POSTSCRIPT

In 1964, at the invitation of the Division of Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association, I gave an address called "The Science of Behavior and Human Dignity." In it I stated a theme to which I was to give most of the next 6 years -- the apparent encroachment of a science of behavior upon the freedom and dignity of the individual. The question of freedom had had a long history -- many philosophers, theologians, and behavioral scientists were determinists -- but the question of the feeling of dignity or worth had received much less attention. We are usually willing to attribute our shortcomings to our environment, but we want credit for our achievements. Nevertheless, as a scientific analysis traces our behavior to our genetic and personal histories, less and less seems to remain for which we ourselves are responsible.

That became the theme of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which I published in 1971. Possibly because the book appeared at the conclusion of a decade in which young people had broken free from almost all societal control, it attracted a good deal of attention. Time magazine did a cover story on it, and it was on the best-seller lists for many months. Reactions were both positive and negative, the negative in many cases quite violent. The Time cover had me asserting that "We can't afford freedom," and my title convinced those who did not read the book that I was indeed against freedom and dignity. But in spite of the scientific evidence that we are not in any way responsible for our behavior, it is important that we should feel free and worthy, and I argued that by recognizing the scientific facts we could move more rapidly to a world in which people would feel as free and worthy as possible. What lay "beyond" the freedom and dignity of the individual was the survival of the species or, more immediately, of a way of life in which the potential of the species was more fully realized.

The negative reactions to Beyond Freedom and Dignity, made it clear that many people misunderstood the behavioristic position. The reviewers tended to recall the behaviorism they had learned about in courses in psychology. Behavior was said to be a matter of responses to stimuli; people were treated as if they were rats and pigeons, creative thinking was not accounted for, and so on. Many psychologists were dashing off in what I thought were unprofitable directions. It seemed necessary to restate the behavioristic position, and in an effort to do so, I published About Behaviorism in 1974. The central theme was simple: Philosophers and most psychologists were egocentric. A person was said to perceive the world, form concepts about it, engage in thought processes, and act upon the world intentionally or purposefully. The behavioristic position was just the opposite: A person comes under the control of a stimulating environment, responds to subtle properties of that environment, and responds to it in many complex ways because of the consequences contingent upon earlier responses. The environment selects behavior and, on the analogy of natural selection, takes over the role of creative thought, purpose, and plans. The cognitive processes which had become so popular a subject of psychology were really misrepresentations of the role of contingencies of reinforcement. They were inferred from behavior in relation to the environment. They could not be directly observed because "there were no nerves going to the right places in the brain."

At the same time I began to write a book on the future. Overpopulation, the exhaustion of resources, the pollution of the environment, and the growing probability of a nuclear holocaust also lay "beyond freedom and dignity" unless something was done about them. I wrote a book-length manuscript and brought a revision up to the same length, but decided not to publish it. Instead I gave several lectures on the subject, the title of one of them, "Are We Free to Have a Future?" indicating its relation to Beyond Freedom and Dignity. I am currently at work on a further statement of the position.

Many of the attacks on Beyond Freedom and Dignity were personal, Reviews were accompanied by portraits of me in which my head was attached to the bodies of rats and pigeons, On one campus I was hanged in effigy. I decided that it was time to "report me and my cause aright," and that I should write an autobiography. I began with a few rules. Whenever possible, I would use documentary evidence rather than recollection, I would tell the story as it happened with as little contemporary interpretation as possible. I would include personal details but allow the reader to infer their connections, with my life as a psychologist. The first volume, Particulars of My Life, brings the story up to the point at which I left for Harvard to become a graduate student in psychology. The second, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, covers the ensuing 20 years, when I returned to Harvard as a professor. A third volume will, I hope, complete the story.

In 1964 I received a Career Award from the National institute of Mental Health. For 5 years, renewable for another 5, it would free me from all commitments to the University and allow me to devote myself to an analysis of cultural practices from the point of view of an experimental analysis of behavior. Of the four books written during those 10 years, Beyond Freedom and Dignity was closest to the assigned theme. The grant terminated upon my retirement in 1974, but I have continued to work in the same vein.

The arrival of a new graduate student, Robert Epstein, made a change. He edited a volume composed of papers I had recently published, which was called Reflections on Behaviorism and Society. He also discovered that I had written thousands of notes over the years and edited a selection of them under the title Notebooks.

As a more drastic change, he persuaded me to return to laboratory experimentation. I was ready to do so because I thought tremendous opportunities were being neglected in the field of the experimental analysis of behavior. Few people seemed to understand the role of contingencies of reinforcement in shaping and maintaining the behavior of such an organism as a pigeon, but it was those contingencies which, I had argued in About Behaviorism, were the factual side of so-called cognitive processes. We collaborated on a variety of research, including a 3-year project which we eventually called "Columban [Pigeon] Simulation." Through careful construction of complex contingencies of reinforcement, we were able to get pigeons to exhibit behavior said to show "symbolic communication," "spontaneous use of memoranda," self-concept," "insight," and other so-called cognitive or creative processes.