourism as derived by Skinner.  However, things don’t have to be parsed in this manner. One could look at the work of behaviourists, such as Rescorla, Breland, Sidman, Lowe et all’s experimental refutations of previously held beliefs by behaviourists as a sign of an evolving healthy discipline.

One thing that should be emphasised was that when Skinner was writing ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ work on rule following in behavioural science was being done which was already demonstrating that we couldn’t simply reinforce behaviours we wanted repeated, when people operated under verbal rules, they were less sensitive to the contingencies of reinforcement than non-verbal animals. Thus, even for behaviourists at the time Skinner wrote ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity his work was outdated.  Society couldn’t be shaped in the manner Skinner wanted.

Chomsky goes on to quote Skinner’s claims about techniques we could use to control speech. Chomsky notes, correctly that Skinner’s science isn’t up to the task of doing such job. But he notes it would be abhorrent if such controls could be put in place:

Or consider freedom of speech. Skinner’s approach suggests that control of speech by direct punishment should be avoided, but that it is quite appropriate for speech to be controlled, say, by restricting good jobs to people who say what is approved by the designer of the culture. In accordance with Skinner’s ideas, these would be no violation of ‘academic freedom’ if promotions were granted only to those who conform, in their speech and writings, to the rules of the culture, though it would be wrong to go farther and punish those who deviate by saying what they believe to be true. Such deviants will simply remain in a state of deprivation. In fact, by giving people strict rules to follow, so that they know just what to say to be ‘reinforced’ by promotion, we will be ‘making the world safer’ and thus achieving the ends of behavioural technology (74,81). The literature of freedom would, quite properly, reject and abhor such controls. (Ibid pp. 30-31).

What Chomsky doesn’t note though is that Skinner’s philosophy always had safeguards in place so those under control had a means to resist any science of behavioural engineering.

            Since 1953 Skinner had written about countercontrol as a way organisms had of resisting being controlled by others. Spencer et al (2022) define countercontrol as follows:

“Countercontrol is a Skinnerian Operant concept that posits that an individual’s attempts to exert control over another person’s behaviour may evoke a countercontrolling response from the person being controlled that functions to avoid or escape potentially aversive conditions generated by the controller.” (Spencer et al p. 457)

Skinner had targeted our notion that people are free. He argued that people only described themselves as free when they could not identify the variables which were controlling their behaviour. He also noted that when people are under the control of positive reinforcers, they often describe their behaviour as freely chosen. He gave the example of state lottery which works as an implicit tax on people and noted that people think they freely chose to do the lottery. He emphasised the point that people value freedom because it is controlled by positive reinforcement and as a result does not occasion countercontrol (Delprato 2002 p. 195).

            Skinner warned that evidence of lack of countercontrol as an indication of “freedom” was dangerous. Belief that we are freely acting can lead to inadvertently being subject to long term aversive consequences resulting from our behaviour. This can happen when the controller is aware of these long-term consequences and the controlee is the ultimate loser in this scenario (ibid p. 195).

            Skinner argues that the correct solution to control is not to abolish it (he thinks this is impossible), but to analyse it and see if this is the type of control and consequence we want and if not to figure out a different type of controlling system to work within:

“Humans need (a) to eliminate aversive control (often a practical impossibility), (b) to identify positive reinforcement and other inconspicuous forms of control that have deferred aversive consequences, and (c) to substitute positive reinforcement contingencies without such consequences.” (Delprato p. 196).

Delprato argues that the above sequence is practically impossible, so we are in effect stuck with the use of countercontrol.

            As we discussed above since the mid-sixties, we knew that once people begin to follow verbal rules their behaviour isn’t shaped by the contingencies of reinforcement in the same way as non-human behaviour. Nonetheless, control and counter control are still facts in any society we live in. Relational Frame Theorists, behaviourists who have been studying emergent properties of verbal behaviour, have recently tried to tie countercontrol in with derived relational responding to see if we could use the concept now that our understanding of rule-following behaviour has expanded beyond Skinner’s conception (Spencer et al 2022).

            As things stand 50 years after Skinner wrote his ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ we still are nowhere near developing the capacity to behaviourally engineer our society. While Chomsky sometimes caricatured Skinner’s behaviourist position. He was surely correct to note that Skinner’s proclamations about the capacities of behavioural science to engineer our culture went well beyond anything possible in 1971 or anything possible today.

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[1] I am not hear arguing that we can explain people reading books entirely in terms of reinforcement, I am merely demonstrating that Chomsky’s quick argument for incoherence doesn’t work.

[2] See for example: Weiner et al (1964), Lippman and Myer (1967), Lowe et al (1983), Hayes et al (1986).