136 A Psychological Behaviorism Theory of Personality
admitted was unreachable, was to constitute through animal
study a general theory of human behavior. The field of per-
sonality, in contrast, is concerned with individual differences,
with humans, and this represents a schism of interests.
A second, even more important, feature of behaviorism
arises in the fact that personality as conceived in personology
lies within the individual, where it cannot be observed. That
has always raised problems for an approach that placed scien-
tific methodology at its center and modeled itself after logical
positivism and operationism. Watson had decried as mentalis-
tic the inference of concepts of internal, unobservable causal
processes. For him personality could only be considered as
the sum total of behavior, that is, as an observable effect, not
as a cause. Skinner’s operationism followed suit. This, of
course, produced another, even wider, schism with personol-
ogy because personality is generally considered an internal
process thatdeterminesexternal behavior. That is the raison
d’être for the study of personality.
Tolman, who along with Hull and Skinner was one of the
most prominent second-generation behaviorists, sought to
resolve the schism in his general theory. As a behaviorist
he was concerned with how conditioning experiences, the
independent variable, acted on the organism’s responding,
the dependent variable. But he posited that there was some-
thing in between: the intervening variable, which also helped
determine the organism’s behavior. Cognitions were interven-
ing variables. Intelligence could be an intervening variable.
This methodology legitimated a concept like personality.
However, the methodology was anathema to Skinner.
Later, Hull and Kenneth Spence (1944) took the in-between
position that intervening variables should be considered just
logical devices, not to be interpreted as standing for any real
psychological events within the individual. These differences
were played out in literature disputes for some time. That was
not much of a platform for constructing psychology theory
such as personology. The closest was Tolman’s consideration
of personality as an intervening variable. But he never devel-
oped this concept, never stipulated what personality is, never
derived a program of study from the theory, and never em-
ployed it to understand any kind of human behavior. Julian
Rotter (1954) picked up Tolman’s general approach, however,
and elaborated an axiomatic theory that also drew from Hull’s
approach to theory construction. As was true for Hull, the ax-
iomatic constructionstyleof the theory takes precedence over
the goal of producing a theory that is useful in confronting the
empirical events to which the theory is addressed.
To exemplify this characteristic of theory, Rotter’s so-
cial learning has no program to analyze the psychometric
instruments that stipulate aspects of personality, such as intel-
ligence, depression, interests, values, moods, anxiety, stress,
schizophrenia, or sociopathy. His social learning theory,
moreover, does not provide a theory of what personality tests
are and do. Nor does the theory call for the study of the learn-
ing and functions of normal behaviors such as language,
reading, problem-solving ability, or sensorimotor skills. The
same is true with respect to addressing the phenomena of ab-
normal behavior. For example, Rotter (1954) described the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) but in
a very conventional way. There are no analyses of the differ-
ent personality traits measured on the test in terms of their be-
havioral composition or of the independent variables (e.g.,
learning history) that result in individual differences in these
and other traits. Nor are there analyses of how individual dif-
ferences in traits affect other people’s responses to the indi-
viduals or of how individual differences in the trait in turn act
on the individual’s behavior. For example, a person with a
trait of paranoia is more suspicious than others are. What in
behavioral terms does being suspicious consist of, how is that
trait learned, and how does it have its effects on the person’s
behavior and the behavior of others? The approach taken here
is that a behavioral theory of personality must analyze the
phenomena of the field of personality in this manner. Rotter’s
social learning theory does not do these things, nor do the
other social learning theories.
Rather, his theory inspired academic studies to test his for-
mal concepts such as expectancy, need potential, need value,
freedom of movement, and the psychological situation. This
applied even to the personality-trait concept he introduced,
thelocus of control—whether people believe that they them-
selves, others, or chance determines the outcome of the situa-
tions in which the individuals find themselves. Although it has
been said that this trait is affected in childhood by parental re-
ward for desired behaviors, studies to show that differential
training of the child produces different locus-of-control char-
acteristics remain to be undertaken. Tyler, Dhawan, and Sinha
(1989) have shown that there is a class difference in locus of
control (measured by self-report inventory). But this does not
represent a program for studying learning effects even on that
trait, let alone on the various aspects of personality.
The social learning theories of Albert Bandura and Walter
Mischel are not considered here. However, each still carries
the theory-oriented approach of second-generation behavior-
ism in contrast to the phenomena-oriented theory construction
of the present approach. For example, there are many labora-
tory studies of social learning theory that aim to show that
children learn through imitation. But there are not programs to
study individual differences in imitation, the cause of such
differences, and how those differences affect individual
differences in important behaviors (e.g., the ability to copy
letters, learn new words, or accomplish other actual learning
tasks of the child). Bandura’s approach actually began in a
loose social learning framework. Then it moved toward a