Book Review

When psychology established itself as a science in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was defined (to quote William James) as the Science of Mental Life, or consciousness. Behaviorism was, and is, a movement primarily in American psychology that rejected consciousness as psychology's subject matter and replaced it with behavior. The movement was named in 1913 by a young animal psychologist, John B. Watson, but had roots as far back as the 1880s and was well under way by the first decade of the twentieth century. Although behaviorism has been written about often and at length, its nature is hard to pin down. Behaviorists disagreed sharply among themselves about what behaviorism meant and who was a real behaviorist and who was not. They disagreed about why behavior rather than consciousness could and should be the object of scientific investigation, about what sorts of theories counted as scientific and/or behavioristic, and about the proper goals of organized psychology. Today, although virtually every psychologist now defines psychology as the science of behavior, the only ones who wear the behaviorist label are the followers of B. F. Skinner. Complicating the picture is the sprawling nature of psychology itself, a soi-disant science and profession including everything from single-cell studies of the nervous system to psychotherapy to ambitious plans to improve the nation and the world.

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