Personality and Skinner's Behaviorism

This post is meant as a sequel to the previous post, B.F. Skinner and Radical Behaviorism. Here I continue exploring the thought of B.F. Skinner and how it relates to modern psychology. I highly recommend reading the previous post before this one. 

We all have a unique personality, and many have a desire to understand their personality. This is evident due to the abundance of personality tests available on the internet, but is personality something that can be quantified and explained scientifically? The answer is a resounding yes, but without understanding how actual personality psychologists go about doing this, it may not be very clear.

The first question concerning personality is, what is it? Personality is generally agreed to be a consistent pattern of tendencies to behave in certain ways, to feel certain a way, and to think a certain way. A trait is a particular facet of personality. In 1931 psychologist Gordon Allport published a landmark paper titled '"What is a Trait of Personality?" In it, he outlined some of the features of what a personality trait is. To summarize, a trait is not just a label for a pattern of behavior set by the history of situations an individual has been in, but refers to something real in an individual. Traits then are not merely habits, but are more general. Traits also determine behavior. Allport wrote that, "It is not the stimulus that is the crucial determinant in behavior that expresses personality; it is the trait itself that is decisive. Once formed a trait seems to have the capacity of directing response to stimuli into characteristic channels."¹

 B.F. Skinner himself wrote about traits, stating that "A common and unchanging property of the behavior of all members of a species would not usefully be referred to as a trait at all. It is only because people differ from moment to moment or from person to person that trait-names arise."²  Skinner even acknowledged the validity of studying individual differences, writing that "Traits which can be reduced to inventories of behavior, to the relative strengths of parts of a repertoire, or to the speed with which behavioral processes take place have acceptable scientific dimensions, and their relation to a functional analysis is clear."³

Skinner also wrote of personality tests that they are, "a convenient opportunity to observe behavior—to survey or sample our dependent variable. The score may be used to predict some aspect of the larger universe of behavior from which the test is drawn. Thus a test of mechanical ability, or intelligence, or extroversion may enable us to predict success or failure in a job in which these traits are important."⁴

So far, it sounds like Skinner would accept the modern trait theorist approach, but there are a few key differences in his view on traits and that of the trait theorists. Skinner noted that we use traits to describe behavior. Taking the legend of Narcissus for example, he wrote, "we invent the adjective 'narcissistic,' and then the noun 'narcissism'; and finally we assert that the thing presumably referred to by the noun is the cause of the behavior with which we began."⁵

So, what then is a trait? Is it a description of a consistent patterns of behavior as Skinner holds, or is it something with causal force as Allport maintains? Calling a trait a particular determinant of consistent patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling really only describes the effects of whatever it is that determines behavior. Everyone has a unique brain which is built by their genetic inheritance and life experiences. The brain is what thinks, feels, and makes decisions which results in behavior. If someone has a genetic predisposition for anxiety and depression, they will likely test very high in neuroticism on a scale such as the Big Five. At the same time someone may have no genetic predisposition to depression, but instead may have had traumatic life experiences causing the epigenetic regulation of genes which regulate the production of neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin to malfunction. In one case, the problem is in the genes. In the other, in the environment. In both cases the end result is a high level of neuroticism. It can be difficult to identify a trait with a specific aspect of an individual's neuroanatomy, but not impossible. Skinner was uninterested in wasting too much time sorting out details when variables external to an individual are easily available for analysis.

Skinner wrote that, "The process of looking inside the organism for an explanation of behavior has tended to obscure the variables which are immediately available for a scientific analysis. These variables lie outside the organism,  in its immediate environment and  in its environmental history."⁶ This describes the situationist perspective, although my many situationists put more emphasis on current demands of a situation rather than the history of reinforcment. The other perspective is the person perspective, that it is the unique qualities of an individuality which more strongly determine behavior. This particular incarnation of the nature-nurture dispute is known as the person situation debate.⁷

So, which is it? Regardless of an individual's unique characteristics, a sufficiently powerful environment may change his or her behavior to act in ways which are unusual. Perhaps one of the more dramatic examples in the history of psychology is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Phillip Zimbardo in 1971. In the experiment, volunteers played the role of prisoners or guards, and in a matter of a couple of days, the individuals had slipped into the guard or prisoner roles. Even though the participants could withdraw at any time, most did not even consider this. There was no reason to infer this would happen, as each participant had no history of mental illness, no criminal record, and had no anomalous results on the personality tests. Yet, if one reads Phillip Zimbardo's account of the experiment in The Lucifer Effect, one notices that each individual morphed into their altered personality at a different rate. Although Zimbardo seems to consider the situation the more powerful determinant of behavior in the book, the fact that each individual changed at different rates seems to confirm the idea that our individual characteristics shape our behavior. Of course you can overcome personality with enough time, but the fact that each individual is different causes that to happen at different rates and this indicates that outside of unusual circumstances such as the prison experiment, our unique characteristics strongly shape our behavior. In a sense the debate, much like the nature-nurture debate in general, is a false dichotomy because the environment and the individual interact in complex and varying ways, such as the effects the environment can have on the expression of genes.⁸ ⁹

The tools of behaviorism are immensely useful for understanding behavior, and have had many practical applications in therapy. Speech therapy techniques based on B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior have helped many autistic children learn to express themselves, while behavioral modification approaches based on the principles of operant conditioning have helped many people with behavioral disorders learn to get along in life. ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² However, acknowledging each individual's uniqueness can allow for better designed schedules of reinforcement in such therapeutic settings. In addition, understanding personality not to be some metaphysical entity or property in some supposed mental inner world, but rather as a description of neurological characteristics which drive the consistent patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling, allows for a deeper understanding of every person's uniqueness.

References:

¹ Allport, G. W. (1931). What is a trait of personality? The Jorunal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 25(4), 368-372.
² Science and Human Behavior, pg 195
³ Science and Human Behavior, pg 197
⁴ Science and Human Behavior, pg 199
⁵ Science and Human Behavior, pg 202
⁶ Science and Human Behavior, pg 31
⁷ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-situation_debate
⁸ Beach, R., Brody, G. H., Lei, M. K., Simons, R. L., Philibert, R. A., Gibbons, F. X., et al. (2013). Impact of Child Sex Abuse on Adult Psychopathology: A Genetically and Epigenetically Informed Investigation. Journal of Family Psychology, 27(1), 3-11.
⁹ Champagne, F. A., & Rissman, E. F. (2011). Behavioral Epigenetics: A new frontier in the study of hormones and behavior. Hormones and Behavior, 59, 277-278.
¹⁰ https://lighthouseautismcenter.com/what-is-verbal-behavior-therapy/
¹¹ http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/verbal-behavior-therapy
¹² http://www.spectrum-behavioral.com/WhitePapers/behavioraltherapy.aspx

Appendix:


HEXACO (Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openess to experience)

Big Five/OCEAN (Openess, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) Version 1 ; Version 2

Avoid typological tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Those tests are designed via an approach called typology which posits that there are a fixed number of personality types. The MBTI for instance posists 16 different types of personality.  Trait tests such as the ones listed above are much more precise and flexible. For example, The MBTI might say you are extraverted, but not how extraverted. In the end it fails to be as informative.