152 A Psychological Behaviorism Theory of Personality
necessity of arguing perennially about basics. The fact is the
traditional framework allows for a seeming simplicity; per-
sonality theories can be created that are simple, but they have
very little scope. Worse, however, the traditional framework
allows for the creation of an infinity of such approaches to
personality, all of them unrelated. The result is a large and
chaotic fund of unrelated knowledge, set forth in many differ-
ent and competing theory languages, impossible to work with
as a student, researcher, or practitioner. This constitutes irre-
solvable complexity. And the framework only guides the field
to multiply its complexity with new and unrelated works.
Generally, there is no advancement of knowledge in terms of
parsimony, profundity, organization, non-redundancy, relat-
edness, and explanatory value.
Some of the implications of the PB theory of personality
for study in the twenty-first century will be sketched.
Biology and Personality
Biological characteristics do indeed play an important role in
human behavior and in individual differences in behavior.
But in the present view, without a good conception of per-
sonality, biological research is presently not of the type
needed. The traditional search is for the biological mecha-
nisms that produce personality traits, which PB considers the
wrong path. Rather, the PB position is that the individual’s
biology provides the mechanismby which the learning of
the BBRs can take place, be stored, and be selectively acti-
vated by the stimuli of the later environmental situations the
individual encounters. Biological studies of various kinds
are needed to specify the biological events involved in these
processes.
Learning and Personality
While biological conditions are the most basic level of study
proposed, it is the field of learning that is the most important
basic level. Anomalously, however, especially since most
every personologist would agree that personality is in good
measure learned, personologists generally have not studied
how learning-behavior principles are involved in the acquisi-
tion or function of personality. There seems to be an implicit
view that learning is not that much different for people except
in extreme cases.
The PB position, on the contrary, is that the personality
repertoires are learned, that there are wide individual differ-
ences in the learning conditions involved, and that those
differences produce infinitely varied personality characteris-
tics. Psychological behaviorism says that the first major
task of a personality theory is formulating a basic theory of
learning-behavior and a theory of human learning. No other
existing personality theory does this.Human Learning and PersonalityThe basic animal-conditioning principles are not sufficient for
dealing with the learning of personality. There have been stud-
ies, long since abandoned, employing human subjects that
dealt with more complex learning situations and produced
principles such as mediated generalization, sensory precondi-
tioning, and verbal associations. But there has not been a
conceptual framework to guide the field to study what is nec-
essary, that is, to study how humans learn complex, functional
repertoires in an advancing cumulative-hierarchical way.
There has been no systematic goal of studying the basic be-
havioral repertoires that are important to humans. Although
there are research fields that study language, emotion, and
sensorimotor behavior, these fields do not systematically ad-
dress how these behaviors are important for human adjust-
ment. Studies should be conducted that indicate how such
repertoires function to (a) change the individual’s experience,
(b) change the individual’s behavior, and (c) change the indi-
vidual’s ability to learn. Such knowledge is needed to provide
foundations for advancing the study of personality. For con-
structing theory, personology needs fundamental knowledge
of cumulative-hierarchical learning, the BBRs, their content,
and how the BBRs work to affect experience, learning, and
behavior.Developmental PsychologySome of the theories of personality include reference to how
personality develops in childhood. Freud’s psychoanalytic
theory initiated this and has had great influence on some
other personality theories in this respect. But Freud’s theory
of learning was lacking: He had no understanding of human
learning principles or what is learned via those principles, no
concepts of the BBRs, how they are learned, how important
they are for further learning of personality, and so on. So his
treatment (and others in this tradition) of child development
in personality formation had to be limited and lacking.
The PB position is that the learning experiences of child-
hood set the individual’s basic personality (BBRs) to a great
extent so that what follows typically continues in the same
line of development. This conceptual position and its empiri-
cal findings indicate that the field of child development should
be an essential study. The focus of the field in the PB view
should become the study of the central BBRs that are learned
in childhood—a large agenda. This position recognizes the
value of traditional research, such as longitudinal study of