The Genesis and Merits of Cognitive Behaviorism

Albert Bandura is well known as the founder of social cognitive theory. His work was part of a significant turning point in the history of psychotherapy. Following the groundbreaking work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, psychotherapy was mostly practiced and studied from a psychoanalytic framework. According to this theory, human behavior was a symptom of the unconscious mental life and the interactions between the different aspects of this psychic realm. For example, Freud taught that the three parts of the psyche, the id, ego, and superego, interacted with each other to form a specific personality. Jung theorized that such interactions took place between a different set of parts: the shadow, the anima or animus, the persona, and the self. The role of the psychotherapist then was to help the patient explore and further integrate these unconscious parts through the interpretation of dreams, the analysis of word associations, or the uncovering of subconscious motivations that caused certain behaviors or reactions.

In sharp contrast to this approach, behavioral psychologists placed their emphasis on the modification of problematic behaviors through careful manipulation of the environment rather than on a person’s internal systems. They were skeptical about psychoanalysis for several reasons, including its lack of predictive and therapeutic value. Some claimed that its only predictive power was that patients inevitably ended up with beliefs that matched the clinician’s particular theory.¹ B. F. Skinner, one of the founders of behaviorism, wrote, “Feelings occur at just the right time to serve as causes of behavior and they have been cited as such for centuries.” He cited the example of a parent who wants to make his child eat nutritious food and so does not allow him to eat anything else. Eventually, the child will feel hunger and eat the food. In this example, we observe that a physical situation causes a feeling and a feeling causes a physical action. Thus, the feelings or the intrapsychic activity is a middle term between two physical realities, not the actual cause. Moreover, this middle term is largely unexplainable and undecipherable. He therefore suggested that we simply ignore it, focusing instead on the causality between the physical environment and human behavior.

When what a person does is attributed to what is going on inside him, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation? For twenty-five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment.²

On the other hand, behavioral psychologists were not accepted by the mainstream psychoanalytic tradition. The primary arguments against their approach were that behavioral modification was too superficial, that it only treated symptoms that would eventually resurface in a different form, and that it was not useful for true psychological development but only for minor behavioral modifications.³ Clearly, there was a need for something more integrated than either of these approaches.

The radical behaviorism of Skinner ignored the mind altogether as being causally significant with regards to a person’s actions. It viewed the human being as a mere set of correlations between stimuli and reactions which could be trained. The reductionism of radical behaviorism was disproved by an experiment conducted by Martin Seligman in the 1960s. His suspicions about radical behaviorism began when he observed an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers were confused by why the dogs in the experiment were not responding to minor shocks in the expected manner. He believed that they had learned to be helpless and that this caused them to be unresponsive to the shocks. This was a highly controversial view at the time because it was presupposed that “helplessness” was an intellectual concept, something like a paradigm, which could never be the cause of behaviors, especially in animals. He conducted an experiment of his own where he isolated all other variables. There were three dogs. One could change whether or not it got shocked by pushing a button. The other could not change the shocks by pushing the button. And the third received no shocks. AFter this, they all moved into a different setting where they could all easily run away from the shocks and be free of them.

In early January of 1965, we exposed the first dog to shocks from which it could escape and the second dog to identical shocks from which it could not escape. The third dog was left alone. The next day, we took the dogs to the shuttlebox and gave all three shocks they could easily escape by hopping over the low barrier dividing one side of the box from the other. Within seconds the dog that had been taught to control shocks discovered that he could jump over the barrier and escape. The dog that earlier had received no shocks discovered the same thing, also in a matter of seconds. But the dog that had found that nothing it did mattered made no effort to escape, even though it could easily see over the low barrier to the shockless zone of the shuttlebox. Pathetically, it soon gave up and lay down, though it was regularly shocked by the box. It never found out that the shock could be escaped merely by jumping to the other side.⁴

The conclusion was clear. An animal could learn through experience that nothing it does makes a difference. The result of learning this idea or paradigm is inaction. Seligman therefore called this “learned helplessness.”

The work of behaviorists clearly needed to be expanded with a cognitive dimension. Later neuroscientific studies brought even more clarity to the picture, as it discovered that the initial or default state of the brain is one of unlearned helplessness. The brain gradually develops efficacy through positive experiences of being able to effect change through actions. This is observable in infants as they move their hands and feet randomly but then begin to observe how those movements affect the environment. In a healthy upbringing, a person grows out of the default helplessness. However, helplessness can be relearned, so to speak, through repetitive experiences of non-efficacy. “Animals learn that they can control aversive events, but the passive failure to learn to escape is an unlearned reaction to prolonged aversive stimulation.”⁵ Such experiments helped demonstrate the power of thoughts in influencing behavior.

Bandura was one of those critical of the psychoanalytic tradition. He therefore embraced the behavioral framework but expanded it in significant ways. First, he pioneered social learning theory, which shows that behaviors are learned by watching and learning from others.^{6 7} Like Seligman (and several others), he thus demonstrated a definite cognitive dimension to behavior. More significantly, he also affirmed the agency of the human being. He wrote, “People are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating, and self-reflecting. They are not simply onlookers of their behavior. They are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products.”⁸ This stands in contrast to the more deterministic tendencies of both psychodynamism and behaviorism. With this more robust form of behaviorism, Bandura could respond to the critiques coming from the psychoanalytic tradition that behaviorism was superficial. He demonstrated that integral human development, where the change permeates the inner life of the individual, is possible from a behavioral starting point.

In Bandura’s early work with phobics (persons suffering from phobias), he walked them through guided mastery experiences. The key to such therapy, he found, is taking a step that is large enough to stimulate growth and yet small enough to generate a positive experience. For example, if a person was afraid of heights, the therapist would join the person in walking up a small hill. Gradually, he would have the person go up on his own without the therapist. The experiences were steadily increased in intensity, duration, and generality (e.g. with different types of heights). Such therapy proved exceptionally effective. Moreover, it was often accompanied by another surprising result. Years later, patients would return indicating that they became more confident in other areas of their lives that had no apparent connection to the phobia that they had overcome through therapy.⁹ As it turned out, once the person learned that they possessed the ability to overcome a debilitating fear (perhaps one that afflicted them for decades), they could apply this learned confidence to overcome other debilitating fears. A person who overcame their fear of reptiles, for example, would come back years after their therapy was finished to report that they had now overcome their fear of public speaking. It seems that deep transformation is possible through this “outside-in” approach via cognitive behavioral exercises.

In future articles, we will explore the merits of the “inside-out” approach.

1. Albert Bandura, Albert Bandura on Behavior Therapy, Self Efficacy & Modeling (Interview), 2005, accessed November 16, 2024, psychotherapy.net. ↩

2. B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism, 1st edition (New York: Vintage, 2011), chap. 1. ↩

3. Albert Bandura, Albert Bandura on Behavior Therapy, Self Efficacy & Modeling (Interview). ↩

4. Martin E. P Seligman, Learned Optimism (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 18–28. ↩

5. Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience,” Psychological Review 123, no. 4 (July 2016): 349. ↩

6. Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila A. Ross, “Transmission of Aggression through Imitation of Aggressive Models,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63, no. 3 (1961): 575–82. ↩

7. Albert Bandura, “Influence of Models’ Reinforcement Contingencies on the Acquisition of Imitative Responses,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1, no. 6 (1965): 589–95. ↩

8. Albert Bandura, “Toward a Psychology of Human Agency,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, no. 2 (2006): 164–80. ↩

9. Albert Bandura, Albert Bandura on Behavior Therapy, Self Efficacy & Modeling (Interview). ↩