The fruits and fallacies of Fred Skinner on freedom.

• Author: Hocutt, Max
• Position: REFLECTIONS - Essay

Under the influence of Marx and Engels, socialist visionaries eager to transform society held that it could not be done by persuasion; it would require brute force, Destruction of the entrenched instruments of capitalist oppression and exploitation would necessitate violent revolution, which would need to be followed by ruthless measures to suppress reaction. Aware since the demise of the Soviet Union of the horrors--150 million dead and counting--that resulted from the best-known efforts to put this once orthodox belief in practice, (1) progressive leftists now prefer to seek their ends using more cunning and less harsh measures than simply commanding and compelling the behaviors desired. (2)

In tune with this revised attitude, Cass Sunstein--erstwhile University of Chicago colleague and "regulation czar" of President Barack Obama--and Richard Thaler (2008) have recently advocated using economic incentives and other means to "nudge" rather than push us in the direction we must go if we are to realize their progressive purposes. Peter Ubel (2009) is similarly convinced that a market system of medical care can be bettered and its costs reduced by instituting government regulations contrived to foster, but not force, patients to learn healthier practices. The idea is to induce people to do what is good for them by making the alternatives less convenient or more expensive. Many politicos, including most prominently Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, are eager to enact this pernicious but insidious idea.

Where did this idea come from? One of its most influential sources and articulate apologists was B. F. Skinner, one of the dominant psychologists of the middle half of the twentieth century. The central contention of Skinner's celebrated and copious writing was the need to control conduct without using coercion. On the grounds that reward is not only less objectionable but also more effective than punishment in inculcating desirable behavior, Skinner's 1971 manifesto Beyond Freedom and Dignity announced hopefully that "it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished never occurs" ([1971] 1972, 66). (3) Sunstein, Thaler, and Ubel evidently share this millenarian hope.

This essay is a libertarian critique of Skinner's hopeful manifesto, which has been called one of the one hundred most influential books ever written (Seymour-Smith 1998). Its author's once famous name has now largely faded from public view, so the reader might wonder whether the time for such a critique has passed. (4) As just noted, however, Skinner's paternalistic ideals are still very much with us. Furthermore, there is no expiration date on the deep-seated fallacies in his reprise of the perennial proposal to give control of the entire social order to a Gnostic elite. So a flesh and detailed delineation of the errors in Skinner's thinking is in order.

Before Skinner's fallacies can be exposed, however, his reasoning must first be summarized.

A Technology of Behavior

Skinner begins his argument by announcing a need to create and deploy "a technology of behavior," a set of scientifically based procedures for controlling the choices people make (p. 5). To this end, he had already spent many years studying the behavior of rats and pigeons in the laboratories of the Universities of Minnesota and Harvard. Carefully designed and widely imitated, these studies suggested methods that are still being used beneficially in education, child rearing, psychotherapy, personnel management, merchandising, and other pursuits. It was a notable achievement, one worthy of the celebration it received and not to be sneered at now. The problem with Skinner lies elsewhere.

Inspired by his success in the laboratory but, like other followers of the progressive philosopher John Dewey, alarmed by the growing size of the world's population, by fear of nuclear Armageddon, by changes in the natural environment, and by a deteriorating educational system, Skinner increasingly turned himself from laboratory experimenter into aspiring social reformer (pp. 3, 138). Writing a best-selling book in a popular style peppered with a technical idiolect, he declared that "we need to make vast changes in human behavior" if civilization is to survive (pp. 4, 175). Recognizing that the control required would limit personal freedom, he became moral philosopher and declared that freedom is not all it is thought to be, nor is the dignity that goes with it.

In fact, Skinner said, the popular idea of freedom is a muddle, and so is the related notion of personal responsibility (p. 16). The only freedom worth having is freedom from "aversive stimuli" (p. 27). Belief in any other so-called freedom rests on the prescientific idea that human actions are the uncaused doings of "autonomous man," an invisible person within us who makes choices for us that are independent of our circumstances (p. 19). To construe behavior as the work of such unmoved movers is, however, not to explain it, but to proclaim it miraculous (p. 200). Hence, "[a] scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame to the environment" (p. 21).

Having decided that our behavior is already controlled, Skinner went on to say that "the real issue"--his favorite phrase when he wanted to beg a question or change the subject--was not whether to control, but what kinds of controls to prefer (p. 21). Moreover, he thought he knew the answer. In his idiolect, we need an environment in which negative reinforcers are replaced by positive (p. 33). In plain English, what is wanted is a social order in which the carrot replaces the stick, censure gives way to praise, and punishment of bad behavior is displaced by reward of good. Who would design this society? Experts in the science of behavior--in other words, people like Skinner.

This completes my summary of Skinner's argument. Now to identify the fallacies in it. We shall see that his basic error was misuse of the word control.

Control

Experimental scientists favor controls, efforts to hold constant all variables but one, the independent variable, in order to determine its effect on a second variable, the dependent variable. Hence, the seventeenth-century chemist Robert Boyle held the volume of a gas constant while increasing its temperature in order to measure the effect on pressure. Skinner's experiments consisted in keeping a pigeon or rat in a box under constant conditions while altering the frequency and timing of rewards, usually a pellet of food, in order to determine the effect on the animal's rate and persistence of responding, with a peck of a disc or a press of a lever, to a predetermined stimulus, usually a light or bell. By thus controlling the animal's environment, Skinner could shape and control its behavior.

Boyle's and Skinner's experiments were artificially contrived events, as are all procedures properly described as scientific experiments. In the context of such deliberate contrivance, talk of controls has a precise meaning. Outside of experimental settings, however, it becomes less precise. Scientists do sometimes speak with deliberate paradox of natural experiments, using the term to mean situations in which, without the intervention of an experimenter, all factors except one appear to remain constant with corresponding effects on a second factor. By definition, however, nobody in these naturally occurring situations is in control, and nothing is under control. So although it is correct in these contexts to speak of causes, it is wrong to call them controls. Where there is nobody in control, there literally are no controls.

Yet Skinner resolutely substituted the word control for the word cause at every opportunity. For him, all causes of behavior, natural or artificial, were controls on it. Behavior was now a function of or an effect of the controls on it. The aim of science was just to discover and exploit these controls. If you had a reason for doing something, it was a control on your behavior. An influence on you counted as a control. And so on. Did this way of talking equate the natural environment to a laboratory setting? Yes, but Skinner saw nothing odd about that. Because "[a] culture is very much like the controlled space used in the analysis of behavior," he thought talking of controls was a more up-to-date and precise way to talk of causes (p. 153). (5)

Unhappily, it was not. In workaday speech, the only thing normally counted as control of behavior is restraints or constraints put on it by other agents; freedom is simply the absence of such artificially imposed restraints. Skinner's uses of the words control and freedom were therefore indisputably metaphorical. Yet, in the haughty fashion of Alice in Wonderland's Humpty Dumpty, he blithely (and astonishingly) dismissed as "a metaphor and not a very good one" the usual definition of freedom as "lack of resistance or restraint" (p. 60).

Charity requires that a writer be given considerable latitude, but his reader is entitled to object when the result becomes Orwellian, as it does when basic distinctions are ignored and disputed questions are begged using ordinary words in extraordinary ways. (6) As Abe Lincoln liked to observe, you cannot give a dog an extra leg by defining a dog as a five-legged animal. Likewise, you cannot make every cause of behavior be a controlling agent by calling it one, nor can you prove the unreality or undesirability of freedom by redefining it as uncaused and so unintelligible behavior. All you do by such means is foster confusion.

To cut through the confusion, consider a recently captured and corralled horse. Although the horse's behavior in the wild was unarguably an effect of the things in its environment, it was before its capture entirely free in the clear and customary sense that no person prevented it from roaming the plains and doing as it liked. Its untamed behavior certainly had causes, but these causes did not...