Free Preview: The New Behaviorists by Christine Rosen
“We have not yet seen what man can make of man.”—B. F. Skinner
When Barack Obama won the presidential election in November 2008, observers credited the extraordinary effectiveness of his grassroots organizing with helping him to achieve his historic victory. But Obama had another unacknowledged ally on his side: behavioral science. A team of behavioral scientists, including at least one Nobel laureate, advised the campaign on everything from honing his message to fund-raising techniques to voter turnout tactics.
After the election, Obama appointed several members of this behavioral brain trust to prominent positions in his administration. In areas such as health care, environmental regulation, and the economy, Obama is relying on these experts to launch one of the most ambitious behaviorist-style policy projects in American political history. Drawing on the recent findings of behavioral economics, they hope to encourage us to conserve energy at home by using “smart meters,” save better for retirement by automatically enrolling us in the company 401(k) plan, and help us make smarter choices about mortgages and credit cards, among other things.
Recent health-care legislation debated in Congress, for example, would give tax credits to employers who offer their workers financial rewards for losing weight or quitting smoking. As one Indiana state senator told the Economist, marveling at the detailed requirements for spending included in the federal economic stimulus package, “They’re going to control your behavior with specifications and regulations.” If he is successful in his role as behaviorist-in-chief, Obama will usher in an era of social reform akin to the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. And he will do it by getting us to change the way we behave, little by little, every day.
Pavlov’s dog. Skinner’s box. Some people have heard of these behavioral scientists and their unlikely muses, but few people know the unusual history of the science of behavior. In the early twentieth century, American psychologist John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, described his vision simply: “It is the business of behavioristic psychology to be able to predict and to control human activity.” Building on Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s pioneering work on classical conditioning in dogs, Watson spent years performing animal studies that demonstrated the powerful effects of reward and punishment on learned behavior. By 1913, when he published his groundbreaking essay, “Psychology As the Behaviorist Sees It,” Watson was determined to create a new kind of psychology, one that actively applied to the real world knowledge gleaned from laboratory research. To Watson, the behaviorist was not merely a psychologist; he was a social engineer whose expertise would help design a better world.
Of course, long before the rise of behavioral psychology, people used creative techniques to make themselves behave. Odysseus had himself lashed to his ship’s mast so he could not succumb to the temptation of the Sirens’ song while sailing past their mythic island. The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides advised educators to use frequent positive reinforcement, including food, to encourage their youngest students to focus on their studies: “Study and I will give you nuts, figs, or a piece of sugar.” And Victor Hugo allegedly developed the habit of writing in the nude to prevent himself from leaving his desk when he was supposed to be working.
The early behaviorists of the twentieth century added the imprimatur of science to these efforts. Theirs was an enterprise based entirely on the observation of behavior in real time. Rejecting introspective psychology of any sort, they did not try to ferret out people’s subconscious motives or repressed memories. It was the immediate environment that must be changed, they argued, not the individual id. In this sense the behaviorist message has always been simple yet empowering: change your environment, and you will change your behavior. Retrain yourself to respond to the right incentives, and you will become a better person. “Behavior has a pattern, like bones,” one behavioral scientist told the New Yorker in 1947. “Bones grow, and so does behavior.”
John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, left academic psychology in the 1920s after a scandal involving a liaison with one of his research assistants. He fled to Madison Avenue and eventually became an executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, using his scientific training and the authority it conferred to transform the field. It was Watson who recalled from his research in the laboratory that rats reached for the most readily available objects, so he advised vendors to place candy and magazines within easy reach of people waiting in the checkout line of stores. Drawing on his research on classical conditioning, he told companies that their advertisements must provoke one of three reactions if they were to make an impression: fear, rage, or love.
In addition to his work as an advertising executive in the 1920s, Watson wrote a best-selling child-rearing manual that applied behaviorist principles to the proper care and rearing of children. Many of these techniques are still in use, such as “time-out,” the temporary purgatory to which modern parents banish their misbehaving children. Everyone from Dr. Spock to the legion of crypto-Mary Poppins–style nannies that star in reality television series like Nanny 911 use time-out to change children’s behavior, and they have behaviorism to thank for its creation.
By the mid-twentieth century, Watson’s Madison Avenue–style behaviorism had given way to the “radical behaviorism” of Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner, whose theories and applied behavioral technologies continue to impact therapy, self-help, education, and community design. Skinner was the quintessential popular scientist; his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity was on the New York Times’ best-seller list for twenty-six weeks, and he was featured on the cover of Time in 1971.
Like Watson, Skinner insisted that the science of behavior—and particularly the knowledge he had gleaned from his animal experiments in operant conditioning—had everyday applications. Consistent, repetitive punishment and reward administered in a perfectly controlled setting nearly always yielded positive results—results that could be achieved in people as easily it could in the pigeons Skinner trained in his laboratory. An inveterate tinkerer, Skinner created a “baby box,” a climate-controlled crib where children could loll around in perfect safety and comfort, freeing their mothers from the burden of constant surveillance. Skinner’s youngest daughter spent the first two years of her life in an “air crib,” where, Skinner reported in an interview with the New Yorker in 1947, she was always “naked and happy.”
During the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, a dedicated army of behavioral psychologists applied Skinner’s vision of behaviorism to juvenile delinquents, prisoners, preschool children, and “back-ward” mental patients such as schizophrenics. Their techniques quickly spread to mainstream patients, particularly autistic children, many of whom have responded well to a form of early, intense therapy called Applied Behavior Analysis. Skinner’s behaviorism had a strong utopian streak; he wrote a novel, Walden II, that described a community based on behaviorist principles, which his disciples used as a model for real-world experiments in communal living in Virginia and Mexico that still exist today.
But Skinner’s lasting impact was in the arena of self-help. Articles advising readers how to get “Thinner with Skinner” promised weight loss through behaviorism; other popularizers offered self-help manuals for quitting smoking and becoming more assertive. One of the most popular diet books in the 1970s was published by behavioral psychologist Richard Stuart and Barbara Davis. Slim Chance in a Fat World: Behavioral Control of Obesity, argued that “the environment rather than the man is the agent of control of human behavior,” and placed little emphasis on personal responsibility or willpower to tame one’s desire to overeat.
Today, Skinner’s legacy can be seen in contemporary “commitment devices” such as the website StickK.com, whose motto, “Put a contract out on yourself!” uses behaviorist principles to let you devise a personalized self-help regimen, complete with built-in punishments (like automatically sending unflattering pictures of your fleshy self to your friends if you fail to lose weight, or donating money to a cause you loathe if you fail to meet your particular personal goal).
More seriously, a new, crusading progressivism is emerging among regulators and legislators eager to use science to justify policies that would encourage individual self-control. Forty states now levy taxes on soda and junk food, and crusaders against obesity are calling for the federal government to regulate soda as strictly as it does tobacco products. Across the country, private companies have enacted wellness initiatives that aren’t as anodyne as their names imply: the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Initiative includes a ban on hiring anyone who smokes, and its director recently told the New York Times Magazine that he would like to stop hiring obese people as well.
Who are the new behaviorists, and where are they taking our society?
Like Watson and Skinner, the new behaviorists argue that it is the system, not the individual, that must change. Behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of the book Nudge, champion the benefits of what they call “choice architecture” and advocate a form of “libertarian paternalism” in social policy that values the “nudge” over the traditional coercive shove. Like earlier behaviorists, they place their faith in science (in this case a hybrid of psychology and economics that in recent years has challenged neoclassical economic theory) and the wisdom of a technocratic elite to reshape behavior. But they are especially concerned with the broad negative social effects and costs of irrational, impulsive behavior. As Thaler told National Public Radio recently, “People are economically unsophisticated and often can’t resist temptation.” The “choice architects” whom he wants to entrust with the design of policy, he argues, are simply deciding “what people would choose if they had the time to think about it.”
What behavioral economists and libertarian paternalists want to do is reconcile political theory with the scientific study of human behavior since, they argue, the old categories of political theory no longer apply. Virtue? Behavioral economists view it as unobservable, value-laden, and mushy; you might as well ask if social policy has a soul. Personal responsibility? Impossible in a complicated world governed by complex “systems” and limitless choices. The result is a kind of stimulus-response politics that promises to liberate citizens from having to make complicated choices in exchange for limiting their freedom.
In some cases the changes suggested by choice architects are benign, such as a proposal to arrange food in school cafeterias so that the healthier options look more appealing—and thus are more likely to be eaten. As well, they urge employers to craft retirement savings plans that require employees to opt out of saving part of their paychecks rather than opting in, in an effort to combat the incredibly powerful force of human inertia.
The new behaviorism also differs from more draconian forms of social engineering in that it poses as nonjudgmental, cloaking its exhortations in the pristine laboratory coat of science rather than caustic moral censure. It views people as mechanical and thus susceptible to some behavioral tinkering, and in this sense it is far less pessimistic or deterministic a view of man than the one offered by genetic science, for example. We’re not ignorant; we are merely laboring under assumptions based on “imperfect information.” We’re not undisciplined losers intent on achieving instant gratification; we have simply adopted too many “time-inconsistent preferences” for our own good.
But if “choice architecture” is an appealing euphemism, it is also misleading, for the new behaviorism isn’t interested in protecting people’s freedom to choose; on the contrary, its core principle is the idea that only by allowing an expert elite to limit choice can individuals learn to break their bad habits.
Our current anxiety about the future, particularly at a time of acute economic crisis, makes the behaviorists’ argument for a more expertly designed world all the more appealing. But coupled with Americans’ desire for order and predictability is a long-standing fear of dependence—on government, on experts, on anything that sets itself in opposition to common sense and conventional wisdom. What the behaviorists of the past recognized, and what many who promote behaviorist-inflected policies today assume, is that human beings tend to act the same—not that they are necessarily created equal.
As a result, behaviorists tend to value personal freedom in the abstract while in practice limiting that freedom to ensure that people behave in socially responsible ways. Contemporary behaviorists want to nudge us, but not merely to make us happier, better people. They have specific hopes for the social effects this nudging will achieve, whether those are higher savings rates, thinner Americans, or fewer smokers.
Whether they are called hidden persuaders, behavior modifiers, or choice architects, behaviorists’ attempts to control others raise difficult questions about freedom and personal responsibility. As Skinner recognized, “Talking about feelings is safe because nothing important will ever be done about them. . . . Talking about changes in the social environment is dangerous stuff.” Who holds the “choice architects” accountable for their designs? Whose judgment is being substituted for that of the individual? What happens to a society when a self-control elite begins regularly shaping decisions for the masses?
The central fear about behaviorists in the twentieth century, most effectively expressed by Vance Packard in his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, was that the controllers would trample freedom by controlling us (either through subliminal advertising messages or fascist, Clockwork Orange–style mind control). And in 1969, cognitive psychologist and president of the American Psychological
Association George A. Miller warned his fellow psychologists of the dangers of investing the power of social control in the hands of a bureaucratic elite.
Today the questions we should ask are more subtle: Should we use science and social policy to protect people from themselves, and if we do, what does it mean to redefine freedom as merely freedom from bad habits and their unhealthy, unproductive effects? This kind of freedom is what Watson had in mind when he wrote in the conclusion of his 1924 book, Behaviorism, of our need for a new kind of freedom, a “behavioristic freedom.”
This form of freedom is freedom from something rather than for something. It is freedom from “bad” habits (smoking, overeating, not saving for retirement) and their effects, and thus the “freedom” to be more productive, efficient citizens—citizens who might eventually become habituated to the idea that complicated choices are best left to government to sort out for them. In the terms outlined by Isaiah Berlin, negative liberty (freedom from constraint by others) was more important than positive liberty (freedom to realize your potential). The new behaviorists use the language of positive liberty while imposing constraints that would undermine individual freedom.
Behaviorism is an appealing philosophy for our time because it is deeply hopeful about our ability to change while simultaneously placing blame for our present problems on the accident of our surroundings, not on our own weaknesses. We are not inherently good or bad, self-controlled or weak-willed. We are all simply products of our environment. Our often poor response to the moral hazards of daily life (Should I exercise or eat that pizza? Should I buy that sweater I really can’t afford or save my money?) are not really our fault, but the fault of our poorly designed social milieu (Pizza Hut lards their food with salt and fat to make it irresistible! The store offered me instant credit!). As behavioral economist Dan Ariely argues, the “one main lesson” readers should draw from the research in his best-selling book Predictably Irrational is that “we are all pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend.”
Contemporary behaviorists see no need for indoctrination or subliminal persuasion to right this wrong. On the contrary, modern behaviorism’s goal is to make us feel as if we have embraced healthy behaviors and better choices on our own. Contemporary behaviorists genuinely believe that people will make the right decisions if they are shown the correct path to take; barring that, they want the government to regulate the unhealthy things (trans fats, easy credit) that make us lose our will in the first place. As one behaviorist rephrased the enduring question, “Know thyself”: “Know thy behaviors, know thy environment, and know the functional relationship between the two.”
And yet, which path provides better protection for freedom—the inculcation of individual virtue or the exercise of social control? The new behaviorists are focused on results; they believe man’s inherent irrationality can be tamed by scientific solutions, applied by a technocratic elite, to create a better world. But just as individuals can be seized by irrational impulses and succumb to harmful short-term interests, so too can bureaucracies, as history reminds us. As well, there is the risk that we will become so comfortable with the benefits of this kind of control (the conveniences and ease our “choice architects” devise) that we will allow what Harvey Mansfield has called “rational control” to trump individual virtue.
At the heart of today’s behaviorist approach is a notion at once appealing and hubristic: the idea that we can create social norms simply by applying the findings of social science on a broad scale (as opposed to the more complicated norms that develop organically, over time, and admittedly often imperfectly, in communities that then spread to the culture more broadly). It is not a coincidence that the view of human nature promoted by today’s behaviorists—that we are all irrational creatures suffering from imperfect information—suits well a progressive politics that invests its hopes in a technocratic elite that is eager to use policy to shape people’s personal choices.
Americans’ anxious hopefulness about improving ourselves has proven fertile ground for behaviorist ideas in the past; as the recent emergence of behavioral science suggests, it still does. As the authors of the latest best-selling behavioral economics manifesto, Superfreakonomics, reassure us, “People aren’t ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.”
Viewed from this angle, behaviorism offers a more troubling—at times hopeless—view of human nature. Behaviorists would have us give up on the messy, uncertain work of building character and focus instead on changing the circumstances that encourage bad behavior. The behaviorist enterprise has always been an attempt to change people, and to do so by limiting their freedom to some degree, even if those limits are applied for our own good.
By describing our many behavioral missteps and offering solutions to nudge us in one direction rather than another, the new behaviorists hope to make us happier, healthier, and—most important—more productive. But this well-intentioned effort fails to grapple with a more vexing question: what if the things that make us irrational, weak-willed, and passionate are also what make us deeply, appealingly human?
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