Behavioral Approaches and Personality 137behavioral approach several years later, drawing on the ap-
proach to be described here as well as the approach of Skinner,
and later it moved toward including a more cognitive termi-
nology. Mischel (1968) first took a Watsonian-Skinnerian
approach to personality and assessment, as did other radical
behaviorists. He later abandoned that position (Mischel,
1973) but, like the other social learning theorists, offered no
program for study stipulating what personality is, how it is
learned, how it functions, and how personality study relates to
psychological measurement.
When all is said and done, then, standard behaviorism
has not contributed a general and systematic program for the
study of personality or personality measurement. It has fea-
tures that interfere with doing so. Until they are overcome in
a fundamental way (which Tolmanian social learning ap-
proaches did not provide), those features represent an impass-
able barrier.
Behavior Therapy and Personality
The major behaviorists such as Hull, Skinner, and Tolman
were animal learning researchers. None of them analyzed the
learning of functional human behaviors or traits of behavior.
Skinner’s empirical approach to human behavior centered on
the use of his technology, that is, his operant conditioning ap-
paratus. His approach was to use this “experimental analysis
of behavior” methodology in studying a simple, repetitive
response of a subject that was automatically reinforced (and
recorded). That program was implemented by his students in
studies reinforcing psychotic patients, individuals with mental
retardation, and children with autism with edibles and such for
pulling a knob. Lovaas (1977), in the best developed program
among this group, did not begin to train his autistic children in
language skills until after the psychological behaviorism (PB)
program to be described had provided the foundation. Al-
though Skinner is widely thought to have worked with chil-
dren’s behavior, that is not the case. He constructed a crib for
infants that was air conditioned and easy to clean, but the crib
had no learning or behavioral implications or suggestions. He
also worked with programmed learning, but that was a delim-
ited technology and did not involve behavior analyses of the
intellectual repertoires taught, and the topic played out after a
few years. Skinner’s experimental analysis of behavior did not
indicate how to research functional human behaviors or prob-
lems of behavior or how they are learned.
Behavior Therapy
The original impetus for the development of behavior therapy
(which in the present usage includes behavior modification,
behavior analysis, cognitive behavior therapy, and behavior
assessment) does not derive from Hull, Skinner, Tolman, or
Rotter, although they and Dollard and Miller (1950) helped
stimulate a general interest in the possibility of applications.
One of the original sources of behavior therapy came from
Great Britain, where a number of studies were conducted of
simple behavior problems treated by using conditioning prin-
ciples, either classical conditioning or reinforcement. The
learning framework was not taken from an American behav-
iorist’s theory but from European developments of condition-
ing principles. As an example, Raymond (see Eysenck, 1960)
treated a man with a fetish for baby carriages by classical con-
ditioning. The patient’s many photographs of baby carriages
were presented singly as conditioned stimuli paired with an
aversive unconditioned stimulus. Under this extended condi-
tioning the man came to avoid the pictures and baby car-
riages. The various British studies using conditioning were
collected in a book edited by Hans Eysenck (1960). Another
of the foundations of behavior therapy came from the work of
Joseph Wolpe. He employed Hull’s theory nominally and
loosely in several endeavors, including his systematic desen-
sitization procedure for treating anxiety problems. It was his
procedure and his assessment of it that were important.
A third foundation of behavior therapy came from my PB
approach that is described here. As will be indicated, it began
with a very broad agenda, that of analyzing human behavior
generally employing its learning approach, including behav-
iors in the natural situation. Its goal included making analyses
of and treating problems of specific human behavior problems
of interest to the applied areas of psychology. Following sev-
eral informal applications, my first published analysis of a be-
havior in the naturalistic situation concerned a journal report
of a hospitalized schizophrenic patient who said the opposite
of what was called for. In contrast to the psychodynamic inter-
pretation of the authors, the PB analysis was that the abnormal
behavior was learned through inadvertent reinforcement given
by the treating doctors. This analysis suggested the treat-
ment—that is, not to reinforce the abnormal behavior, the op-
posite speech, on the one hand, and to reinforce normal speech,
on the other (Staats, 1957). This analysis presented what be-
came the orientation and principles of the American behavior
modification field: (a) deal with actual behavior problems,
(b) analyze them in terms of reinforcement principles, (c) take
account of the reinforcement that has created the problem be-
havior, and (d) extinguish abnormal or undesirable behavior
through nonreinforcement while creating normal behavior by
reinforcement.
Two years later, my long-time friend and colleague Jack
Michael and his student Teodoro Ayllon (see Ayllon &
Michael, 1959), used this analysis of psychotic behavior and
these principles of behavior modification to treat behavioral
symptoms in individual psychotic patients in a hospital. Their