Fitter, dumber, more productive: How the
craze for Apple Watches, Fitbits and other wearable tech devices revives the
old and discredited science of behaviourism by STEVEN POOLE
“The school of
behaviourism arose in the early 20th century out of a virtuous scientific
caution.…
The behaviourists
discovered that the actions of laboratory animals could, in effect, be
predicted and guided by careful “conditioning”, involving stimulus and
reinforcement. They then applied Ockham’s razor: there was no reason, they
argued, to believe in elaborate mental equipment in a small mammal or bird; at
bottom, all behaviour was just a response to external stimulus. …
The problem with
Ockham’s razor, though, is that sometimes it is difficult to know when to stop
cutting. And so more radical behaviourists sought to apply the same lesson to
human beings. What you and I think of as thinking was, for radical
behaviourists such as the Yale psychologist Clark L Hull, just another pattern
of conditioned reflexes. A human being was merely a more complex knot of
stimulus responses than a pigeon. Once perfected, some scientists believed,
behaviourist science would supply a reliable method to “predict and control”
the behaviour of human beings, and thus all social problems would be overcome.”