A Psychological Behaviorism Theory of Personality

ARTHUR W. STAATS

135 BEHAVIORAL APPROACHES AND PERSONALITY 135

Traditional Behaviorism and Personality 135 Behavior Therapy and Personality 137 THE STATE OF THEORY IN THE FIELD

OF PERSONALITY 140

The Need for Theorists Who Work the Field 141 We Need Theory Constructed in Certain Ways

and With Certain Qualities and Data 142 PERSONALITY: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL

BEHAVIORISM THEORY 143 Basic Developments 143

Additional Concepts and Principles 146 The Concept of Personality 147 Deﬁnition of the Personality Trait 149 The Principles of the Personality Theory 150

Plasticity and Continuity in Personality 150 The Multilevel Nature of the Theory

and the Implications 151 PERSONALITY THEORY FOR THE

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 151 Biology and Personality 152 Learning and Personality 152 Human Learning and Personality 152 Developmental Psychology 152 Social Psychology 153

Personality Tests and Measurement 153 Abnormal Psychology 155

Application of the Personality Theory 155 CONCLUSION 156

REFERENCES 157

This chapter has several aims. One is that of considering the role of behaviorism and behavioral approaches in the fields of personality theory and measurement. A second and central aim is that of describing a particular and different behavioral approach to the fields of personality theory and personality measurement. A third concern is that of presenting some of the philosophy- and methodology-of-science characteristics of this behavioral approach relevant to the field of personality theory. A fourth aim is to characterize the field of personality theory from the perspective of this philosophy and methodology of science. And a fifth aim is to project some developments for the future that derive from this theory perspective. Addressing these aims constitutes a pretty full agenda that will require economical treatment.

BEHAVIORAL APPROACHES AND PERSONALITY Behavioral approaches to personality might seem of central importance to personology because behaviorism deals with learning and it is pretty generally acknowledged that learning

affects personality. Moreover, behaviorist theories were once the models of what theory could be in psychology. But certain features militate against behaviorism’s signiﬁcance for the ﬁeld of personality. Those features spring from the traditional behaviorist mission.

Traditional Behaviorism and Personality

One feature is behaviorism’s search for generallaws. That is ingrained in the approach, as we can see from its strategy of discovering learning-behavior principles with rats, pigeons, dogs, and cats—for the major behaviorists in the ﬁrst and second generation were animal psychologists who assumed that those learning-behavior principles would constitute a com- plete theory for dealing with any and all types of human behavior. John Watson, in behaviorism’s ﬁrst generation, showed this, as B. F. Skinner did later. Clark Hull (1943) was quite succinct in stating unequivocally about his theory that

“all behavior, individual and social, moral and immoral, normal and psychopathic, is generated from the same primary laws” (p. v). Even Edward Tolman’s goal, which he later

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136 A Psychological Behaviorism Theory of Personality

admitted was unreachable, was to constitute through animal study a general theory of human behavior. The ﬁeld of personality, in contrast, is concerned with individual differences, with humans, and this represents a schism of interests.

A second, even more important, feature of behaviorism arises in the fact that personality as conceived in personology lies within the individual, where it cannot be observed. That has always raised problems for an approach that placed scien- tiﬁc methodology at its center and modeled itself after logical positivism and operationism. Watson had decried as mentalis- tic the inference of concepts of internal, unobservable causal processes. For him personality could only be considered as the sum total of behavior, that is, as an observable effect, not as a cause. Skinner’s operationism followed suit. This, of course, produced another, even wider, schism with personology because personality is generally considered an internal process thatdeterminesexternal behavior. That is the raison d’être for the study of personality.

Tolman, who along with Hull and Skinner was one of the most prominent second-generation behaviorists, sought to resolve the schism in his general theory. As a behaviorist he was concerned with how conditioning experiences, the independent variable, acted on the organism’s responding, the dependent variable. But he posited that there was some- thing in between: the intervening variable, which also helped determine the organism’s behavior. Cognitions were intervening variables. Intelligence could be an intervening variable.

This methodology legitimated a concept like personality.

However, the methodology was anathema to Skinner.

Later, Hull and Kenneth Spence (1944) took the in-between position that intervening variables should be considered just logical devices, not to be interpreted as standing for any real psychological events within the individual. These differences were played out in literature disputes for some time. That was not much of a platform for constructing psychology theory such as personology. The closest was Tolman’s consideration of personality as an intervening variable. But he never developed this concept, never stipulated what personality is, never derived a program of study from the theory, and never employed it to understand any kind of human behavior. Julian Rotter (1954) picked up Tolman’s general approach, however, and elaborated an axiomatic theory that also drew from Hull’s approach to theory construction. As was true for Hull, the axiomatic constructionstyleof the theory takes precedence over the goal of producing a theory that is useful in confronting the empirical events to which the theory is addressed.

To exemplify this characteristic of theory, Rotter’s social learning has no program to analyze the psychometric instruments that stipulate aspects of personality, such as intelligence, depression, interests, values, moods, anxiety, stress, schizophrenia, or sociopathy. His social learning theory,

moreover, does not provide a theory of what personality tests are and do. Nor does the theory call for the study of the learning and functions of normal behaviors such as language, reading, problem-solving ability, or sensorimotor skills. The same is true with respect to addressing the phenomena of abnormal behavior. For example, Rotter (1954) described the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) but in a very conventional way. There are no analyses of the different personality traits measured on the test in terms of their behavioral composition or of the independent variables (e.g., learning history) that result in individual differences in these and other traits. Nor are there analyses of how individual differences in traits affect other people’s responses to the individuals or of how individual differences in the trait in turn act on the individual’s behavior. For example, a person with a trait of paranoia is more suspicious than others are. What in behavioral terms does being suspicious consist of, how is that trait learned, and how does it have its effects on the person’s behavior and the behavior of others? The approach taken here is that a behavioral theory of personality must analyze the phenomena of the ﬁeld of personality in this manner. Rotter’s social learning theory does not do these things, nor do the other social learning theories.

Rather, his theory inspired academic studies to test his for- mal concepts such as expectancy, need potential, need value, freedom of movement, and the psychological situation. This applied even to the personality-trait concept he introduced, thelocus of control—whether people believe that they themselves, others, or chance determines the outcome of the situa- tions in which the individuals ﬁnd themselves. Although it has been said that this trait is affected in childhood by parental re- ward for desired behaviors, studies to show that differential training of the child produces different locus-of-control characteristics remain to be undertaken. Tyler, Dhawan, and Sinha (1989) have shown that there is a class difference in locus of control (measured by self-report inventory). But this does not represent a program for studying learning effects even on that trait, let alone on the various aspects of personality.

The social learning theories of Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel are not considered here. However, each still carries the theory-oriented approach of second-generation behaviorism in contrast to the phenomena-oriented theory construction of the present approach. For example, there are many labora- tory studies of social learning theory that aim to show that children learn through imitation. But there are not programs to study individual differences in imitation, the cause of such differences, and how those differences affect individual differences in important behaviors (e.g., the ability to copy letters, learn new words, or accomplish other actual learning tasks of the child). Bandura’s approach actually began in a loose social learning framework. Then it moved toward a

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Behavioral Approaches and Personality 137

behavioral approach several years later, drawing on the approach to be described here as well as the approach of Skinner, and later it moved toward including a more cognitive termi- nology. Mischel (1968) ﬁrst took a Watsonian-Skinnerian approach to personality and assessment, as did other radical behaviorists. He later abandoned that position (Mischel, 1973) but, like the other social learning theorists, offered no program for study stipulating what personality is, how it is learned, how it functions, and how personality study relates to psychological measurement.

When all is said and done, then, standard behaviorism has not contributed a general and systematic program for the study of personality or personality measurement. It has features that interfere with doing so. Until they are overcome in a fundamental way (which Tolmanian social learning approaches did not provide), those features represent an impass- able barrier.

Behavior Therapy and Personality

The major behaviorists such as Hull, Skinner, and Tolman were animal learning researchers. None of them analyzed the learning of functional human behaviors or traits of behavior.

Skinner’s empirical approach to human behavior centered on the use of his technology, that is, his operant conditioning ap- paratus. His approach was to use this “experimental analysis of behavior” methodology in studying a simple, repetitive response of a subject that was automatically reinforced (and recorded). That program was implemented by his students in studies reinforcing psychotic patients, individuals with mental retardation, and children with autism with edibles and such for pulling a knob. Lovaas (1977), in the best developed program among this group, did not begin to train his autistic children in language skills until after the psychological behaviorism (PB) program to be described had provided the foundation. Al- though Skinner is widely thought to have worked with children’s behavior, that is not the case. He constructed a crib for infants that was air conditioned and easy to clean, but the crib had no learning or behavioral implications or suggestions. He also worked with programmed learning, but that was a delim- ited technology and did not involve behavior analyses of the intellectual repertoires taught, and the topic played out after a few years. Skinner’s experimental analysis of behavior did not indicate how to research functional human behaviors or problems of behavior or how they are learned.

Behavior Therapy

The original impetus for the development of behavior therapy (which in the present usage includes behavior modiﬁcation, behavior analysis, cognitive behavior therapy, and behavior

assessment) does not derive from Hull, Skinner, Tolman, or Rotter, although they and Dollard and Miller (1950) helped stimulate a general interest in the possibility of applications.

One of the original sources of behavior therapy came from Great Britain, where a number of studies were conducted of simple behavior problems treated by using conditioning principles, either classical conditioning or reinforcement. The learning framework was not taken from an American behaviorist’s theory but from European developments of conditioning principles. As an example, Raymond (see Eysenck, 1960) treated a man with a fetish for baby carriages by classical conditioning. The patient’s many photographs of baby carriages were presented singly as conditioned stimuli paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus. Under this extended conditioning the man came to avoid the pictures and baby carriages. The various British studies using conditioning were collected in a book edited by Hans Eysenck (1960). Another of the foundations of behavior therapy came from the work of Joseph Wolpe. He employed Hull’s theory nominally and loosely in several endeavors, including his systematic desen- sitization procedure for treating anxiety problems. It was his procedure and his assessment of it that were important.

A third foundation of behavior therapy came from my PB approach that is described here. As will be indicated, it began with a very broad agenda, that of analyzing human behavior generally employing its learning approach, including behaviors in the natural situation. Its goal included making analyses of and treating problems of specific human behavior problems of interest to the applied areas of psychology. Following several informal applications, my first published analysis of a behavior in the naturalistic situation concerned a journal report of a hospitalized schizophrenic patient who said the opposite of what was called for. In contrast to the psychodynamic inter- pretation of the authors, the PB analysis was that the abnormal behavior was learned through inadvertent reinforcement given by the treating doctors. This analysis suggested the treatment—that is, not to reinforce the abnormal behavior, the opposite speech, on the one hand, and to reinforce normal speech, on the other (Staats, 1957). This analysis presented what became the orientation and principles of the American behavior modification field: (a) deal with actual behavior problems, (b) analyze them in terms of reinforcement principles, (c) take account of the reinforcement that has created the problem behavior, and (d) extinguish abnormal or undesirable behavior through nonreinforcement while creating normal behavior by reinforcement.

Two years later, my long-time friend and colleague Jack Michael and his student Teodoro Ayllon (see Ayllon &

Michael, 1959), used this analysis of psychotic behavior and these principles of behavior modiﬁcation to treat behavioral symptoms in individual psychotic patients in a hospital. Their

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138 A Psychological Behaviorism Theory of Personality

study provided strong veriﬁcation of the PB behavior modiﬁ- cation approach, and its publication in a Skinnerian journal had an impact great enough to be called the “seeds of the behavioral revolution” by radical behaviorists (Malott, Whaley, &

Malott, 1997, p. 175). Ayllon and Michael’s paper was written as though this approach derived from Skinnerian behaviorism and this error was repeated in many works that came later. For example, Fordyce (see 1990) followed Michael’s suggestion both in using the PB principles and in considering his pain theory to be Skinnerian.

The study of child behavior modiﬁcation began similarly.

Following my development of the behavior modification principles with simple problems, I decided that a necessary step was to extend behavior analysis to more complex behavior that required long-term treatment. At UCLA (where I took my doctoral degree in general experimental and completed clini- cal psychology requirements) I had worked with dyslexic children. Believing that reading is crucially important to human adjustment in our society, I selected this as a focal topic of study—both remedial training as well as the original learning of reading. My first study—done with Judson Finley, Karl Minke, Richard Schutz, and Carolyn Staats—was ex- ploratory and was used in a research grant application I made to the U.S. Office of Education. The study was based on my view that the central problem in dyslexia is motivational.

Children fail in learning because their attention and participation are not maintained in the long, effortful, and nonreinforc- ing (for many children) learning task that involves thousands and thousands of learning trials. In my approach the child was reinforced for attending and participating, and the training materials I constructed ensured that the child would learn everything needed for good performance. Because reading training is so extended and involves so many learning trials, it is necessary to have a reinforcing system for the long haul, unlike the experimental analysis of behavior studies with children employing simple responses and M&Ms. I thus introduced the token reinforcer system consisting of poker chips backed up by items the children selected to work for (such as toys, sporting equipment, and clothing). When this token reinforcer system was adopted for work with adults, it was called the token economy (see Ayllon & Azrin, 1968) and, again, considered part of Skinner’s radical behaviorism.

With the training materials and the token reinforcement, the adolescents who had been poor students became attentive, worked well, and learned well. Thus was the token methodology born, a methodology that was to be generally applied.

In 1962 and 1964 studies we showed the same effect with preschool children ﬁrst learning to read. Under reinforcement their attention and participation and their learning of reading was very good, much better than that displayed by the usual

four-year-old. But without the extrinsic reinforcement, their learning behavior deteriorated, and learning stopped. In reporting this and the treatment of dyslexia (Staats, 1963;

Staats & Butterfield, 1965; Staats, Finley, Minke, & Wolf, 1964; Staats & Staats, 1962), I projected a program for using these child behavior modification methods in studying a wide variety of children’s (and adults’) problems. The later development of the field of behavior modification showed that this program functioned as a blueprint for the field that later developed. (The Sylvan Learning Centers also use methods similar to those of PB’s reading treatments, with similar results.)

Let me add that I took the same approach in raising my own children, selecting important areas to analyze for the application of learning-behavior principles to improve and advance their development as well as to study the complex learning in- volved. For example, in 1960 I began working with language development (productive and receptive) when my daughter was only several months old, with number concepts at the age of a year and a half, with reading at 2 years of age. I have audiotapes of this training with my daughter, which began in 1962 and extended for more than 5 years, and videotapes with my son and other children made in 1966. Other aspects of child development dealt with as learned behaviors include toilet training, counting, number operations, writing, walking, swimming, and throwing and catching a ball (see Staats, 1996). With some systematic training the children did such things as walk and talk at 9 months old; read letters, words, sentences, and short stories at 2.5 years of age; and count unarranged objects at 2 years (a performance Piaget suggested was standard at the age of 6 years). The principles were also applied to the question of punishment, and I devised time-out as a mild but effective punishment, ﬁrst used in the literature by one of my students, Montrose Wolf (Wolf, Risely, & Mees, 1964).

Traditional behaviorism was our background. However, the research developed in Great Britain and by Wolpe and by me and a few others constituted the foundation for the ﬁeld of behavior therapy. And this ﬁeld now contains a huge number of studies demonstrating that conditioning principles apply to a variety of human behavior problems, in children and adults, with simple and complex behavior. There can be no question in the face of our behavior therapy evidence that learning is a centrally important determinant of human behavior.

The State of Personality Theory and Measurement in the Field of Behavior Therapy

Behaviorism began as a revolution against traditional psychology. The traditional behaviorist aim in analyzing psychology’s studied phenomena was to show behaviorism’s

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