Verbal behaviorism. Criticisms of behaviorism.

Verbal behaviorism

In 1957, Skinner published Verbal Behavior, in which he analyzed language as behavior. According to him, this obeys the same rules as other behaviors but differs in that it cannot be reinforced by the physical environment, but only indirectly by the behavior of other people.

According to Skinner, language is a social behavior. It can be reinforced or extinguished by interlocutors like any other behavior. Verbal behavior is shaped and maintained by a verbal environment – by people who respond to behavior in certain ways because of the practices of the group of which they are a part. These practices and the resulting interaction between the speaker and the listener generate the phenomena that are considered here under the heading of verbal behavior. The originality of the approach and its therapeutic effectiveness come from its functional and not formal approach to language. Linguistics and psycholinguistics are interested in the structure of language, its vocabulary, its grammar and its links with the structure of the psyche. In the verbal behavior approach, on the contrary, language is considered as a means of obtaining or avoiding a consequence like other behaviors and also of modifying the environment. If initially the book was ignored by the scientific community, including behaviorists, this position gradually changed during the 1980s and 1990.

The theories developed in this book are incorporated into ABA techniques to help people with ASD substitute language for non-verbal behaviors in interacting with other people.

Criticisms of behaviorism

Most of the criticisms of behaviorism relate to its theoretical position of ignoring mental activity or internal factors (the prior knowledge of the subject, for example). Cognitivism was born in the 1950s in response to behaviorism which did not take into account and did not provide an explanatory theoretical framework for cognitions. In particular, the criticism made by Chomsky in 1959 of Skinner’s work Verbal Behavior had a significant impact on the scientific community of psychologists and marked the end of the intellectual hegemony of behaviorism.

Inflicted corporal punishment or physical suffering are initially considered acceptable as punishments or reinforcements aimed at modifying behaviors of self-harm or severe autistic disorders in particular. In the early 1980s, the community of psychologists took a position on an ethical level in order to provide indications and a framework for intervention, and finally prohibited any recourse to physical violence or physical suffering (spanking, electric shocks, etc.).

The ABA method is accused in the United States by two associations, Autism Network International (in the context of an article co-written with pro-psychoanalysis Mireille Battut) and Autistic Self Advocacy Network, of cruelty, robotization and conditioning of autistic children. In France, in 2012, a complaint by the father of an autistic child to the ARS for mistreatment against the Center Camus in Villeneuve d’Asq, a pilot center for the practice of ABA , leads to a finding of “dysfunctions” constituting “risk factors for mistreatment likely to have repercussions on the children cared for”.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)