Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a celebrated article, recently pointed out that we cope with social disintegration by redefining deviancy, so that crimes become “normal” behavior.
How did we arrive at this condition? There’s no short answer, but I have increasingly come to believe that my own profession—psychology—bears a large part of the blame. The story began many years ago, when psychology defined itself as a science. Thus selfanointed, the discipline gained great prestige. People accepted with little demur prescriptions that would earlier have been condemned on moral grounds. Don’t spank your child. Don’t attempt to deter sexual exploration by young people—deterrence is probably bad and will certainly fail. Punishment is ineffective and should be replaced by positive reinforcement. Self-esteem is good, social stigma bad. It is not clear that this advice was all wrong. What is clear, and what I will show in this article, is that it was not based on science.
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Unfortunately, psychology as a profession tends to assume that all questions about human action fall within its domain and that all can eventually be answered with the authority of science—and this imperialism has gone largely unquestioned.
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Nearly all psychologists believe that behavior is completely determined by heredity and environment. A substantial majority agree with Skinner that determinism rules out the concept of personal responsibility. This opposition between determinism and responsibility is now widely accepted, not just by behaviorists but by every category of mental-health professional, by journalists, by much of the public— and by many in the legal profession.
Behaviorism is the most self-consciously “scientific” of the many strands that make up psychology. Although somewhat overshadowed recently by cognitive psychology and other movements, behaviorism has had overwhelming influence during most of the short history of psychology. Consequently, when behaviorists have produced hard evidence in favor of beliefs already shared by other psychologists, the combined effect has always been decisive.
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Skinner, and the behaviorist movement of which he was the head, delegitimized both individual responsibility and punishment.
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I will argue, first, that there is no opposition between behavioral determinism and the notion of individual responsibility, and second, that the scientific basis for blanket opposition to punishment as a legitimate social instrument—in the family, the school, the workplace, and the judicial system—is nonexistent.
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Skinner’s argument is simply wrong. It will be a task for future sociologists to understand why such a bad argument received such ready assent.
Skinner contrasted the “prescientific” view that “a person’s behavior is at least to some extent his own achievement” with the “scientific” view that behavior is completely determined by heredity and environment. The conventional view, he wrote, is that a person is free.
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Punishment doesn’t always abolish freedom—and freedom is not just the absence of punishment.
Skinner had another definition of freedom: absence of causation (“autonomous man”).
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People generally feel free when they follow their preferences, no matter how predictable those preferences may be.
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His argument boils down to three points: punishment is ineffective because when you stop punishing, the punished behavior returns; punishment provokes “counterattack”; positive reinforcement is better. Let’s look at each of these.
- Punishment is ineffective. Well, no, it isn’t. Common sense aside, laboratory studies with pigeons and rats (the basis for Skinner’s argument) show that punishment (usually a brief electric shock) works very well to suppress behavior, as long as it is of the right magnitude and follows promptly on the behavior that is to be suppressed. If a rat gets a moderate shock when he presses a bar, he stops pressing it more or less at once. If the shock is too great, the rat stops doing anything; if the shock is too weak, he may still press the bar once in a while; if it’s just right, he quits pressing but otherwise behaves normally. Does the punished behavior return when the punishment is withdrawn? That depends on the training procedure. An avoidance procedure called shock postponement, in which the rat gets no shock so long as he presses the bar once in a while, produces behavior that can persist indefinitely when the shock schedule is withdrawn. That is to say, the rat continues periodically to press the bar.
- Punishment provokes counterattack. Sure: if a food-producing lever also produces shock, the rat will try to get the food without getting the shock. A famous picture in introductory-psychology texts is called “Breakfast in Bed.” It shows a rat that learned in a shock-food experiment to press the lever while lying on his back, insulated by his fur from the metal floor grid. Skinner was right that rats, and people, try to beat a punishment schedule.
- Positive reinforcement is more effective. Not true. The effects of positive reinforcement also dissipate when the reinforcement is withdrawn, and there is no positive-reinforcement procedure that produces behavior as persistent as that produced by a shock-postponement schedule. Positive reinforcement also provokes counterattack. Every student who cheats, every gambler who rigs the odds, every robber and thief, shows the counterattack provoked by positive reinforcement schedules.
There are other arguments on both sides, but the net conclusion must be that the scientific evidence is pretty much neutral in deciding between reward and punishment. Each has its advantages and disadvantages: punishment is better for suppressing behavior, positive reinforcement better for generating behavior; punishment tends to produce more-persistent behavior than rewards; and so on. If we wish to favor reward over punishment, we must make a moral, not a scientific, case.
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ALL this might be academic but for its impact on legal thinking.
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What is the purpose of judicial punishment? Legal scholars normally identify two purposes, retribution and deterrence. Retribution is a moral concept, which need not concern us here. But deterrence is a practical matter.
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From an objective point of view— the only legitimate point of view for science—“holding a man responsible” for his actions means nothing more than making him subject to punishment if he breaks the law.
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But if behavior were unpredictable and unaffected by “reinforcement contingencies”—if it were uncaused, in Skinner’s caricature of freedom—there would be absolutely no point to punishment or any other form of behavioral control, because it would have no predictable effect. In short, legal responsibility requires behavioral determinism.
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Praise and blame are perhaps the strongest incentives available to society. By giving them up, Skinner gave up our best tools for social order.
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There is surprising congruence between the legal concept of responsibility and the function of punishment as a deterrent. “Guilt” is established not so much by the act as by the potential of punishment to deter the act.
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History is not the point. The point is, Did the defendant know that his actions would have an illegal outcome? And if he had known in advance of the act that sure punishment would follow, would he still have acted as he did? If the criminal would have been deterred by the prospect of punishment, the social view says, then he should be punished.
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Scientific psychology, like all science, is amoral: it tells us what is or what might be—not what should be. Psychologists who offer more, promoters of the “authentic self” or punishment-free societies, are peddling not science but faith.
Source: The Atlantic (February1995)
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