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Behaviorism, Autism, and Procrastination
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Clinton, Bush, Skinner and Social Determinism
Richard W. Malott
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Social Determinism
Herrnstein (1971), wrote an extremely interesting, thoughtful, insightful article on meritocracy in the USA. This was long before he dishonored the field of behavior analysis with his biological-deterministic The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), wherein he justified the right-wing, establishment’s view of the appropriateness of the status quo, the current, extreme inequities in wealth and power, by saying those inequities resulted from the genetic inferiority of poor people and of people of color.
In the earlier article, Herrnstein argued that our society is a meritocracy where not only does the cream rise to the top, but it starts near the top from day one. (It was not until The Bell Curve that he argued this social determinism was, in turn, biologically determined.) And, today in search of the soul of Skinner’s 100th birthday, as I jogged through Harvard Square and the Harvard Commons, I reflected on the elite nature of Harvard, the intellectual home of both Herrnstein and Skinner. In truth, if you stacked all the IQ points in Cambridge end to end, they would reach from here to the other side of the universe, or at least to the moon.
In other words, Cambridge, MA may contain the world’s greatest collection of extremely well-honed, effective repertoires (the professors) and effective repertoires in the honing (the students), at least the greatest per capita. Jogging through Harvard’s commons (the park in the center of the university) and Harvard’s square (the shopping district on the edge of the university), I didn’t need no Dorothy to tell me that Toto and I were no longer in Kalamazoo and that the bookstore window I was staring through wasn’t part of the Barnes and Noble chain.
The loser, mediocre, elite continuum fascinates me. What’s the difference between Skinner and you and me? How’d he become Skinner, and why didn’t we? What’s the difference between us and the world’s greatest experts? Skinner’s peer group wasn’t the members of ABA. We ABA members worship him, as well we should. But his peer group wasn’t us; it was his world-class colleagues at Harvard. There are two different worlds, the one these world-class experts inhabit and the one we inhabit.
So how do you get to be a world-class expert? By working your butt off, according to the brilliant cognitive psychologist, Anders Ericsson (e.g., Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Rèomer, 1993). Ten thousand hours of deliberate, well focused, thoughtful practice will turn you into a world-class expert, whether that expertise is in music, sports, dance, chess, science, or politics. And Ericsson’s research suggests you can only do about 20 hours of this intense work per week. Therefore most world-class experts start when they’re little kids, a few hours a week. By the time they’re in their early 20’s they’ve upped it to 20 per week and accumulated their 10,000. But it ain’t easy. Many children (maybe most) burn out along the way, because their parents didn’t manage to program the deliberate practice humanely enough or to inculcate the Jewish-mother values needed to maintain such a rigorous regimen. And, yes, the parent’s and other caretaker-trainers are crucial. Kids don’t embark on 10,000 hours of hard, deliberate practice on their own. And even if they did, they’d need expert coaches and trainers along the way, whether those experts were parents or professionals or, more typically, a combination of parents and professionals. Ericsson says that at least one of the parents must devote their life to nurturing the budding expert, and I would add: nurturing with wisdom, thoughtfulness, and high, demanding, guilt-inducing Jewish-mother intensity, though not so much that the kid burns out and rebels.
But that’s asking a lot of the parents. They must have the resources to afford the luxury of nurturing a budding genius. But poor folks don’t have that luxury and equally bad, they don’t have the skills. The problem is that, contrary, to what we romantic, liberal, democracy-loving Americans would like to believe, everything positive is correlated with wealth; the wealthier you are, the healthier you are, the smarter you are, the less likely you are to get into spousal abuse or child neglect, the less likely you are to be obese, smoke cigarettes, not floss your teeth, not buckle up etc.Continue reading this article (page 3)
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