Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 4
If art springs from an inner life which is truly original, in the sense that it begins with the artist, then there is nothing to be done beyond giving the artist an opportunity. It is much more promising, however, to argue that the achievements of the artist can be traced to the world in which […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 3
When [artists] talk about their emotions, thoughts, ideas, and impulses, they necessarily use a vocabulary that they have learned from people who have had no contact with these things and who, therefore, cannot teach them to describe what they observe accurately. (p. 380)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 2
Why, indeed, do artists paint pictures? The traditional answers are not very helpful. They refer to events supposedly taking place inside the artist himself . . . They represent the artist as a complex person living a dramatic life, and they give him exclusive credit for the beautiful things he creates. But we have not […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 1
We usually know why people behave as they do when they “have” to do so, but less compelling reasons are usually less obvious. They exist, however, and if we are going to encourage people to be artists (or, for that matter, consumers of art), we ought to know what they are. (pp. 379-380)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 19
We are living in an age in which science fiction is coming true. The thrilling spectacle of man-made satellites has turned our eyes toward outer space. What we shall find there only time will tell. Meanwhile, we are confronted by far more important problems on the surface of the earth. A possible solution is in […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 18
If we are to make a study of behavior sufficiently reinforcing to hold the interest of young men in competition with inner mechanisms, we must make clear that behavior is an acceptable subject matter in its own right, and that it can be studied with acceptable methods and without an eye to reductive explanation. (p. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 17
Under the influence of a contrary philosophy of explanation, which insists upon the reductive priority of the inner event, many brilliant men who began with an interest in behavior, and might have advanced our knowledge of that field in many ways, have turned instead to the study of physiology. We cannot dispute the importance of […]
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Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 15
Experimental psychology has suffered perhaps its greatest loss of manpower because competent investigators, beginning with a descriptive interest in behavior, have passed almost immediately to an explanatory preoccupation with what is going on inside the organism. In discussing this flight to the inner man I should like to believe that I am whipping a dead […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 13
The psychologist who adopts the commoner statistical methods . . . is inclined to rest content with rough measures of behavior because statistics shows him how to “do something about them.” He is likely to continue with fundamentally unproductive methods, because squeezing something of significance out of questionable data discourages the possibly more profitable step […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 12
For more than a generation, however, our graduate schools have been building psychologists on a different pattern of Man Thinking. They have taught statistics in lieu of scientific method. Unfortunately, the statistical pattern is incompatible with some major features of laboratory research. As now taught, statistics plays down the direct manipulation of variables and emphasizes […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 11
The very success of a science may force it to become preoccupied with smaller and smaller details, which cannot compete with broad new issues. The philosophical motivation of the pioneers of a “mental science” has been lost. (p. 365)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 10
When we have studied the performances generated by various contingencies of reinforcement in a single arbitrary response, we can move on to two or more concurrent responses. Instead of one lever to be pressed by a rat or one key to be pecked by a pigeon, our experimental space now frequently contains two or three […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 9
I propose to analyze the behavior of psychologists. Why are they not currently developing the pure science of human behavior from which such tremendous technological advances would certainly flow? How are we to explain the continuing flight from the experimental field? Where have the experimental psychologists gone, and what are they doing instead? And why? […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 8
Very little current research is reported in the frame of reference of a comprehensive theory. Nor has the point of view of an experimental analysis yet reached far afield. Many social sciences remain untouched, and among natural scientists there is almost complete ignorance of the promise and achievement of the scientific study of behavior. (p. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 7
The principles of an experimental analysis are now being extended to the field of verbal behavior, and it is inconceivable that the results will not be used to improve instructional procedures. And with fabulous results. Enough has already been done to justify the prediction that what is now learned by the average college student will […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 6
We do not really explain “disturbed behavior” by attributing it to “anxiety” until we have also explained the anxiety. The extra step required is in the spirit of an experimental science: it is a search for a manipulable variable rather than a verbal explanation. (p. 362)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 5
It is possible that theories of behavior derived from the clinic or from field studies, rather than from the laboratory, are on the wane. A strict Freudian psychology, for example, is no longer stoutly defended. Certain general points have been made—in some sense we are all Freudians—but the facts and principles which have been salvaged […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 8
Fortunately, there are those who are inclined to do something about the mistreatment of children, the aged, prisoners, psychotics, and retardates. We say that they care, but it is important to make clear that caring is first of all a matter of acting and only secondarily a matter of feeling. (p. 333)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 4
The close check with reality characteristic of experimental analysis would be most likely to expose the fictional entities which had played so devastating a role in what passed for psychological explanation and would permit us to escape from the inaccessible, hypothetical constructs emerging from statistical analyses. (p. 361)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 3
. . . the special control of variables attainable only in laboratory experimentation would ultimately supply the account which, being in closest accord with the actual properties of the human organism, would be most useful in every field of human affairs. (p. 361)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 2
After all, it was the same man who was of interest to psychologists, political scientists, theologians, psychotherapists, economists, educators, literary critics, and scientific methodologists. Why should there be a different theory of human behavior in each case? (p. 361)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 1
If the history of science were any guide, an effective psychology would eventually develop a central conception of human behavior which not only would be fundamentally “right” in the sense of enabling us to understand behavior, whatever that might mean, but would generate powerful techniques having important applications in every field of human affairs. (pp. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 31
We cannot remedy the situation by mere dialectic. We need to arrive at a theory of human behavior which is not only plausible, not only sufficiently convincing to be “sold” to the public at large, but a theory which has proved its worth in scientific productivity. It must enable us, not only to talk about […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 30
There are facts which have been well established for centuries which are incompatible with the traditional theories of human behavior, and these theories move about in the modern world in a welter of contradiction. But their proponents work busily to patch them up, and somehow they survive. A new interpretation here, a conspiracy of silence […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 28
The most important contribution that psychology can make today is a workable theory of behavior in the present sense—a conception of man which is in accord with all the facts of human behavior and which has been crucially tested in the experimental laboratory. Only an effective and progressive theory of behavior can bring about the […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 26
One important role of a scientific theory of behavior, then, is to replace the theories which now pervade our thinking, which are part of our everyday speech, which Influence all our dealings with our fellow men, and which stand in the way of applying the methods of science to human affairs. (p.357)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 25
The lack of an adequate understanding of human behavior is most cruelly felt in the field of government and world affairs. We are faced with the disheartening spectacle of hundreds of men of good will drawing up blueprints for the world of the future, while making assumptions about human nature which most of us know […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 24
Ancient theories of the nature of man recur again and again with their familiar cant—“an integrated view of life,” “a sense of personal responsibility,” “a capacity to experience and understand life as a related whole,” “the development of the mind,” and so on. Educators are not wholly to blame, for we have not yet put […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 23
Whatever his field, the social scientist does not currently find in the science of psychology a conceptual scheme with which he can talk about human behavior consistently and effectively. Economic man, political man, the group mind—these are crude explanatory fictions which need to be replaced by a sound behavioral theory. (p. 356)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 21
The hypothetical physiological mechanisms which inspire so much research in psychology are not acceptable as substitutes for a behavioral theory. On the contrary, because they introduce many irrelevant matters, they stand in the way of effective theory building. (p. 355)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 20
As the science of physiology advances, it will presumably be possible to show what is happening in various structures within the organism during particular behavioral events, and the theoretical systems of the two sciences may also be seen to correspond. (pp. 354-355)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 19
The simple fact is that psychologists have never made a thoroughgoing renunciation of the inner man. He is surreptitiously appealed to from time to time in all our thinking, especially when we are faced with a bit of behavior which is difficult to explain otherwise. (p. 354)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 17
The integrity or unity of the individual has been assumed, perhaps because the organism is a biological unit. But it is quite clear that more than one person, in the sense of an integrated and organized system of responses, exists within one skin. (p. 354)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 16
Since we have not clearly identified the significant data of a science of behavior, we do not arrive well prepared at the second stage of theory building, at which we are to express relations among data. Observed relations of this sort are the facts of a science—or, when a sufficient degree of generality has been […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 14
The current theoretical practice which is objectionable is the use of a hypothetical neural structure, the conceptual nervous system, as a theory of behavior. The neurological references introduced into such a theory, like references to mental states, interfere with free theory building, and they produce a structure which is not optimal for the organization of […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 23: Current Trends in Experimental Psychology. Quote 13
The other current explanatory theory flourishes with greater prestige and presumably in more robust health. This is the physiological theory of behavior. The inner man is given neurological properties, with a great gain in scientific respectability. Psychiatry becomes neuropsychiatry, and psychology the study of the nervous system. It is difficult to attack this theory without […]