1.1 INTRODUCTION
In 1913, John Watson’s Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it
put forth the notion that psychology did not have to use terms
such as consciousness, mind, or images. In a real sense, Watson’s
work became the opening “round” in a battle that the
behaviorists dominated for nearly 60 years. During that period,
behavioral psychology (and education) taught little about cognitive
concerns, paradigms, etc. For a brief moment, as cognitive
psychology eclipsed behavioral theory, the commonalties
between the two orientations were evident (see, e.g., Neisser,
1967, 1976). To the victors, however, go the spoils and the rise
of cognitive psychology has meant the omission, or in some
cases misrepresentation, of behavioral precepts from current
curricula. With that in mind, this chapter has three main goals.
First, it is necessary to revisit some of the underlying assumptions
of the two orientations and review some basic behavioral
concepts. Second, we examine the research on instructional
technology to illustrate the impact of behavioral psychology on
the tools of our field. Finally, we conclude the chapter with an
epilogue.
1.2 THE MIND/BODY PROBLEM
The western mind is European, the European mind is Greek; the
Greek mind came to maturity in the city of Athens. (Needham, 1978,
p. 98)
The intellectual separation between mind and nature is traceable
back to 650 B.C. and the very origins of philosophy itself.
It certainly was a centerpiece of Platonic thought by the fourth
century B.C. Plato’s student Aristotle, ultimately, separated mind
from body (Needham, 1978). In modern times, it was Ren´e
Descartes who reasserted the duality of mind and body and
connected them at the pineal gland. The body was made of
physical matter that occupied space; the mind was composed
of “animal spirits” and its job was to think and control the body.
The connection at the pineal gland made your body yours. While
it would not be accurate to characterize current cognitivists as
Cartesian dualists, it would be appropriate to characterize them
as believers of what Churchland (1990) has called “popular
dualism” (p. 91); that the “person” or mind is a “ghost in the
machine.” Current notions often place the “ghost” in a social
group. It is this “ghost” (in whatever manifestation) that Watson
objected to so strenuously. He saw thinking and hoping as
things we do (Malone, 1990). He believed that when stimuli, biology,
and responses are removed, the residual is not mind, it is
nothing. As William James (1904) wrote, “. . . but breath, which
was ever the original ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between
the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out
of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to
them as consciousness” (p. 478).
The viewof mental activities as actions (e.g., “thinking is talking
to ourself,”Watson, 1919), as opposed to their being considered
indications of the presence of a consciousness or mind as
a separate entity, are central differences between the behavioral
and cognitive orientations. According to Malone (1990), the goal
of psychology from the behavioral perspective has been clear
since Watson:
We want to predict with reasonable certainty what people will do in
specific situations. Given a stimulus, defined as an object of inner or
outer experience, what response may be expected? A stimulus could
be a blow to the knee or an architect’s education; a response could
be a knee jerk or the building of a bridge. Similarly, we want to know,
given a response, what situation produced it. . . . In all such situations
the discovery of the stimuli that call out one or another behavior should
allow us to influence the occurrence of behaviors; prediction, which
comes from such discoveries, allows control. What does the analysis of
conscious experience give us? (p. 97)
Such notions caused Bertrand Russell to claim that Watson
made “the greatest contribution to scientific psychology since
Aristotle” (as cited in Malone, 1990, p. 96) and others to call
him the “. . . simpleton or archfiend . . . who denied the very existence
of mind and consciousness (and) reduced us to the status
of robots” (p. 96). Related to the issue of mind/body dualism
are the emphases on structure versus function and/or evolution
and/or selection.
1.2.1 Structuralism, Functionalism, and Evolution
The battle cry of the cognitive revolution is “mind is back!” A great new
science of mind is born. Behaviorism nearly destroyed our concern for
it but behaviorism has been overthrown, and we can take up again
where the philosophers and early psychologists left off (Skinner, 1989,
p. 22)
Structuralism also can be traced through the development
of philosophy at least to Democritus’ “heated psychic atoms”
(Needham, 1978). Plato divided the soul/mind into three
distinct components in three different locations: the impulsive/
instinctive component in the abdomen and loins, the
emotional/spiritual component in the heart, and the intellectual/
reasoning component in the brain. In modern times,Wundt
at Leipzig and Titchener (his student) at Cornell espoused
structuralism as a way of investigating consciousness. Wundt
proposed ideas, affect, and impulse and Titchener proposed
sensations, images, and affect as the primary elements of consciousness.
Titchener eventually identified over 50,000 mental
1. Behaviorism and Instructional Technology • 5
elements (Malone, 1990). Both relied heavily on the method
of introspection (to be discussed later) for data. Cognitive
notions such as schema, knowledge structures, duplex memory,
etc. are structural explanations. There are no behavioral
equivalents to structuralism be
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