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Behaviorism, Autism, and Procrastination
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The Johnson and Malott Dialogue on Sexuality
Nature or Nurture?The psychoanalysts first put forward the position that sexual orientation is learned. Behaviorists tend to be among the severest critics of psychoanalytic theory, but that’s usually about their overuse of metaphor and mentalistic concepts, and expansive view if the mind, as opposed to a parsimonious explanation derived from measurement experimentation. In fact, behaviorists agree with many of the basic phenomena noticed by psychoanalysts, they just describe them differently.
RWM: I agree 100%.
It is easy to translate psychoanalytic concepts into behavioreese. When I taught Intro Psych, I used to ask the students to write translations of Freud’s defense mechanisms, and so on. It was easy because the overlap between psychoanalysis and behavior analysis is at least tri-fold: they are motivation based, they do not require awareness to work, and they are experience-based.
RWM: I agree 100%.
Your notion of “preschool fatality” is very psychoanalytic in this sense.
RWM: I agree 100%.
However, enlightened behaviorists these days try very hard not to express their explanations in a pathological context, which is another way that behaviorists are very different from psychoanalysts. Your text does very well in this regard.
RWM: Thanks.
Simon LeVay, 1996, distills a lot of the research I review below, in a book, “Queer Science.” In some cases I have lifted whole sentences and phrases and put them in here, not in the interests of plagiary, but to accelerate my writing this review.
The “scientific” (vs. psychoanalytic) position that sexual orientation is learned was first described in the 60s’s by Wainwright Churchill (1967) and others. The anthropology of Churchill’s theory was that a person’s sexual orientation depended on the sex of the first person with whom he or she first had sexual contact to orgasm.
RWM: I think that’s much to simplistic and, in fact, rarely the case.
If that person was heterosexual, then heterosexuality was reinforced; if of the same sex, then homosexuality was reinforced. Conversely, an early sexual contact that was painful or frightening would be negatively reinforced. Of course, the sex of one’s initial partner must be the most salient characteristic; “otherwise one might end up always dating taxi drivers or never having sex with people in jeans.” (LeVay, 1996)
There are many problems with Churchill’s position, i.e., anthropology. For example, many gays and lesbians end up with a sexual orientation different from their first encounter. I had 10 years of mediocre sex with women before I got up the awareness and nerve that I would serve myself better by having sex with men. Many gay people my age had lots of sex with women before coming out, although this is far less likely today, given the rising level of tolerance for homosexuality, and awareness of the GLBT community. It is also quite common for gays and lesbians to know that they are homosexual prior to any homosexual experience or even prior to any sexual experiences of any kind. And there are many heterosexual men and women whose first sexual contacts, often pleasurable ones at that, have been with the same sex. For example, all teenage boys of the Sambia of New Guinea engage in culturally reinforced homosexual behavior but later they become predominantly heterosexual. And don’t forget the same-sex behavior among boys and girls at segregated boarding schools. Boarding school attendance does not increase the likelihood of a homosexual orientation in adulthood (Wellings, et al, l994).
RWM: I agree with your critique of Churchill. I think most of our sexual values and prejudices are programmed before any direct sexual encounters. We need a better analysis of how this works.
I could go on about one-trial learning not always working, competing repertoires whose eventual predominance is based upon relative proportions of reinforcement, and so on, as did many people who poked holes in these early behavioral anthropologies. In response to the criticisms of Churchill’s theory, McGuire and his colleagues (1965) said that although the initial encounter itself may not fix sexual orientation, the association is reinforced during subsequent solitary masturbation because the individual is likely to use the recollection as an aid to sexual arousal. They reported several case histories to support their theory. Their suggested treatment plan for homosexuality was to begin masturbating with homosexual fantasies and switch to a heterosexual fantasy 5 seconds prior to orgasm, by which time climax is too close to be derailed. However, McGuire et al. never reported a successful case of this plan.
RWM: And that’s compatible with the early behavior therapy work trying to convert homosexual criminals to heterosexual criminals. But, I’ve always been a little suspicious of that work, suspecting the researcher-therapists were confusing temporary compliance with permanent adherence to a new set of values.
Your anthropology, the social reinforcement of Bobbie’s sexual orientation began with his mother-child interactions and his mother’s wishes is not specific, and I don’t blame you for not being specific. I maintain that any anthropology will be refutable. The psychoanalyst’s mumbo-jumbo about mother-child interactions is more specific and therefore full of holes. Different social learning anthropologies are a dime a dozen in the literature. Both psychoanalytical and behavioral theories can be manipulated to accommodate almost any case history. This is the first of 3 main problems I see with your using the Barlow, et al study to support the position that sexual orientation is learned.
(RWM: Yes, we are working at a sufficiently lose, speculative level that we can accommodate almost any scenario; but that’s true, whether we take a nature or a nurture view. I’m not sure why I was so vague on that one and have made it a little more specific, in accord with the actual case study, but I’m going to have to check it out, because I may be confusing a couple of studies.)
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