484 Part VI Learning-Cognitive Theories
Inappropriate Behaviors
Inappropriate behaviors follow from self-defeating techniques of counteracting
social control or from unsuccessful attempts at self-control, especially when either
of these failures is accompanied by strong emotion. Like most behaviors, inap-
propriate or unhealthy responses are learned. They are shaped by positive and
negative reinforcement and especially by the effects of punishment.
Inappropriate behaviors include excessively vigorous behavior, which makes no
sense in terms of the contemporary situation, but might be reasonable in terms of past
history; and excessively restrained behavior, which people use as a means of avoiding
the aversive stimuli associated with punishment. Another type of inappropriate behav-
ior is blocking out reality by simply paying no attention to aversive stimuli.
A fourth form of undesirable behavior results from defective self-knowledge
and is manifested in such self-deluding responses as boasting, rationalizing, or claim-
ing to be the Messiah. This pattern of behavior is negatively reinforcing because the
person avoids the aversive stimulation associated with thoughts of inadequacy.
Another inappropriate behavior pattern is self-punishment, exemplified either
by people directly punishing themselves or by arranging environmental variables
so that they are punished by others.Psychotherapy
Skinner (1987b) believed that psychotherapy is one of the chief obstacles blocking
psychology’s attempt to become scientific. Nevertheless, his ideas on shaping
behavior not only have had a significant impact on behavior therapy but also extend
to a description of how all therapy works.
Regardless of theoretical orientation, a therapist is a controlling agent. Not
all controlling agents, however, are harmful, and a patient must learn to discrimi-
nate between punitive authority figures (both past and present) and a permissive
therapist. Whereas a patient’s parents may have been cold and rejecting, the ther-
apist is warm and accepting; whereas the patient’s parents were critical and judg-
mental, the therapist is supportive and empathic.
The shaping of any behavior takes time, and therapeutic behavior is no
exception. A therapist molds desirable behavior by reinforcing slightly improved
changes in behavior. The nonbehavioral therapist may affect behavior accidentally
or unknowingly, whereas the behavioral therapist attends specifically to this tech-
nique (Skinner, 1953).
Traditional therapists generally explain behaviors by resorting to a variety of
fictional constructs such as defense mechanisms, striving for superiority, collective
unconscious, and self-actualization needs. Skinner, however, believed that these
and other fictional constructs are behaviors that can be accounted for by learning
principles. No therapeutic purpose is served by postulating explanatory fictions and
internal causes. Skinner reasoned that if behavior is shaped by inner causes, then
some force must be responsible for the inner cause. Traditional theories must ulti-
mately account for this cause, but behavior therapy merely skips it and deals
directly with the history of the organism; and it is this history that, in the final
analysis, is responsible for any hypothetical internal cause.