Skinnerian Criticism of Religion (from M. Kagan's "Psychology vs. Religion--Ad Hominem?: The Ad Hominem Fallacy and Freudian and Skinnerian Psychological Criticism of Arguments from Religious Experience" (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 1988). Comments, additions, and corrections are welcome. Please send them email: KAGAN@maple.lemoyne.edu
from Chapter FOUR: Freudian and Skinnerian Criticism of Religious Experience Arguments OUTLINE: III. Skinnerian Critique A. Conditioning and Schedules of Reinforcement 1. Superstitious Conditioning B. Towards a Skinnerian Criticism of Argument from Religious Experience C. Suspicion Regarding Introspection and Private Experience Reports in Skinner's Theory of Verbal Behavior D. Prong 1 (Aetiological) 1. Summary of Prong 1 2. Multiple Causation and Variables Controlling Religious Experience Reports a) More Obvious External Control b) More Subtle Control and Conditioned Perception c) Superstitious Conditioning Again d) Inadequate Feedback E. Prong 2: (Pragmatic) 1. Prong 2: Summary and Sources a) Pragmatics of Religious Control b) The Dangers of Superstitiously Conditioned Experience
III. Skinnerian Critique As a second account and kind of criticism of religious experience argument, the Skinnerian merits consideration for at least two reasons. Skinner's views are closely tied to those of one major current philosophical school--the Russell- Quine tradition.1 Secondly, there is a sense in which the Skinnerian account arises in response to problems with Freud. Skinner's system can be seen as inheriting much from the mood of the Freudian.2 Though including many of the elements of Freudian psychology, the Skinnerian psychology inverts priorities. What was central to Freudian psychology moves towards the periphery; what was peripheral becomes central. Skinner's theoretical accounts begin with publicly observable behavior--the central theoretical terms in Skinner's theory concern observable stimuli and responses to such stimuli. It is only after the groundwork has been laid there that Skinner gives attention to behavioral interpretation of behavior within the skin, or "covert behavior."3 The gist of his theory can be presented in the following terms. A. Conditioning and Schedules of Reinforcement There are two kinds of conditioning processes useful in predicting and controlling the behavior of organisms: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is the kind of conditioning process involved in cases such as that of Pavlov's dogs, wherein an involuntary response to a stimulus (in the Pavlov case, salivation in the presence of food) begins to occur in the presence of some associated stimulus (e.g., the dinner bell) even in the absence of the original stimulus (food). The second kind of conditioning process, "operantconditioning," is the kind associated with what we would normally term teleological behavior. Skinner's operant theory states that non-reflexive non-Pavlovian behavior is a function of consequences of similar previous behavior--that behavior which is followed by reinforcing consequences recurs with greater frequency, whereas behavior is less likely to recur when not reinforced. The core of this view is suggested by E. L. Thorndike's law of effect:4 Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to recur. The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond.5 1. Superstitious Conditioning In Skinner's work on schedules of reinforcement, an interspecies regularity of effects of reinforcement schedules (how often and at what rate a behavior is reinforced) was discovered. Skinner discovered that by far the most enduring behavior (behavior the emission of which persists long after cessation of reinforcement) occurs when the one to one correspondence between conditioned behavior and reinforcer is varied in what are termed variable ratio and variable interval schedules,6 i.e., when a behavior is rewarded "intermittently" in a random fashion.7 In the case of what Skinner terms "superstitious" conditioning " . . . . the variable ratio is extremely effective in shaping and maintaining behavior . . . ." Skinner argues that this is true with respect to the kind of behavior which would ordinarily, on other schedules of reinforcement, have been eliminated from the repertoire due to a lack of environmental reinforcement. His argument for this point begins with the assumption that reinforcers invariably reinforce some particular behavior or other of an organism. At any given time, an organism is behaving. Given the law of effect, the reinforcer will have an effect, and sometimes, given deprivation status and reinforcement history,"a single reinforcement may have a substantial effect." Skinner then defines superstitious behavior as that which occurs when "there is only an accidental connection between the response and the appearance of a reinforcer." When pigeons are reinforced at fifteen second intervals regardless of behavior, conditioning takes place. The modified behavior is then reinforced at the next interval. "Conspicuous responses which have been established in this way include turning sharply to one side, hopping from one foot to the other and back, bowing and scraping, . . . and raising the head." Once this kind of response has been established, Skinner points out, it is difficult to extinguish; "it will survive even when reinforced only infrequently." Skinner claims that pigeons are not unusual in this regard, that much of human behavior is also conditioned in this way. Furthermore, "superstitious rituals" can be preserved by culture: Superstitious rituals in human society usually involve verbal formulae and are transmitted as part of the culture. To this extent they differ from the simple effect of accidental operant reinforcement. But they must have had their origin in the same process, and they are probably sustained by occasional contingencies which follow the same pattern.8 As Loevinger points out, the fact that these findings hold "almost regardless of the species studied, whether it be rat, pigeon or person," is remarkable. Findings like these she states, "justify a certain hubris . . . . There are not many psychological findings at once so specific in form and so general in application."9 Those whose religious experiences consist of having had some of their prayers answered at gambling tables or in fox holes may be challenged by this account. Their behavior, praying, along with their feeling of an immediate answer, would probably be explained by a Skinnerian behaviorist as a paradigm case of accidental reinforcement leading to superstitious conditioning. A serious danger inherent in this conditioning process is the generation of patterns of behavior which are not adequate to important non-accidental contingencies. Superstitious behaviors, due to their being deeply ingrained, may prevent the development of or displace more appropriate responses to the environment. B. Towards a Skinnerian Criticism of Argument from Religious Experience Skinner, like Freud, does not confine his psychological speculations to individual cases, but also attempts to explain the workings and results of the wider cultural realm. Among the sorts of behavior he attempts to explain is "verbal behavior," which includes reports of religious experiences, and the activities of religious institutions and their followers. A Skinnerian criticism of religious experience argument can be reconstructed on the basis of Skinner's view of verbal behavior, superstitious conditioning, and religious control. For Skinner, as for Freud, religion is thought of in terms of stereotypical Christian religiosity, with its churches, its heaven, its hell, and its saving God.10 A Skinnerian critique, like the Freudian, can be presented in terms of aetiology and prognosis. This critique can be usefully introduced in terms of Skinner's reconstruction of verbal behavior- behavior which seems to include not only public reports of "covert" behavior, but also some of the covert behavior itself.11 C. Suspicion Regarding Introspection and Private Experience Reports in Skinner's Theory of Verbal Behavior12 Given Skinner's theory of language learning, it is clear that he will have to be suspicious of religious experience reports given their "private" character. According to Skinner, how a private or interoceptive experience is reported is a function of the reinforcement history of the reporter when responding to interoceptive stimuli. If the experience is not public and there are public stimuli available that allow us to make a case for disregarding the experience report, we have a right to do so.13 E.g., if it is a headache, or an itch, or a feeling of presence or of a non-describable "higher power", then descriptions will suffer from at least two related problems- vagueness and uncorrectability verging on incommunicability with people who lack the experiences. In so far as these experiences lack public concomitants (a rash, a tumor, the sun standing still), then there is no public data for their subject matter as reported by them. Any kind of scientific or pre-scientific argument involving a logic of manipulable symbols with semantic counterparts will fail in its practical application if there is no way of fixing these counterparts. For Skinner's language scheme, religious experience reports, like all other reports, are a function of the concurrent stimuli along with the reinforcement history of the organism in question by the relevant speech community. Headache reports followed by days off with pay, reports of itching that keep field workers inside air conditioning during a St. Louis summer, reports of encounters with higher powers contained in best-sellers--all are reports a Skinnerian behaviorist might explain in terms of explicit and observable reinforcement contingencies. Skinner sketches his theory of private experience reports in Verbal Behavior,14 and in Science and Human Behavior.15 It is not that Skinner denies the existence of the private experiences reported publicly (a denial sometimes attributed to him), but rather, he is suspicious of such reports and leery of accepting them as evidence appropriate to a science. He mistrusts them, as he states in Science and Human Behavior16 (and restates in Verbal Behavior17), since: Everyone mistrusts verbal responses which describe private events. Variables are often operating which tend to weaken the stimulus control of such descriptions, and the reinforcing community is usually powerless to prevent the resulting distortion. The individual who excuses himself from an unpleasant task by pleading a headache cannot be successfully challenged, even though the existence of the private event is doubtful. There is no effective answer to the student who insists, after being corrected, that that was what he "meant to say," but the existence of this private event is not accepted with any confidence. Skinner continues his account by pointing out that we do not even have an "inside track" with respect to our own private experience reports, but that it is societal reinforcement and learned discriminations that govern our self-statements. "Strangely enough," he concludes, "it is the community which teaches the individual to `know himself.'" D. Prong 1 (Aetiological) A Skinnerian two-pronged critique of religious experience argument, like the Freudian, contains an aetiological and a pragmatic component. 1. Summary of Prong 1 Religious experience reports can be explained in terms of: (1) external controls or pressures which shape and reinforce even given the absence of the stimuli reported, (2) more subtle conditioning of reports of unusual private experiences, (3) superstitious conditioning, and (4) inaccurate descriptions of one's own behavior. These four factors provide non-divine sources for and explanations of reports of religious experience. 2. Multiple Causation and Variables Controlling Religious Experience Reports According to Skinner, verbal behavior is overdetermined in the sense that it is a function of many variables, that these can sum, collide, or "vector." In the reconstruction I am offering here, reports of religious experience can be seen as a function of at least four variables: (a) extreme or more obvious cases of external control in the absence of the private or public stimuli reported, (b) subtle cases of external control determining the classification of unusual private experiences and cultural characteristics of perception reports, (c) superstitious conditioning, and (d) cases involving inadequate feedback with respect to one's own behavior. a) More Obvious External Control One of the consequences of Skinner's views concerning multiple causation18 is that a behavior of class x, the topography of which is normally a function of discriminative stimuli u,v, . . . z, will in the absence of some of these variables tend to be a function of the others. Thus, in the absence of controlling discriminative stimuli, verbal behavior will increasingly be a function of the deprivation and conditioning history with respect to the audience in question. Conversely, as the role of these histories becomes more important to the functional analysis of a given individual's verbal behavior the function of concurrent stimuli will diminish. The audience (A) of an experiencer (E) consists of E and those members of E's community participating in or related to E's history of operant and classical conditioning in such a way as to function as listeners to E's present verbal behavior. Among the concurrent stimuli in a given E's experience will be rhythmic and musical backgrounds, parallel visual input of an ambiguous nature, as well as E's own covert verbal behavior. Other relevant factors will include E's history--various deprivations with respect to primary and secondary reinforcers and behavior which has been followed by changes in the level of deprivation; crucial here will be E's operant conditioning regarding attainment of reinforcers in similar cases of deprivation. Given the nature of responses to reports of religious experience, it would seem that "secondary deprivations"19 would be important. In lay terms the question to be asked concerns payoff and record of payoffs. In order to show the bearing of the above on religious experience reports let's consider a crude case:20 An eleven year old boy, Paul, is brought to religious services. According to the doctrine of Paul's family's church all of the saved are blessed with distinctive signs of their salvation. Among these signs are religious experiences consisting of "feeling the presence of God" that culminate in a kind of automatic speech wherein the divine takes over the speech apparatus and speaks directly through the member in a language unknown to the member. After the meeting has been under way for about an hour, one member begins acting in the fashion associated with this experience. Gradually, all the members present (except for Paul) act in like fashion and report having this experience and demonstrate it by means of incomprehensible utterances. It is clear that the meeting will continue until everyone present has had the experience. Paul prays, Paul waits; nothing happens. He prays and waits some more. He slowly becomes the center of painful attention. He excuses himself to go to the bathroom. The other boys there have already reported having this religious experience. Among them are some of Paul's friends who explain to him that they faked it and that Paul should do so also or they will never get to go home. The dynamics in Skinnerian terms of this case parallel those of a response to a threat.21 As the situation has developed, the audience A (of other church members) has become a discriminative stimulus (SD) which is also an aversive stimulus (Sav) mandating a response to a threat R ("if you do not respond you are damned and we'll be here all day"). Given Skinnerian analysis, not only will Paul be reinforced by acceding to the threat, and therefore be more likely to succumb to similar threats in the future, but the threatening agency is reinforced by Paul's accommodating behavior and will also be more likely to threaten in this fashion. b) More Subtle Control and Conditioned Perception Cases need not be so crude. Studies have indicated that even ordinary perceptual reports can become distorted as a function of current community,22 and not all situations are so clear-cut as to make this kind of process so explicit. As Skinner indicates repeatedly throughout Verbal Behavior, the influence of audience control is only one of multiple determinants of verbal behavior. Audience control is most pronounced when these other factors (such as concurrent stimuli, conditioning history of the speaker in question) are either congruent23 or inadequate to determine the response. Interpretations of such cases that may be used to explain seeing things religiously, as well as to begin to make sense of the entire group of perceptions and experience reports referred to in terms of "seeing as" or "hearing as," have been suggested by Skinner. These views were developed in his evaluations of the results of experimental results from the "verbal summator,"24 a kind of "auditory Rorschach" which "repeats a vague pattern of speech sounds at low intensity or against a noisy background . . . . The material sounds like fragments of natural speech heard through a wall."25 The verbal summator decreases the influence of concurrent stimuli. In Skinnerian terms, it allows material from "supplementary variables" (such as the experiencer's conditioning history) to come through. One subject heard in these mumbled speech like noises, "God of love, Come near the earth."26 c) Superstitious Conditioning Again The Skinnerian theory of the origins of religious experience due to superstitious conditioning is explained above.27 The feeling that magical thinking is efficacious (as well as that of a protecting hand of a Higher Power), may occur, in situations of great good fortune (or avoidance of great misfortune), as in the cases where some say, "somebody up there likes me," or with prayer. In their early work, for example, on varying schedules, Skinner's colleague, Fred S. Keller, compared conditioning under a variable-ratio schedule to human prayer.28 d) Inadequate Feedback Skinner claims that our ignorance concerning our own role in the production of behavior may lead us to attribute the behavior to another entity, whether a subpersonality or deity. This ignorance results from "inadequate feedback." Skinner states: When feed-back from verbal behavior has been lacking at the time of emission and when the speaker or writer is then faced with evidence of that behavior, he is likely to attribute it to another person. He not only has no memory of having produced it, but the unedited material may be so strange or objectionable as to be unrecognizable. . . . When evidence of personal participation is inescapable, there is a tendency to assign the work to supernatural forces. The Greek and Roman oracles, often apparently speaking in a trance state similar to that of automatic writing, were accepted as speaking for the gods. The modern spiritualistic medium often claims to be speaking with the voice of a dead person. Great religious works are often said to be dictated by God.29 Having provided the ingredients of a non-divine aetiology and explanation of religious experience by means of obvious and subtle kinds of external control, superstitious conditioning, and inadequate feedback with respect to one's own behavior, in the next section, we consider the second, pragmatic, prong of the Skinnerian critique. E. Prong 2: (Pragmatic) 1. Prong 2: Summary and Sources Two key sources for a Skinnerian pragmatic criticism of religious experience argument are his Beyond Freedom and Dignity30 and Science and Human Behavior. There, the critique is based on the consequences of accepting such arguments, first (1) as a result of the deleterious consequences of the methods of control used by agencies whose authority might be buttressed by religious experience, and secondly (2) due to the dangers of accepting evidence rooted in superstitious conditioning. a) Pragmatics of Religious Control Skinner argues on the basis of religion's failures. Institutional religious control does not seem to be giving rise to a golden age. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner argues that traditional controlling systems contain too many false assumptions about the human person. Religion, among them, interferes with the attainment of the technology required to perfect the world. Since religion relies on factors such as superstitious conditioning, and overwhelming threatening contingencies (e.g., eternal hell) for its maintenance and support, it has and will come into conflict with the science of human behavior which Skinner takes be the only way out of the dilemmas we face as individuals in need of behavior therapy and as a society in need of behavioral controls to prevent evils such as overpopulation and war.31 b) The Dangers of Superstitiously Conditioned Experience The conditioning process associated with experience related to religious control is that of superstitious conditioning (the report of feeling a divine hand in one's life due to accidental reinforcement; the feelings about one's prayers being answered; the false generalization from human controls to natural controls). Superstitious conditioning is an unreliable method and dangerous in the long run. It is virtually guaranteed to bring false information into one's Weltanschauung--this way leads to world-views permeated with dangerously false contents which can actually interfere with even pre-existing truths. Furthermore, superstitious conditioning thwarts more constructive responses to the environment and may interfere with an individual's adequate adjustment to his or her environment, i.e., may produce what is ordinarily termed psychopathology. Worse still, according to Skinner, not only can this cause such problems, it may preserve them, interfering as it does with psychotherapeutic attempts.32 IV. Summary and Conclusion of Chapter Four In this chapter I have provided a reconstruction of Freud and Skinner in which each provides the material for a two-fold critique of religious experience argument. Each presents an aetiology that does not require a divine source for religious experience; each offers pragmatic criticism based on the deleterious consequences of accepting religious experience as the basis of religious belief. Freud provides an aetiology of religious experience based on the Oedipus Complex, wishful thinking, and the pre-history of humanity;33 Skinner finds the sources of religious belief in the vicissitudes of the conditioning process, stressing external pressure, public shaping of self-perception, and superstitious conditioning. Freud finds the consequences of accepting such experience a risk to both the sanity and progress of the individual and society; Skinner finds parallel dangers in accepting the results of superstitious conditioning as evidence, and in the pernicious control buttressed by such experience when taken seriously. Both object strenuously to the error of trying to find in such reports the solutions that only science can provide. We now turn to the issue of the ad hominem status of these psychological criticisms. The analysis of abusive ad hominem found in Chapter Two, the Jamesian argument from religious experience reconstructed in Chapter Three, as well as the popular argument from religious experience sketched in Chapter Four, will all be brought to bear on these reconstructions of Freudian and Skinnerian criticisms of religious experience argument. This occurs in the next chapter, Chapter Five, where the question will be addressed and answered, "Do Freudian and Skinnerian criticism of religious experience arguments commit the fallacy of abusive ad hominem?" ====NOTES===================================== 1Quine and Skinner have been friends for over 50 years. The influence of Skinner's work on verbal behavior is documented in Word and Object, pp. 80, 82. Quine's influence on Skinner's work on verbal behavior is discussed in Skinner's, The Shaping of a Behaviorist: Part Two of an Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 151) and is documented in Verbal Behavior itself (pp. 18, 324, 342). In Shaping., Skinner claims that he was influenced towards behaviorism by Russell's work Philosophy, which with Watson's Behaviorism, and Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes, "had," he thought as he entered his first year of graduate school, "prepared me for a career in psychology" (p. 4). Skinner also was motivated to extend his behaviorism into the complexities of verbal behavior and issues of epistemology by his discussions with Whitehead, whom Skinner once told, "we needed a psychological epistemology" (Shaping., p. 29). In 1934, Whitehead challenged Skinner to explain verbal behavior within the limits of behaviorism. The work that culminated in Verbal Behavior was then begun (Shaping., pp. 149-151; see also Verbal Behavior (pp. 456 460) where Skinner attempts to meet Whitehead's challenge). 2This is, apparently, deliberate. According to Saul Rosenzweig ("The Impact of B. F. Skinner on Psychiatry," Medical World News: Psychiatry 1972, pp. 54-55, 59-60), while a graduate student at Harvard, Skinner "predicted that he would one day translate all of Freud into objective terms." (p. 59) Skinner's goal may account for the parallels between his psychological criticism of argument from religious experience and that of Freud. Both account for religious experience as misinterpretation of information about the self, in terms of needs satisfied as a result of taking and presenting these experiences as evidence of higher powers. Skinner, it will be seen, also criticizes this kind of move as interfering with mental health and societal development. See "The Dangers of Superstitiously Conditioned Experience," and note 72, below. 3Freud on the contrary, places internal dynamics at the theoretical center, and overt behavior at the periphery. Skinner's view is a curious emulation and inversion--one might say that he stands Freud on his head. 4It should be noted that there is a problem with making a precise distinction between these two kinds of conditioning. For the interested reader, this debate is explained in Ana Coelho's unpublished dissertation manuscript (Ph.D. dissertation in progress, Washington University in St. Louis; Chapter 2, Section 2, pp. 11-15, "The Operant-Respondent Distinction" and Section 4, "The Elicited-Emitted Distinction," pp. 16-21). 5Robinson, Systems of Modern Psychology: A Critical Sketch, pp. 115-116, quoting E. L. Thorndikes's Animal Intelligence. Facsimile of 1898 edition; New York: Hafner, 1970, p. 244. 6Other schedules of reinforcement include "fixed interval" in which an organism is reinforced after a response only after a specified time has elapsed since the last reinforcement; rates of responding increase shortly before the interval expires. Howard Rachlin suggests that an example of this in ordinary experience is the reinforcement of a teakettle boiling (Introduction to Modern Behaviorism, San Francisco, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1970, p. 115). In "fixed-ratio" schedules the organism is reinforced after some fixed number of responses, as in piece- work. 7Jane Loevinger, in Paradigms of Personality (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1987) explains: For a variable-ratio schedule, the animal is reinforced after some number of responses, but the number varies from one reinforcement to the next in some random sequence. With that schedule, the likelihood of receiving a reinforcement is greater, the faster the rate of response; thus the animal is usually responding rapidly when reinforced and settles down to a uniformly high rate of responses . . . even when the frequency of reinforcement is no greater than for other schedules. . . . Not only does intermittent reinforcement affect the rate of response; it also affects the persistence of a response for long periods during which it is not reinforced. In particular, a variable-interval or variable-ratio schedule will make the animal very resistant to experimental extinction of the response. With appropriate prior training, a pigeon may emit as many as 10,000 successive responses without reinforcement . . . . (p. 83; she cites G. H. Bower and E. R. Hilgard's 1981 Theories of Learning (5th edition; Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall) for the extinction data). 8Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, pp. 86-87. 9Loevinger, Paradigms., p. 83., cites Skinner's 1956 article "A Case Study in Scientific Method, American Psychologist," 11, 221-233. 10This domain of the religious for Skinner is made clear in the 23d chapter of Science and Human Behavior, "Religion," pp. 350-358. 11In his discussion of "thinking" in Verbal Behavior, Skinner argues that we learn to restrict verbal behavior to the covert level. I.e., just as we learn how to read without moving our lips, we learn how to read without subvocalizing. The behavior becomes covert and is no longer accessible to direct observation. (Verbal Behavior, Chapter 19, "Thinking," pp. 434-438, "Covert Verbal Behavior." See also Science and Human Behavior, Chapter 17, "Private Events in a Natural Science," pp. 263-282.) 12There is a sense in which Skinner's theory of verbal behavior is Skinner's first major attempt to carefully present and argue for the generalization of his experimental laboratory work to more complex and varied human behavior. In his early work, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1938), Skinner wrote: The reader will have noticed that almost no extension to human behavior is made or suggested. This does not mean that he is expected to be interested in the behavior of the rat for its own sake. The importance of a science of behavior derives largely from the possibility of an eventual extension to human affairs. But it is a serious, though common, mistake to allow questions of ultimate application to influence the development of a science at an early stage. . . . Let him extrapolate who will. Whether or not extrapolation is justified cannot at the present time be decided. . . . the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior. (pp. 441-442) Yet, with Skinner, as with later behaviorists, restraint had its limits; he entered the lists of the extrapolators. According to his autobiographical writings, he did so in response to a philosopher's challenge. In Verbal Behavior (pp. 456ff., as well as in his autobiography, Shaping of a Behaviorist, Part Two., (pp. 149- 51)), Skinner describes his theory of verbal behavior as a response to Whitehead: In 1934, while dining at the Harvard Society of Fellows, I found myself seated next to Professor Alfred North Whitehead. We dropped into a discussion of behav- iorism . . . . Eventually we took the following stand. He agreed that science might be successful in accounting for human behavior, provided one made an exception of verbal behavior. Here, he insisted, something else must be at work. He brought the discussion to a close with a friendly challenge: "Let me see you," he said, "account for my behavior as I sit here saying, `No black scorpion is falling upon this table'." (Shaping., pp. 149-51.) 13E.g., the reports function as excuses. 14pp. 130-146. 15pp. 257-282. 16p. 260. 17p. 134. 18Skinner devotes all of Part III of Verbal Behavior (pp. 227-309) to "Multiple Variables," and an entire chapter (Chapter 9, pp. 227-245) to the issue of "Multiple Causation." Freud also claimed that events were "over-determined." Freud argues in Moses and Monotheism that the influence of a great man need not require the non-influence of other factors, e.g., economic. He claims that though one cause may satisfy our need for explanation, in truth, "each event seems to be over-determined and turns out to be the effect of several converging causes. (See Moses and Monotheism, pp. 136-38.) 19For our purposes, a "primary deprivation" is a deprivation induced by depletion of a primary reinforcer, e.g., hunger, which is eliminated through the provision of the primary reinforcer, in this case, food. A "secondary deprivation" is a depletion of a secondary reinforcer (e.g., money or attention) which can be exchanged for a primary reinforcer. 20Richard L. Kuhn brought this kind of case to my attention in 1986. 21This analysis is suggested by Skinner's formal treatment of a simple threat ("step aside") in Verbal Behavior, pp. 37-38. 22The classic "observation sentence" studies in which group control seems to determine a response despite concurrent stimuli are Solomon E. Asch's. In the "Asch-Type Situation," a subject mis-describes the size of a vertical chalk line when confronted with the mis-description of others (confederates). These studies are summarized in Lawrence S. Wrightsman's Social Psychology in the Seventies (Monterey, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, A Division of Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, California, 1972), pp. 463-464. Wrightsman (pp. 463, 615) cites the following Asch studies: "Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments," in H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, Leadership, and Men, (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press, 1951); "Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority," Psychological Monographs, 1956, 70 (9 Whole No. 416); "Effects of Group Pressure upon Modification and Distortion of Judgments," in E. E. Maccoby, T. M. Newcomb, and E. L. Hartley (Eds.), Readings in Social Psychology (3d ed.), (New York: Holt, 1958), pp. 174-183. This phenomenon is accounted for in certain procedural systems. In Talmudic legal process, for example, speakers were compelled to state their opinions in an inverse order with respect to seniority. 23I.e., the facts are agreed upon by the audience, and evidence is not an important consideration. 24 Verbal Behavior, pp. 259-265. 25Verbal Behavior, p. 260. 26Verbal Behavior, p. 262. 27See section III. A. 1, "Superstitious Conditioning." 28In his autobiography, Skinner discusses a 1936 letter where Keller "had mentioned the possibility of a variableratio schedule, the heart of all gambling systems." According to Skinner, Keller wrote, "Unless I can find where you did it already, I'm going to get data on extinction after `haphazard' rather than `fixed' ratios in reconditioning. You know, it's more like human prayer that way!" (Shaping, Part Two, p. 189.) 29Verbal Behavior, pp. 390-391. 30(New York: Bantam/Vintage published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Alfred A. Knopf edition 1971, Bantam/Vintage edition, 1972.) 31This is the line Skinner offers in Science and Human Behavior and in Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He offers a similar argument, and makes similar claims for the need to give up old values and religious systems in "Walden Two Revisited," the 1976 Introduction to his utopia, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1948, 1976, pp. v-xvi). (This parallels Freud's argument in Future of an Illusion, Chapters VII-X.) 32See Science and Human Behavior, pp. 358, 371-372. The parallel to Freud's criticism in terms of psychopathology at both the level of individual and society is striking. Both psychologists threaten those who believe on the basis of religious experience with a loss of contact with and ability to successfully manipulate reality and truth. See . . . above for more discussion of the Freud Skinner connection. 33It is worth noting again, given its controversial nature, that this pre-history is neither sufficient nor necessary for Freud's criticism of religion, given his theory of over-determinism.