LUCS Seminar: Pamela Lyon - Psychology as the biopsychist views it

In 1913 John B. Watson wrote a lacerating critique of the consciousness-focused psychology of his day that was also a manifesto for a new research program based on the study and modification of animal behavior. The title of the article was "Psychology as the behaviorist views it." Behaviorism brought to psychology a set of investigative tools and principles relating to conditioning that still have utility. However, its two main ideological conceits failed utterly. An animal's responses to an experimental setup cannot be understood without reference to physiology, just as natural behavior cannot be understood divorced from ecological context. Mentalistic terminology, including consciousness, cannot be banished from psychology without significant cost to explanation and understanding of important natural phenomena. Yet key parts of Watson's general critique remain valid. Psychology's potential as a natural science remains unrealized. We believe a radical comparative psychology—the study of behavior grounded in biological process, ecological reality, and evolution across widely divergent phyla—has the power to provide psychology with the empirical and theoretical mooring needed. Inspired by Darwin, this effort had been underway for decades—in behavioral studies of microscopic organisms and other non-traditional models—when behaviorism took hold. Obstacles both methodological and philosophical stopped it. Today, comparative psychology has astonishing tools, e.g., microfluidics, sophisticated tracking techniques, statistical programs for analyzing data, comparative genomics, plus the ability to propagate a staggering variety of organisms, a growing body of literature upon which to build, and unrivalled means of communication within and across specialties. It is now possible to understand behavioral and mechanistic commonalities—and differences—between organisms of widely differing complexity in the instantiation of cognition, affect, and motivation. The paper will present several examples to illustrate what such a comparative psychology could look like. It also will summarize the deep philosophical commitments of behaviorism and cognitive science that prevented us from getting here sooner. 

Keywords: Psychology, behaviorism, cognition, evolution, biogenic approach, navigation, oscillation, random-rate processes