Behaviourism in the social sciences

« 1990 ) the use of the ‘experimental' method persisted in social psychology.

It was assumed that the complex situations in which human beings found themselves could be split up into simple states of the environment which could be treated as values of variables.

Responses too were partitioned in a similar manner.

Neither the role of the actor's interpretation of the stimulus conditions nor the actor's intention in responding were admitted as relevant, or as competing with the interpretations imposed by experiments (Milgram 1974 ).

By an elementary application of Mill's Canons of Induction, that an effect which was always found to follow a certain phenomenon and which, in the absence of the phenomenon, did not appear, statistical trends in the relationship between stimuli and responses were offered as psychological laws.

From the point of view of the social sciences the most important and most paradoxical applications of the experimental method were in social psychology. The application of the methodological part of the behaviourist paradigm in social psychology led to the setting up of a number of experimental programmes centred around a variety of human social phenomena (Lindzey and Aronson 1968 ).

For example the investigation of interpersonal liking (Zajonc 1968 ); of the fact that when they were with groups people tended to follow majority opinion (Asch 1956 ); of the conditions under which people behaved aggressively (Berkowitz 1962 ), all used the ‘experimental' method.

Paradoxically this approach to social behaviour in which the role of the individual human actor as agent undertaking various projects, alone or with others, was swept away and replaced by the idea of an automaton reacting with exactly those responses to which it had been conditioned, was dominant in that home of the ethos of the individual, the USA.

This poses a fascinating problem for the sociology of science. 2 The critique of behaviourism It was the acceptance of a Cartesian metaphysics of mind that had led to scepticism about the possibility of public knowledge of mental states and processes from which the original impetus to a behaviourist treatment of problems in the human sciences had come.

The most influential criticism of behaviourism was directed not at its Cartesian metaphysics, but at the limitations that it imposed on the possibility of obtaining scientific knowledge of other minds.

This line of criticism developed into the ‘first cognitive revolution' initiated by J.S.

Bruner ( 1973 ) and G.A. Miller (Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976 ).

Adopting the hypothetico-deductive conception of scientific method the new cognitivists saw the experiment as playing the role of a test for a hypothesis about publicly unobservable mental processes, rather than as a datum to be used in an induction to a correlative law of stimulus and response. The ‘cognitive science' movement developed out of the insights of Bruner and Miller by the adoption of the computer analogy, as a way of systematically formulating hypotheses about mental processes.

The computer is to the brain as the running of a programme is to the mental activity of that brain. A more realistic approach to the study of social psychology, that developed in the 1970s, led to a growing emphasis on language as the main medium of human interaction ( Harré 1977 ).

In the behaviourist and immediately. »