Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Psychology 23 I
organism to a ‘black box’ between the inputs and outputs of which a connexion
can be established without knowing what goes on inside. Despite these limita-
tions, this research has been productive, and in this connexion there are two
points that might be noted.
The first is the utilization of ‘instrumental learning’, discovered by Konorski.
It was previously thought that learning was the result of ‘external reinforce-
ment’, provided by the experiment or by the experimenter, whereby the actions of
the subject are requited by successes, failures and punishment. Konorski has
shown that there are, on the contrary, forms of learning linked to the spon-
taneous utilization of devices built into the experimental set-up. Skinner thus
placed in his experimental boxes kinds of levers, which if pressed accidentally
and later deliberately by the animal, made the food appear. From his observa-
tions of pigeons, rats and so on, he saw that the animal’s explorations eventually
enabled it to operate the lever, which then became a kind of food dispenser. In
this connexion, let me say at once how indicative it is to see an author who,
systematically ignoring what is inside the ‘black box’, systematically uses a
functional activity of the subject and an almost instrumental activity (though
not excluding various kinds of reinforcement). Skinner then made the all-im-
portant observation that his pigeons learned more quickly what was expected of
them in the many variations of the experiment when the whole device was
mechanically adjusted as regards the distribution of the results of each action
than when the experimenter attended to the details. Being himself a teacher,
Skinner had the bold idea of trying out on his students a programmed distribu-
tion of psychological food by means of distributors offering several answers to
choose from for each question. By pressing the appropriate buttons, the stu-
dent sees whether the answer he has chosen is right or wrong; if correct, the
operation continues; if not, the question is asked again. It is common enough
knowledge that the result of this psycho-educational experiment led Skinner
and his successors to apply this method of programmed teaching generally to
the learning of languages, arithmetic and so on, and that this process is very
popular at the present time in some circles, though debated in others. Its oppo-
nents include, of course, the great linguist N. Chomsky, in whose view the spon-
taneous learning of language is absolutely irreducible to Skinner’s models.6
The strict positivism of which we have just given an example is therefore very
far from being non-productive from the experimental or even theoretical point
of view. As the aim of this survey is not to conduct a critical analysis of different
people’s views, but a study of trends, it is not for me to express an opinion con-
cerning this first trend, but to show why it is not followed by the majority of
research workers and how it is supplemented or replaced by others.
11. The first thing to point out in this connexion is that generally (though not in
the case of Skinner, as we shall see) pure empiricism leads to an atomistic split-
ting up of forms of behaviour to the exclusion of any kind of structuralism, not
by reasoned induction or deduction, but implicitly and through the very dividing
up of the problems. The mind naturally tends to explain the complex by means
of the simple and merely to regard as simple what appears to be so by direct