Personality Ch. 6 Learned Internal Drives Notes From Text

6.2.2: Conditioned Fear and Systematic Desensitization

Although he did work with humans long enough to do the experiments with Little Albert that conditioned him to fear a rat and by generalization many furry objects. Later a course of counter conditioning removed the fear. Deconditioning phobias is now a common form of therapy and is sometimes achieved with aid of virtual reality, an approach that is much more cost effective than in vivo treatments. Behavioral techniques also developed to eliminate bed wetting. Freud would see be wetting as a disorder resulting from failure to pass through a stage of psychosexual development. Behaviorist saw if as an unmastered skill that could be contidioned. Watson took very seriously idea of tabula rasa and believed that he could train any child to do any task and succeed at any profession.

6.2: The Origins of Behaviorist Approaches

Around 1900 many people became interested analysis of the mind. But their methodology limited them to self-reports. There was no way of knowing if the reports they were receiving were valid or not.

6.2.1 The Rejection of Introspection

Behaviorism arose from the limits of introspectionism. Lead by John Watson this school wanted to use rigorous science and rejected data that was subjective and unmeasurable. Watson BTW found he didn't like working with human subjects and decided animals could teach him what he needed to know so began working with them.

6.5: Other Learning Approaches to Personality

By the 30s and 40s a number of behaviorists began to feel that all causes of behavior were not found in the environment. Hunger for one thing and tiredness for another were behaviors that might have internal causes.

6.1.5: Complexities in Application of Conditioning Principles

Certain animals more easily condition to specific stimuli more easily than other species do. Despite the differences across species classical conditioning remains a viable explanation of many parts of personality. But many of our learned patterns of response come by experiencing or anticipating the consequences of our actions. This is at the center of the behaviorist approach to personality.

6.3.2: Controlling the Reinforcement

Done through the use of Skinner boxes where reinforcement rates and responses could be measured and controlled. Experience with these guided the design of teaching machines and self-paced teaching regimens.

6.1.3: Extinction Processes

If the pairing of the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus stops then extinction may occur. So the 'conditioned' aspect of personality may change. But if people have been conditioned to avoid something - especially out of fear - then their avoidance is not likely to be extinguished.

6.3.3: Skinner's Behaviorist Utopia

In his novel Walden Two Skinner described a benevolent utopia where good behavior was reinforced and people behaved competently and responsibly. There were no issues surrounding freedom because Skinner believed freewill was an illusion. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity he proposed a behaviorally engineered society where environmental control would shape human behavior. Skinner himself tried to structure his environment so that he was more productive and reinforced 'good' behavior. Maladaptive behavior evolves in the same way that adaptive behavior does. Either the proper response has not been learned or an inappropriate response has been. To Skinner a neurotic is someone who has been reinforced to be overly emotional. In Skinner's view inappropriate behavior even mental illness could be reconditioned.

6.1 The Classical Conditioning of Personality

John Locke laid down the view that the mind - and therefore personality - was a blank slate waiting to be written on. But it was Pavlov's classical conditioning experiments that brought it into science. Pavlov say that some stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus elicited responses. This he called generalization. But not all similar responses would produce a response. This he called discrimination.

6.6: Evaluation

Learning approaches have forced behaviorism to be less strict on its view that there is no role for internal structures, motives or influences and that only observed behavior matters. But notions of conditioning and extinction are found in all psychological disciplines and they help explain why all behavior is not consistent across all situations as some views of personality suggest it should be. Hard core behaviorists continue to deny the existence of free will/self fulfillment. They see behavior as controlled and conditioned, religion and formal education being two tools of this.

6.1.2: Behavioral Patterns as a Result of Conditioning

Many reactions can be explained by classical conditioning. Neutral stimuli associated with positivity will be viewed as enjoyable and welcomed in the future, while stimuli associated with negativity will be unwelcome in the future. So someone beaten for failing to will as a sporting event may develop a non competitive personality. Why are certain people afraid of things. Take snakes for example. Is it innate? This view is a biological explanation. Or we might borrow from Freud and say the snake represents a penis which is a neo-analytic explanation.

6.1.4 Conditioning of Neurotic Behavior

Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate at the presentation of a circle. Presented with an ellipse the dog didn't salivate. But as Pavlov presented rounder and rounder ellipses, the dog began to show some salivation. Similarly children of unstable parents may be called upon to discriminate between events that can't be predicted. This may cause confusion and anxiety.

6.3: The Radical Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner

Skinner concluded that environment controls behavior. That meant that to understand behavior you had to deconstruct the conditions/environment that gave rise to the behavior. He tried to do this without using physiology or interpersonal contacts in his explanations.

6.4.1 Internal Processes, External Causation and Free Will

Skinner did acknowledge that we have emotions but Skinner did not see them as causing behavior. They we characteristics of organisms that had been created by the environment. Rather than ask a person if they were tired you could look at the environment and measure their sleep patterns and know. Personality is merely a group of behaviors that have been reinforced by the environment. Like Freud Skinner was a radical determinist, Neither believed there was any free will in behavior. He believed the search for internal causes obscured the issue and diverted attention from the real causes of behavior influences - I guess these would be reinforcements and punishments - in the environment.

6.4 Applying Behaviorism

Skinner recast many ideas from other psychologists in behaviorist terms. For example he saw the id as an innate susceptibility to reinforcement, a predisposition that had been shaped by evolution. For behaviorism not only is personality learned but it can be unlearned if the correct conditioning is applied. Skinner saw the role of biological/evolutionary influences as defining the organisms range of responses that conditioning can produce. But the environment was the most important force and it was important in selecting which behaviors proved important for procreation and survival.

6.3.1: Operant Conditioning as an Alternate Description of Personality

Skinner used operant conditioning and shaping to train animals. To him a seal that jumps through a hoop is not displaying personality but is showing reinforced learning. He is not interested in the structure of personality but rather with observable behavior that is reinforced by conditions in the environment. In his view there is no free will. The word 'personality' has no meaning. The id ego and superego as well as needs instincts and self-actualization mean nothing either. What we call personality is an organism responding to what its environment rewards. He studied superstitions like wearing lucky shoes as an example of behavior that could be explained by reinforcement found in the environment. But he said one animal's learning and behavior did not predict another's learning and behavior patterns and so his approach was idiographic. (BTW if animal's are idiographic isn't that an individual personality) But Skinner would not have considered himself a personality psychologist. He believed there were laws that governed the acquisition of behavior. How that behavior manifested was personality

6.5.2: Social Learning Theory: Dollard and Miller

The idea behind social learning theory is that we are likely to respond - repeated ways of responding they called habits - are built up in terms of a hierarchy of secondary or acquired drives. So - to use the example form the text - if you are mugged while walking down a dark alley, you would learn to avoid situations like that and should you find yourself in similar situations you would feel anxiety. You now have learned a new behavior, to avoid situations similar to the one in which you were mugged and it is now a part of your personality. Other learning may influence this habit you have acquired. Successfully walking down the same street with a confident friend may less the avoidance. The influence of all these learned behaviors produces a likelihood that certain behaviors will occur in certain situations.

6.5.1: The Role of Internal Drives

The idea of internal drives traces to Clark Hull who said we have certain basic internal primary drives - thirst hunger, sex, pain avoidance - and that we are engaged in drive reduction. The behaviors associated with wanting to become rich and earn money can be understood in terms of reducing our drive to eat/minimize hunger. What was new here was that Hull was placing part of the process outside the environment and inside the person.

6.3:

The structure that all these influences make is called the habit hierarchy. The behavior you are most likely to manifest is at the top of this hierarchy. Because the environmental influences acting on each individual produce different hierarchies this accounts for differences in individual personalities. This theory allows us to explain how adult personality can be conditioned from the infant stage. This would explain how cultural differences are based on to individuals. One place this was tested was with the monkey and wire feeding mother and the cloth mother. The monkey's preference for the cloth model showed that nurturence was a primary drive and didn't result from its association with being fed. So there was something else that was internal. These guys came up with a few that was similar to Freud's in the sense that there were key times for certain things to happen, being fed changed supported for toilet training, taught about sexuality, and that if the reinforcements experienced to not foster a natural expression of these emotional problems will result.

6.5.6 Modern Behaviorist Personality Approaches

There is a problem with behaviorism looking at personality in that behaviorism assumes the causes of behavior are in the environment whereas personality assumes that at least some portion of it is lodged in the person. One attempt to resolve this problem has been to think about nervous systems and how they differ from person to person. If everyone's nervous system is different then that may mean everyone has a different qualitative response to reinforcement. This approach is called reinforcement sensitivity theory and posits that underlying biobehavioral systems make different individuals respond differently to different levels of punishment and reinforcement. The BAS and BIS moderate the effects or reinforcement and punishment and there are clear correlations between them and reliably measured personality traits. Another way to look at personality is in terms of the frequency of behavior. The Act Frequency Approach records and counts behaviors typical of a given trait category. This meets the behaviorist standard of only considering observable behavior which can then be compared to other measures of personality. This approach was posthumously applied to Skinner and found him to be high on conscientiousness and openness, though the data used was gained from descriptive reports rather than observations.

6 Conclusion

Unlike many approaches to personality behaviorism starts with simple stimuli and responses and tries to construct the full range of human behavior from basic mechanisms.

6.5.4 Drive Conflict

Using te concepts of learning, drives and secondary drives psychologists tried to explain internal conflicts that manifested as obsessive compulsive behavior as well as neurotic problems. They posited causes like the punishment of sexual drives that manifest - sex being a primary drive - and parental disapproval which served as punishment creating a fear response to expressing sexuality, this latter being a secondary drive. The result is a person who is simultaneously drawn toward and repulsed by sexuality. The result will be neurotic behavior. Neurotic behavior of this kind can manifest in three configurations: 1. approach-avoidance - where there is an attraction to and repulsion from sex 2. approach-approach - where there is an attraction to two equally appealing choices 3. avoidance-avoidance - where two choices are equally repulsive Another view put forward by these thinkers was that aggression results from frustrating or blocking an individual's access to a goal. Previously there were biological and psychoanalytical explanations of aggression. Here was an explanation based on learning and drives. So aggression is something that can be learned and unlearned.

6.5.5: Patterns of Child-Rearing and Personality

Working from teacher ratings, doll play, observation and mother's reports, Robert Sears studied child rearing and personality development. He found only weak correlations between punishment and the presence of neurotic behavior. Freud never conducted such studies.