Behaviorism in Context

Let me explain what I mean when I call myself a Behaviorist. No, it's not about blank slatism, or being able to completely manipulate anyone at will. It's about not taking what people say at face value.

See this tweet:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/827054957329260544

No, no. Just, no. Please, somebody just close all the psychology faculties. Or close the whole universities while they're at it. But this is completely wrong. Nonsensical, really. "People believe that..." doesn't make sense. Look at this closely. It assumes that people have stuff inside their heads ("ideas") and that that stuff inside their heads has some causative effect in how they behave. This is an utterly wrong way of thinking about this.

I mean, you don't know what's going on inside people's heads. You just don't. Look at this study in particular. They ask people about their own eating behavior and that of others. The answer to that question is not the "ideas" in the people's heads. I mean, just look at the setting closely. You have:

1. Some college students

Being asked some question by:

2. A professor or grad student

About their own behavior.

And surprise, surprise, they make themselves look good and make others look not so good. Why would they do that? Well... maybe they want to make themselves look good. Because they want to appear high-status because that's what people do.

Imagine this other setting: you are in Berkeley, and leftist thugs are running a Maoist style struggle session. They grab unpopular kid, who they think might be a Trump supporter, and they ask her what she thinks about heir own and the leftist eating habits.

What do you think she's going to say? If she doesn't want to get beat up with bats until she's unconscious and gets half her rib broken, she'll say her eating habits suck and that those of others are awesome. Why? Because she wants to survive. That's also something that people do.

If you want to know what drives people's behavior, you have to look at... people's behavior. What they actually do. Not just ask them questions. Questions are social behavior which follows social rules. It's all about context.

Modern social science still works on the rationalist paradigm, that people have "ideas" and that they "reason" about them. That is just a descendant of the Christian emphasis on "faith", i.e. that some people have "faith" in their "hearts", which makes them better people. Of course that was just a subterfuge to run a loyalty assessment on people. Making a good show of the "faith" in your "heart" was a very good costly signal to show your loyalty to the Christian team. Politics runs on this sort of misleading rituals. They work very well. I'll loudly proclaim my loyalty to Kek and prostrate in front of its image whenever needed. The more people think it's stupid the better a signal it will be.

But science should be about how things actually work. And the way things work is that you must look at what people do, not what they say. Or more accurately, you should understand what people "say" as a kind of "do". If all those "scientists" got out of their parochial WEIRD world they'd actually understand that.

[…] Behaviorism in Context […]

Yes, but I assume that at least some scientists understand that, but they too signal and so that understanding is not part of the public knowledge. Do you honestly think Degen believes what he wrote?

You should research the origins of behaviourism. I have written a essay on it that I haven't posted yet. A good start point for you would be to look at the origins of behaviouralism. This essay is quite informative: http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/berndtso/behavior.htm This from a man by the name of Berelson is quite clear: ""What happened to give rise to the term? The key event was the development of a Ford Foundation program in this field. The program was initially designated 'individual behavior and human relations' but it soon became known as the behavioral sciences program and, indeed, was officially called that within the foundation. It was the foundation's administrative action, then, that led directly to the term and to the concept of this particular field of study." (Berelson 1968: 42)" If you trace it back to the Ford Foundation (who the Berelson guy was working for) then you get to the "Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program" where it becomes clear behaviourism is just...liberalism. Then you can notice behaviouralism predicts...nothing. I mean, think about it. You see a guy swinging his arms randomly in the distance. Behaviouralism states you should be able to understand his actions. But the actions depend on...context, culture, state of mind of the person etc. and worse, they are subject to... alteration rendering the observations worthless - as you note in this post.

I see no indication of that. And I've meet a lot of scientists.

That's a name. I started the damn post explaining that's not where I'm coming from.

Priests and police know this very well.

Well, there are biologists who will happily talk about their work on the behaviour of mammals, but refuse to comment on the behaviour of humans. Nonetheless, they do have an opinion on the reasons of human behaviour, And they have an opinion on sociologists which is by and large not flattering. In that the biologists are not that different from chemists or physicists, but they might have a better founded reason for their poor opinion.

The lulz from the Sokal Hoax are insufficient, and more lulz must ensue!

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

There is congruence between self reported behavior and actual behavior, though, as marketing takes advantage of.

Oh, you can make a fortune with people's signaling.

Let's say "Sam believes that p", where p could be: i) "Sam is the brightest person in the room" ii) "gravity pulls objects on the surface of the Earth towards the Earth's center" iii) "there is a slice of pie in the refrigerator" The criticism in this post aims pretty squarely (and rightly) at beliefs of the sort in (i). These have to do with what we might call self-estimation, predicated on the views that there is a self (or conscious subject, or...) which has inner states, and these states are transparently obvious to said self. "Beliefs" of sort (i) can probably be sub-divided in lots of interesting ways to get at the basic point: that in certain very important ways people are by and large fooling themselves. What behaviorism doesn't handle is cases like (ii) and (iii). If you are in the room with your friend Sam, and you've both watched Sam's sister make a pie, cut it, and put it in the fridge, and then Sam says "I'd sure like some of that pie", it's no stretch to say that Sam believes there is pie in the fridge. Does this implicate the homuncular view of the subject? Probably not; it's all 'on the surface' after all. We haven't posited any inner rumblings going on within Sam's mind, whether that's ideas bouncing around the *res cogitans* or meat-stuff equivalents in his skull. What we have done is point out something that can be verified by Sam's actions. One trouble with full-bore logical behaviorism is that it has to claim that the *meaning* of Sam's believing that there's pie in the fridge just is the array Sam's dispositions to act. A cluster of dispositions can't *cause* Sam to grab a slice of pie from the kitchen; but then we can't make much sense of Sam's actions on the basis of dispositions alone. This may not seem obvious in the rather trivial pie case, but it matters a great deal in cases like (ii), where we have to take into consideration that the very thesis of this post -- that "people generally aren't acting on the basis of inner reasons" -- is something that can't plausibly be expressed as even complex dispositions to act. There's more than a responsiveness to external stimuli at work there, if the expression of the very idea isn't to slide into incoherence.

By this definition I'm certainly not a behaviourist. But I'd like to add that normally folk don't know what's going on inside their own heads, let alone other folks' heads.

Economists have this cool concept of "revealed preference" which is just what you're looking for here and would save the need to call up the behaviorist label.

Surely you understand that psychology and economics study different things.

The concept is usefull far beyond its narrow field and the emergence of disciplines such as behavioural economics indicates that the overlap is non-negligible.

The concept is useful only as a way of making my point while keeping the general assumptions of the discipline. I'd rather overturn them.

I argue that we're more aware of other people and more deluded about ourselves.

I thought it was Schopenhauer who said, people's thought process aren't as simple as we think they are, and our own thought process aren't as complicated as we think they are.

I don't have anything particular to add to this; I agree with everything you've said in the post. That said, knowledge is only valuable if it informs action. Social signalling is an action, but it seems that we have an opportunity to do a bit more with this knowledge. Is the proscription still mere exit?