Science in Christian Perspective

The Behaviorist Bandwagon and the Body of Christ
Ill. A Christian Examination of Applied Behaviorism
MARY STEWART VAN LEBUWEN
Department of Psychology
York University

From: JASA 31 (September 1979): 129-138.

In Part I of this paper, we attempted to explain the nature of the behaviorist enterprise by distinguishing among (a) behaviorism as a total world view ("ontological behaviorism"), (b) behaviorism as a set of research principles for guiding laboratory investigation of human and animal behavior ("methodological behaviorism"), and (c) behaviorism as a marketable tool for changing behavior in the world at large ("applied behaviorism"). In Part II, we were particularly concerned to examine the implications of ontological behaviorism for the thoughtful Christian. We attempted to show that the assumptions of determinism, materialism, and "mental processlessness," to which the ontological behaviorist adheres, are incompatible with the biblical view of man: environmental determinism leaves no room for moral accountability; materialism leaves no room for spiritual realities over and above what is reducible to the purely physical; "mental processlessness" leaves no room for activities such as reasoning, feeling, or creatively imagining - activities which we know to be characteristic of God himself and therefore (however imperfectly) of human beings made in His image. Moreover, we pointed out that ontological behaviorists themselves, once they bump up against created reality, cannot themselves consistently live up to the assumptions of their position: in one way or another, autonomous man, morally-accountable man, thinking man, spiritually oriented man returns to the behaviorist system which claims to have dispensed with him. This is a further reason for questioning the validity of this "new gospel."

However, the serious flaws of ontological behaviorism do not alter the fact that the applied techniques of behaviorism are everywhere around us, are much used, and in many ways apparently "work." Since, as we have already pointed out, the applied behaviorist does not necessarily adhere to behaviorism as a total world view, perhaps we need to examine the track-record of applied behaviorism separately, trying to distinguish those components which a Christian may feel at ease in using from those towards which he should turn a skeptical eye. We will begin with some typical examples and standard working principles of behavior modification techniques, then go on to suggest what Christians might accept and reject from the system, and why. The following examples are based on techniques of operant conditioning exclusively, since it is these techniques that the lay reader is most apt to see being applied in schools, clubs, and homes. The application of respondent conditioning techniques, as described in Part I of this essay, is still largely restricted to the professional therapists' office and to very selective institutional settings.¹

Applied Behaviorism: Some Typical Examples

Let us return to Billy, the autistic child whose bizarre, unmanageable behavior was described at the beginning of Part I of this paper. When I first met Billy, although I had only a modicum of training in the techniques of behavior modification I spent some time showing Billy's parents how certain (essentially simple) principles of behavior modification could be used to "shape" socially desirable actions in their son and at the same time "extinguish" his bizarre habits: since he was a good eater, I simply took charge of his food dish while he was captive in his highchair and made each spoonful contingent on his emitting some approximation to the word "food." To begin with, I promptly rewarded, or "reinforced" any chance grunt with a mouthful of food, but as the child began to make the association between vocalizing and getting food, I could begin to require progressively more of him: not just any grunt, but only an "oo-o" sound would then be rewarded, and a little later, only an "oo-d" and finally, only the entire word "food." In less than 10 minutes, Billy was saying a word, and (just as important) paying close attention to another human being. As an amateur behavior modifier, I had made use of essentially the same principle as animal trainers use to teach circus animals complicated tricks: one begins by rewarding remote approximations to the final "trick" - bits of behavior which the animal is likely to display anyway in the normal course of its activities, and once these "simple" behaviors can be reliably elicited by the food treats, the trainer can gradually require more and more complicated behavior for the same reward until the tiger is finally waltzing with the bear, or (a much-quoted example from B.F. Skinner's Harvard laboratory) the pigeons are playing ping-pong with each other by batting a celluloid ball back and forth across a table with their beaks. Of course, the pigeons don't "know" that they're playing a game called ping-pong, nor did Billy "know" that the noises he was emitting constituted a real word in a real language that could be used to communicate - but in the case of autistic children like Billy, what begins as a mere noise emitted to food which cannot be obtained any other way can gradually be taught to be used as a label, then as part of a request or question, and eventually as part of a real (albeit still somewhat mechanistic) conversation.

Another example: a severely regressed schizophrenic woman has been vegetating on the back ward of a mental hospital for years, unreachable by more traditional forms of therapy, spending what time she is not eating or sleeping in the endless repetition of bizarre phrases and actions, apparently almost totally oblivious to the real world around her. Then the hospital institutes a behavior modification program. The behavior modifiers point out that, far from helping the woman by tolerating or even indulging her bizarre behavior, the hospital staff are effectively rewarding, or "reinforcing" it, in the first place by giving her food and shelter while she persists in it, and secondly by paying attention to her when she engages in it. Suddenly the entire working operation of the ward changes. The woman discovers, for instance, that she will not get a meal until, for example, she begins to use the toilet for defecation instead of soiling herself. To the surprise of the skeptical ward attendants (who have been cleaning her up for years), she is toilet trained within days. A little later, she is made to "earn" yard privileges (or cigarettes, or candy, or whatever she finds particularly rewarding) by washing and dressing appropriately. Still later, she learns to hold a coherent conversation, or help with tasks around the ward, and "earns" not direct rewards, but plastic poker-chips, a sort of "local currency," with which she can "buy" a number of things, from tuck-shop items to a day-trip away from the hospital. Her "work," which began with the very basic task of being toilet trained and was rewarded with the very basic reinforcement of food, becomes (as she is able to cope with it) gradually more socially demanding, and is rewarded with gradually less immediate and less-tangible rewards: poker chips rather than food; social approval and encouragement rather than cigarettes. In this way, her once-vegetable-like existence is replaced by a life of at least relative social usefulness and the prospect of a return to the outside world.

A final example: a difficult child in a school-room situation is constantly disrupting the class by jumping up and speaking out of turn. The teacher (who has just arrived back from a summer course on applied behavior analysis and behavior modification) stops scolding him each time he does this and simply ignores him, counselling the other children to do the same. If he gets too disruptive, she may calmly and without fanfare isolate him from the others for a few minutes. At the same time, she lavishly praises him whenever he does put his hand up to speak, or even appear to be moving towards such a response. Meanwhile, she is keeping careful records on a graph of the number of times per day that he speaks out of turn and the number of times he puts his hand up first. Within a couple of weeks, the child has stopped disrupting the class and patiently waits to have his upraised hand recognized.

Standard Working Principles

These are fairly typical case-studies from the broad range of behavior problems which have responded to behavior modification techniques. What are the working principles which unify all three examples? In fact, the ground-rules are neither complicated to understand nor difficult to apply. Indeed, behavior modification programs have won a large following in part precisely because their principles need not always be put into practice by highly-trained specialists, but can be easily learned by parents, teachers, ward-attendants and other non-psychologists with a minimum of direction from a specialist in the field. The basic working principles (in which you will see clear remnants of ontological behaviorism) are as follows:

1. Identify precisely the behavior you wish to change. Make sure that it is clearly describable in terms of outward
behavior (e.g., "defecating on the floor"; "taking off his clothes in public"; "speaking out of turn in the classroom"). Do not give into the temptation to appeal to "inner states of mind" when dealing with the behavior problem (e.g., by saying "he's insecure"; "he's lonely"; "he's jealous," etc.). Stick to the external behavioral activity which you wish to change. At the same time, do not make any assumptions about the child's or adult's innate capacities for learning. Do not say "He's schizophrenic, so he'll never be able to eat with a knife and fork," or "She's retarded, so she'll never be able to read." If (as the ontological behaviorist maintains) behavior is largely, if not totally, controlled by environmental conditions, then it follows that we should be able to teach just about anyone to do just about anything, provided we discover how to structure the environmental conditions the right way. The business of "discovering how to structure the environmental conditions the right way" is precisely the specialized task of the behavior modifier, but the applying of those conditions, once discovered, can be done by any reasonably intelligent lay person.

2. Try to identify the "reinforcers" (or rewards) which have been maintaining that activity. Often these may be surprising, and contrary to your naive intuitions: for example, in all three cases mentioned above, undesirable behavior was being reinforced by "attention" (from parents, ward attendants, teacher, fellow students, etc.). The schizophrenic woman's entire bizarre life-style was being reinforced by the custodial care she received day after day regardless of how she behaved.

3. Before trying to intervene and change the undesirable behavior, keep a log of its frequency for several weeks: At what times of day, in what situations, and how regularly does it occur? Only if you have a record of this "baseline" behavior will you be able to affirm, later on, that your behavior modification strategy has worked. This log is also continued throughout the entire behavior modification process.

4. To actually modify the undesirable behavior, two processes must go on at once: (a) systematically ignore (i.e., fail to reinforce) each instance of the undesired behavior at the same time as you (b) reinforce or reward each instance of the desired behavior. Some elaboration is needed here: first of all, with regard to (a), most behavior modifiers (drawing on the results of laboratory research with animals) maintain that it is better to ignore (or "extinguish through non-reinforcement") undesired behavior than to actually punish it. This is because punishment does not so much suppress the behavior as it simply motivates escape from the punishing circumstances. Thus, the undesired behavior may persist, but merely be transferred to circumstances where punishment is not forthcoming. Actual punishment is also eschewed because (as in the case of the disruptive school-child) it may actually be functioning as a kind of

We need to examine the track-record of applied behaviorism separately, trying to distinguish those components which a Christian may feel at ease in using from those towards which he should turn a skeptical eye.

twisted reward: negative attention is better than no attention at all! Secondly, with regard to (b), the reinforcement of the desired behavior should take place promptly after each occurrence (at least in the preliminary stages) and, where the state of the person permits, be accompanied by an explanation that clearly links the reward to the new behavior (e.g., "I gave you that toy because you put your hand up so nicely."). Finally, the process of determining "what constitutes a reward, or a reinforcer?" is a very individual one, qualified by the old dictum that one man's meat is another man's poison. Most people with biologically-normal bodies are reinforced by food - provided they are hungry - but beyond that, the would-be behavior modifier must simply discover what sorts of things are peculiarly rewarding to his client, easy to administer, not overlycostly, and not easy for the client to obtain elsewhere. Once this is done, the desired behavior should become more and more frequent as it is systematically rewarded, and the undesired behavior should disappear, or "extinguish," as it consistently fails to be rewarded anymore.

5. During the preliminary (or "acquisition") phase of the new, desired behavior, it will need to be reinforced upon each occurrence of the behavior. Additionally, one may have to begin by rewarding not the full-blown behavioral response, but rather begin by rewarding anything that resembles a "try" or an "approximation" to the behavior, gradually requiring a closer approximation to the final behavior before the reinforcement is given. However, once the behavior reliably occurs, it can be maintained thereafter on intermittent reinforcement - that is, reinforcement given only occasionally. Laboratory research in operant conditioning seems to show that once a behavior is established, it is in fact better not to reward it after each occurrence; otherwise, if for some reason the constant reward suddenly ceases, the newlylearned behavior will also cease, whereas behavior which is only intermittently reinforced is very "resistent to extinction"; it will even persist long after all rewards have been totally withdrawn.

6. As a final point, a distinction needs to be made between "primary" and "secondary" reinforcers. Primary reinforcers are said by behaviorists to be those rewards to which an organism "naturally" responds (if it is biologically normal): food during a state of hunger, water when thirsty, sleep when fatigued, sexual release during a state of sexual tension - these are all primary reinforcers to which we are largely "pre-wired" to respond and for which we do not normally have to acquire a taste. Secondary reinforcers (and we will have reason to question these definitions a little later) are said to be those acquired through association with primary reinforcers. Thus, to return to a practical illustration, the autistic child may begin by learning to make sounds only for a food reward. But if that food reward (a primary reinforcer) is always accompanied by the presence of his mother and her delighted praise over his accomplishment, then "mother's presence" and "mother's praise" become secondary reinforcers for which the child will eventually work regardless of whether they are accompanied by the more primary ones.

Since would-be behavior modifiers rarely want to follow around their clients popping food rewards into their mouths indefinitely, they tend to try to "wean" them from primary to more secondary reinforcers as quickly as possible. This means that even while primary reinforcers are the standard rewards, they are accompanied clearly and consistently by other things which can later act as secondary or alternative reinforcers. In point of fact, just about anything can become a secondary reinforcer. The pokerchip "tokens" given to the mental patients in the casestudy cited above are a clear example: like ordinary money, they have no intrinsic value to the one who possesses them; rather, they acquire their value by their association with other, more primary, reinforcers such as food, clothing, cigarettes, and so forth. But even the setting in which primary reinforcement is given may become a secondary reinforcer. Thus the autistic child who has become used to getting his food rewards (primary reinforcers) in his highchair may soon perform desired behaviors simply for the privilege of getting into the highchair (which has become a secondary reinforcer by its association with food). The process of discovering and exploiting secondary reinforcers is another skill exercised by the professional behavior modifier, but one which, once understood, is easily applied by the lay worker as well.

Applied Behaviorism: What Can Christians Accept?

As we have stated in earlier parts of this essay, ontological, methodological, and applied behaviorism all have a host of critics,' whose guiding values, if not Christian, may be humanistic, rationalistic, Marxist or whatever. And so it is not simply applied behaviorism itself but also its critics which must be judged by the standards of biblical revelation. In the absence of thoughtful reflection guided by biblical principles, it is all too easy for Christians either to accept or reject unconditionally the entire enterprise of applied behaviorism. This is hardly surprising, since it is our contention that applied behaviorism is compatible with certain biblical truths and incompatible with others. The difficulty comes in distinguishing among these. What follows is a preliminary (and far from exhaustive) attempt to do so by discussing three common criticisms of applied behaviorism.

Criticism 1: "Behavior modification techniques work on the assumption that man is purely selfish, hedonistic pleasure-seeker motivated to work only for the sake of reward. "

This is a criticism which, from a Christian standpoint, is valid if the concept of "reward" is too narrowly-defined, but invalid if it assumes that man is intrinsically more self sacrificial than we know him to be on the basis of biblical revelation. To elaborate, there is nothing in Scripture which contradicts the notion that even the redeemed man is a seeker after rewards: C. S. Lewis (who was otherwise no friend-indeed, he was a deadly foe-of behaviorism)' points out in his essay, "The Weight of Glory" that 

The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ (but) nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it, is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, footing about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.⁵

Lewis is making two very important points here: firstly (on the side of the behaviorists), an appeal to "reward" for work done (even the "work" of learning a new behavior) is not an intrinsically un-Christian notion. Indeed, the opposite assumption-that man at his highest can work in a purely disinterested, self-sacrificial manner-although it sounds superficially Christian, is actually a legacy of optimistic humanism and not of Christianity at all. Not only does God build the incentive of ultimate heavenly rewards into the description of the redeemed life (as Revelation 21 and 22 unashamedly show) but the entire history of His dealings with Israel indicates clearly that God's people were regularly exposed to His reward and favor when they lived by his standards and to his chastisement when they did not. And if the Creator in His wisdom assumes the need for immediate and long-range incentives in us, we are scarcely being un-Christian in assuming like needs in one another.

Having thus apparently opened the door to the unapologetic use of behavior modification techniques by Christian parents and teachers, let me hasten to make a second very important qualifying point from Lewis' quote. Lewis points out that "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak;" this leads us to the very important consideration of what constitutes a "reward" or reinforcer in a behavior modification scheme. A little earlier, we spoke of the behaviorist distinction between "primary" and "secondary" reinforcement. This distinction, in its extreme form, assumes that man's only "built-in" motivation is that of physical comfort, and that all other motives (desire for approval, desire for satisfying work, desire to learn, desire to find the meaning of life) are simply derived from the primary incentive to work for physical comfort. Such an assumption would hold, for instance, that a child's interst in religious matters derives from the fact that his parents reinforce him with "social approval" for such interest, and that child's capacity to be reinforced by the parents' social approval in turn derives from the fact that the parents are the ones who feed, clothe, and protect him. Now it cannot be emphasized too strongly that this "hedonistic assumption," about the nature of man is no less a faith-assumption of ontological behaviorism than the assumptions of determinism, materialism, and "mental processlessness" with which we dealt earlier. It is an assumption (or hypothesis) which precedes behaviorist research-not one which has been unequivocally demonstrated by it, as some seem to believe. While not all applied behaviorists adhere to this ''hedonistic assumption," it is part and parcel of ontological behaviorism and as such constantly creeps into behavior modification schemes when they are applied by unreflective people or by those who are tempted to see the entire behaviorist enterprise as some kind of gospel for the solution to all man's problems.

The practical question is not whether Christians should exercise the authority which accompanies whatever office we fill, but the style in which that authority is exercised by the Christian.

What is wrong with such an assumption from a Christian standpoint? After all, isn't it true that without the basic physical necessities such as food, shelter, and sleep nothing else would get done? True, but "is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ⁶ If we are made in God's image, then included among our most basic motives will be such things as the desire to do creative, meaningful work,⁷ the desire for fellowship,⁸ the desire for "play,"⁹ and (if we are true to our biblical image of man) none of these can be assumed to be mere derivatives from the desire for food, shelter, sleep or sex. Indeed, biblically speaking, the most basic need of all men (if they could only recognize it) is not their need for physical survival, but their need for reconciliation with their Maker. "Thow hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee," wrote Saint Augustine. God Himself is man's "primary reinforcer," and we forget this scandalous truth only at our own peril-"for what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?"¹⁰

So what does all this mean for the judicious use of behavior modification by Christians? In practical terms, it means that the physical rewards of food, candy, cigarettes and trinkets so over-employed by so many behavior modifiers should not be used unless it has become abundantly clear that the person is temporarily incapable of responding to the "higher order" reinforcers such as social fellowship, the opportunity for creative work or play, the opportunity to exercise aristic talents-yes, even the opportunity to worship and learn more about God. For despite man's profound and inbuilt ambivalence towards that "ultimate reward" of reconciliation with God, we should expect to find traces of that yearning for God even in emotionally disturbed, autistic, or retarded children-especially when they have been claimed by their parents for God's kingdom through baptism or dedication.¹¹

Even the recent research literature on behavior modification is beginning to caution against the naive over-use of tangible, physical rewards in situations where they are not needed. In one study, it was shown that children who originally showed a spontaneous interest in coloring activities tended to stop doing so after they had been systematically rewarded with a gold ribbon for being "good colorers." They had, it was concluded, been transformed from happy amateurs who colored for the sake of coloring into mercenary professionals who now required tangible rewards for the exercise of their talents. The research report concludes with a warning against the use of "extrinsic rewards'' in situations where it is clear that ''intrinsic rewards" (such as satisfaction in the mere doing of the activity) are already at work.¹² Christians can welcome this developing recognition among behavior modifiers that their original notions about ''rewards" were far too simplistic-but they should be warned that there often still exists a tendency to resort to primitive physical rewards as the "easy way out." We know of this temptation in our own lives as parents: it's easier to give the child a cookie when he scrapes his knee than to take the time to comfort him or read him a story. And the cookie "works"-at least in the short run. So do cigarettes and candies when used as reinforcers for learning new behaviors-but do we really want the wholesale addictions to sugar and nicotine which can be the long-term results? It is ironic that the behavior modification community includes both those who routinely use cigarettes and candy as reinforcers for new behaviors and those who, for a fee, will help you to eliminate your nicotine and calorie dependencies through the use of behavior modification techniques! Beware, therefore, lest an over-reliance on primitive, lower-order reinforcers turn you into someone who is educating a child or adult for dependence rather that for responsible freedom-into someone who more resembles a drug-pusher than a true teacher.

Criticism 2: "The practice of Behavior modification divides people into two classes: the 'controllers,' who know and practice the system and the 'controlled' who must submit in passive, ignorant helplessness. This then opens the door to authoritarian, totalitarian regimes."

Like the first criticism we considered, this second one is both valid and invalid, Christianly speaking, depending on certain other considerations. It is invalid if it assumes that there is something intrinsically wrong with the existence and exercise of authority and the capacity for control which accompanies that authority. But it is valid inasmuch as it reflects a concern about the potential for exercising control in a powerhungry fashion with no acknowledgement of accountability for the way it is used. Again, let us elaborate both qualifactions of this criticism.

Catholic theologian Michael Novak, in a recent essay on behaviorism¹³ comments that "there is a widespread belief, in this Protestant (sic) nation, that Christianity is a religion of individualism, each man his own priest and pope, each conscience inviolable, each person a potential source of autonomy and dissent." Novak then goes on to point out that this concept of man as a free, autonomous being answerable only to himself and perfectly justified in resisting any and all attempts at control is a legacy of the Enlightenment, and not of Christianity at all (however much the church has been mistakenly tainted by this teaching.)

Three critical factors tell against the model of Christianity as individualism: the teachings of the scriptures; the practice of early Christianity, and the actualities of Christian life. The reaction against an exaggerated and errant (although in some ways helpful) emphasis on individualism has been well under way for several decades .... Professor Skinner's emphasis on the social character of human existence is thus, from a theological point of view, confirmatory of a well-established trend)¹⁴

Hence legitimate authority in the context of community is not to be confused with authoritarianism, and Christians are to listen to the voice of Scripture, not to the drumbeat of secular humanism, in deciding what circumscribes the exercise of control in applied behaviorism. The biblical view of man and society clearly includes authority structuresparents over children, husbands over wives, the state over its citizens, the judge over the criminal, the church elders over the congregation-and for this reason Christians need not reject applied behaviorism on the alltoo-popular grounds that it smacks of "control" and that "control of anyone by anyone else is always intrinsically bad." It isn't. Indeed, according to Scripture, the fruit of rebellion against legitimate authority is not sweet tolerance and freedom but chaotic and ugly self-seeking (as the book of Judges vividly testifies in documenting an era when "each man did what was right in his own eyes"¹⁵). Only a naively optimistic view about the perfectibility of man holds otherwise.

Again, lest I appear to be opening the door to the very excercise of despotism so feared by the secular critics of applied behaviorism, let me qualify the above remarks. The critics of behaviorism do well to be concerned about the misuse of behavioral technology in the hands of the unscrupulous-or even simply in the hands of those who trust too naively in the claims of the system. Observing the trends in British government, law, and social science in the post-war period, C.S. Lewis took up his pen at almost the same time Skinner was writing Walden II and produced an anti-behaviorist fantasy novel called That Hideous Strength.¹⁶ In this novel too, science has been given a blank check (this time by the government of a country rather than an experimental community) to perfect man and further harness the powers of nature. Here too, an elite of specialists works for the supposed greater good of mankind. The difference between Walden II and Belbury (the scientific think-tank of Lewis' novel) is that the planners in the latter situation, through willful misuse of their power, through sheer ignorance of their own limitations, or a combination of both, degenerate into a dog-eat-dog competition for control. This competition eventually ends in the destruction of the entire institution and the merciful restoration of normal life to the surrounding area, whose people and resources had been appropriated and manipulated in the name of progress. Lewis' novel is, of course, no less a work of fiction than Skinner's, and his negative version of the results of a scientifically-planned society no less speculative than Skinner's positive one. To support his case for the finiteness and depravity of man, he appeals to the evidence of history and of Scripture, while Skinner appeals to the past achievements of science and the present successes of behavior modification as evidence that man can not only plan his own destiny, but do so without necessarily abusing the accompanying power. Adherence to either position takes the reader beyond evidence to basic faith-assumptions about man's capacity for unlimited progress and goodness.

How, then, are Christians to walk the fine line between legitimate exercise of authority and sinful degeneration into despotic authoritarianism? We are not guaranteed immunity from the temptation to assume selfish power in a way that is being so consistently role-modelled for us in the twentieth century industrialized world. However, a few reminders from the scriptural comments about authority may be of help.

Whatever authority a Christian exercises in the offices of parent, teacher, husband, employer, or governor is never self-generated, but is derived from God Himself, accountable to Him, and therefore to be exercised with an awe verging on fear and trembling. Our office is not accorded to us because of any intrinsic merit: we are as fallen and prone to sin as those under our command. And so the apostle Paul, even as he admonishes children to obey their parents and servants their masters, promptly warns those same parents and masters not to abuse their authority "knowing that both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with Him."¹⁷ The practical question is not whether Christians should exercise the authority which accompanies whatever office we fill-be it parent, teacher or whatever. Let me rather suggest four important questions regarding the style in which that authority-and its accompanying power to dispense rewards and punishments-is exercised by the Christian.

Firstly, in what spirit are you exercising control? Are you trying to change the person's behavior in order to indulge your own desire for power? Are you exercising control to compensate for the frustration of being controlled by other people or other circumstances, pecking order fashion? Are you putting on a show of authority to cover up your own uncertainties about the situation? Are you merely trying to tailor the other person's behavior to fit your peculiar needs and idiosyncrasies? None of these, I submit, are valid motives for resorting to the powerful tools of behavior modification. Ontological behaviorism may insist that the existence of such motives (being irrelevant internal mental processes) makes no difference whatsoever to the effectiveness of a behavior modification program-but such thinking must be resolutely rejected. Just as God discerns and judges the spirit behind an action, so do those over whom we exercise authority-and that spirit makes all the difference in the world as to the effectiveness of our program. In the long run, only when fueled by a sincere and unselfish desire for the other's good will any attempt at behavioral control succeed. Again, this is a truth that is being brought home to applied behaviorists by the realities of their accumulating professional experience. The architect of one behavior modification project with difficult children in a California school system has concluded that 

sincerity is an integral part of instruction in behaviorial engineering
The teachers working with (me) on the experiment have sometimes doubted each other's sincerity. One person compliments another, who says 'You're just reinforcing me!' And the response is 'Oh, the hell I am! I really mean it!' With the kids and the staff, we've had to continually stress being sincere. You should really want the other person to change.¹⁸

Secondly, for what are you exercising control? Is your long-term goal the training of an equal, fellow-member of the Body of Christ-someone who may well at some future time be in a position of responsible authority over you, circumstances and gifts permitting? Or are you, consciously or unconsciously, playing the role of the animal-trainer, educating for a more and more total dependence on yourself? If the latter, then beware! You are not God; any sovereignty you have over the life of another exists only to direct that other to the true Master of us all. We are called to be willing bond slaves of Jesus Christ and Him alone: deference to all other legitimate authority is the by-product of obedience to Him, and cannot-indeed, dare not exist on its own.

Thirdly, how independently are you exercising behavioral control? As Christians, we are given the gifts of prayer, Scripture, and the counsel of fellow-believers as safeguards against our sinful tendency to distort reality. Is the use of behavioral techniques being subjected to these three courts of appeal for endorsement, modification, or outright rejection? In particular I would stress the responsibility of believing bodies of Christians not to be intimidated by the scientistic trappings of behaviorism: it is for us to hold applied behaviorism accountable to the standards of the Word, and not vice-versa.

Finally, how hastily are you resorting to the techniques of behavioral control? A recent reviewer of the behavior modification scene reported suprise when one of the most prestigious pioneers of behavior modification introduced a token-reinforcement system into a highly disruptive seventh-grade class "only as a last resort after more traditional methods had failed to end the chaos, When I asked why, he replied, 'Why use tokens when something else will work?¹⁹ If a non-Christian specialist in applied behaviorism employs his tools only as a last resort, we would do well to ask ourselves why. I suspect that the emerging cautiousness of such practitioners reflects their growing awareness that learning is not simply a matter of tangible rewards and punishments, however much of these do enter into the picture. Indeed, a constant reliance on such rewards and punishments may simply cause the child to regress to notions of primitive reciprocity ("you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours") in his dealing with others when, in fact, his behavior was already quite amenable to change based on an appeal to reason, emotion, religious conviction or a combination of all three. Ontological behaviorism does not make room for the possibility that children may pass through definite stages in their social, intellectual, and moral development (with a rewards-and punishments orientation a legitimate, but very immature phase in that development).²⁰ Rather it assumes that the stimulus-response laws of respondent and operant conditioning are the sole vehicle of learning for all organisms (animal or human, normal or abnormal) at all ages and stages of life. But the truth of the matter is that we know far too little about the degree to which these techniques pioneered almost exclusively on animals and "marginal" human beings-such as retardates and severely disturbed persons are applicable without substantial qualification to persons leading ordinary lives in ordinary homes, classrooms and workplaces. The track record of applied behaviorism increasingly suggests that a healthy skepticism is warranted.

Criticism 3: "By locating all causes for behavior change in the environment, behavior modification programs deny, or at least ignore, the existence of free will, and hence assign human beings no credit for their accomplishments and no blame for their misdeeds."

This final criticism to which this paper addresses itself is a rather complex argument to handle from a Christian point of view, given the theological differences which have historically existed within the church regarding the part played by man's will in the process of both Salvation and Sanctification. But I am personally inclined to agree with Novak,²¹ when he maintains that the thrust of Scripture is such as to give man no credit for anything good he does (all such goodness being rooted in the grace of God), but, on the other hand, to hold him (but for the work of Christ) fully responsible for his sinful deeds even while acknowledging that such sin is not merely personal because the entire creation has been flawed by man's fall and is never totally supportive of good actions. This is one of the apparent paradoxes of Scripture which is hardly amenable to analysis by the fragile tools of human logic-but even so, it does shed light on two issues regarding the Christian's attitude to applied behaviorism: firstly, if the source of our goodness lies outside ourselves, then we need not reject applied behaviorism merely on the grounds that it denies man due "credit" for his good deeds. True, behaviorism errs in citing not God, but the environment as the ultimate source of man's accomplishments; but the opposite position whereby man himself is exalted as the autonomous source of all noble actions is simply another legacy of the humanistic rejection of God and His replacement by so-called autonomous man as the center of the universe. Hence we can agree with Novak when he supports Skinner to the extent of saying "at no point is man's autonomy such that he can take credit for it. Such as it is, it has been given to him, both in its abiding tendencies and in its actual exercise. It is 'grace' or 'gift,' rather than his own creation," although as a Christian he then parts ways with Skinner in affirming that the ultimate source of that gift is in God and not (or only secondarily) in the impersonal pressures of the environment. "Hence," (he concludes) 'theonomy" rather that 'autonomy' is a more accurate name for the human reality."²²

On the other hand (and this is my second point) if the source of our badness lies essentially within ourselves, and we are answerable for it, then the Christian and behaviorist views of justice must diverge quite radically from one another. For it will be recalled that, according to strict ontological behaviorism, man's behavior (aside from certain genetically-programmed dispositions) is totally determined by the events of his environment and that for this reason both personal freedom and the personal credit (i.e., "dignity") resulting from our accomplishments are illustory. By the same reasoning, however, the notions of personal responsibility and accountability are also illustory: if my enviroment is to be credited with my achievements, it must also take the blame for my mistakes and misdeeds. This leads to a philosophy of justice according to which law-breakers are regarded not as responsible agents who have willingly and knowingly violated certain standards of conduct, but as persons whose misdeeds should either be entirely overlooked ("Poor fellow-he's just a victim of his past!") or at most treated as "illnesses" needing to be "cured," rather than as "sins" needing to be "punished." At first glance, this seems like a very enlightened attitude; but in point of fact, its practical application results all too often in one of two opposite abuses: either the victimization of society at large or (paradoxical as it may seem) of the criminal himself.

If the Source of our badness lies essentially within ourselves, and we are answerable for it, then the Christian and behaviorist views of justice must diverge quite radically from one another.

With regard to the first abuse, the growing tendency to regard the criminal as "more sinned against (by his environment) than sinning" appears to be generating a state of increasing judicial anarchy in the western world. Reduced or suspended sentences have become increasingly the norm even for what used to be regarded as serious crimes-with no accompanying evidence that this attitude of sympathy and leniency has in any way reduced the likelihood that the criminal will repeat his offence." In the traditional system of criminal law,

....vengeance and retribution were recognized as important threads of the social fabric, not because they deterred or reformed the offender, but because they reasurred and satisfied the offended. This was not the satisfaction of some dark animal need. Citizens entered into the social contract with the understanding that society would guarantee-or at least put a premium on-their lives, dignity, and the right to enjoy their possessions. It was only when retribution followed injury that citizens could be reassured and satisfied that society really did place some value on other persons. This wasand is-a central need for any society. And, just as excessive or unjust punishment brutalizes the offender because it suggests that he is of no value, insufficient punishment brutalizes the victim for the same reason²⁴

These are not words written by a Christian journalist-but we can echo her sentiments when we recall that Romans 13 speaks of the civil government (whether she realizes this fact or not) as being "God's servant for your good. . .(and) the servant of God to execute his (i.e., God's) wrath on the wrongdoer."

But one result of the ascendency of a behaviorist view of crime has been the unquestioned assumption that it is only environments, not people, that can be held accountable for crime. Consequently, the state whose penal system rests on such an assumption may violate the biblical imperative in two serious ways: In the first place, it assumes that persons are not born prone to evil, but are merely tabulae rasae ("blank slates") on which the environment alone writes the program of our subsequent behavioral tendencies. By this reckoning, crime is totally the outcome of poverty or deprived social conditions-although this, (continues the same journalist)

does not explain why the overwhelming majority of poor Canadians do not commit crimes, nor why so many well-off ones do, (nor why), during the 1950's- 1970's when Canadians were enjoying rapidly im
proving standards of living and social services unequalled in any other period of history, the crime rates-instead of going downwere rapidly going up,²⁵

In the second place, in refusing to exercise its retributive mandate against the wrongdoer, the behaviorist-leaning penal system, and the state which condones it, have failed to strike the balance between justice and mercy demanded by biblical norms for society.

Regardless of whether punishment deters or rehabilitates, it is necessary for justice .... Cynicism and callous indifference to good and evil are the products of a society that, like ours, is less concerned with the needs of those who observe its rules than with those who break them.²⁶

If journalists of the secular press-without the privilege of biblical faith or literacy-are, on the basis of the observed chaos in criminal justice, appealing for a return to a more biblical view of crime and punishment, it should give thinking Christians much cause for reflection on the type of government they wish to support in the future.
But the victimization of society by criminals held inadequately responsible for their actions is only one result of adherence to an environmental determinist view of behavior. The other, strange as it may seem, concerns the likelihood that the criminal himself will be unjustly victimized. For it is not always the case that behavioristinfluenced penal systems end up doing nothing to the criminal, on the grounds that his crime is "really his environment's fault, not his." It is just as likely that such a theory of criminal treatment may very well acknowledge that the offender's environment has indeed disposed him towards continuous wrong-doing and that he therefore merits the privilege of re-education at the state's expense. C. S. Lewis was prophetically sensitive to the hidden potential for injustice inherent in such a view when the jargon of criminal "rehabilitation'' first began to replace the traditional notion of "retribution" in the minds of penologists a quarter of a century ago. According to this newly-fashionable theory (Lewis called it ''The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"), when a criminal himself is held responsible for his crime and punished accordingly, he is being victimized by a barbarous and unenlighteded spirit of revenge, whereas when he is exposed rather to "treatment," "rehabilitation," or "reeducation," he is being treated in an enlightened and scientific manner which is kinder to the criminal and also promotes the goals of future crime-deterrence. "Thus," (in changing from retributive to a behaviorist theory of penology) "it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick."²⁷ But, Lewis goes on to say, let us not be fooled by a change in terminology:

the things done to the criminal, even if they are called cures, will be just as compulsory as they were in the old days when we called them punishments. If a tendency to steal can be cured by psychotherapy, the thief will no doubt be forced to undergo the treatment.²⁸

Even worse, Lewis warned, once a person passes from the category of "morally wrong" to the category of "psychologically sick, " then there is an accompanying loss of precision both in the definition of what is "sick" and the definition of what constitutes adequate "treatment." Seriously "sick " people, having no specialized knowledge themselves of medicine, must necessarily trust their doctors to know both that they really are sick, and what and how long it will take to treat them. The traditional concept of "deserved" punishment was rooted in the notion that not just a specialized elite, but that all adults capable of functioning in society were able to distinguish between lawful and unlawful acts. Once we concede that people passively "catch" bad behavior from their environment in the same way they "catch" measles or bubonic plague, then it is up to the specialists both to diagnose the disease and prescribe the cure. In extreme cases, the sick person can be quarantined indefinitely for his own good and the good of society, whether he likes it or not. Hence an additional danger of a behaviorist-rooted theory of penology is that the definite sentence for a definite type of crime, to which traditional jurisprudence adhered, may be replaced by an indefinite sentence which can be lengthened or shortened at the discretion of the psychological "experts."
A further danger is that, having conceded to specialists their superior wisdom in defining what is "criminally sick," we may find ourselves, under an unscrupulous political regime, being labelled "sick" and forced to undergo "treatment" for any opinion or practice that is deemed threatening to the status quo.

We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient so government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to 'cure' it? . . And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the treatment of the ideologically unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life long, even if it is fatal, that will only be a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine, there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are 'treatment,' not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.²⁹

Eager to assimilate and apply these "progressive" concepts of prison reform, the Britain of the early 50's would give Lewis no hearing for his arguments (he finally published them in an Australian legal journal.) It was only a little later, however, that the first reports of so called brainwashing procedures began to leak out of China. A recent Skinnerian critic writes:

When China began industrialization, it adopted procedures much like those described in Beyond Freedom and Dignsty. It often applied reinforcement rather than aversive methods to induce its people to accept the new behavioral environment. It then arranged its reward system so as to positively reinforce actions that were in conformity with the values of the new environment. Deviation was not so much punished as it was treated. Recalcitrant individuals were given group-think treatments-called brain-washing-in which they were rewarded for expressing approved sentiments.³⁰

The judicious arrangement of reinforcers in the outside environment has now been buttressed by the use of drugs to alter-or at least render innocuous the internal minds of dissidents in Russia, as Solzhenitsyn and others have reported. And lest we be tempted to think that such abuses (naive or deliberate) could "never happen here," it needs to be pointed out that in California (unquestionably the most eager state in the union when it comes to employing the latest ideas from psychology and the personnel to implement them), since the introduction of rehabilitative, behavior modification types of prison programs in the fifties, "the median term served by 'felony first releases' has risen from twenty to thirty-six months-twice the national average."³¹ This strongly suggests the materialization of Lewis' fears of "indefinite sentencing." Reports from prisons in other parts of the country where behavior modification programs are in use stress repeatedly that prisoners would "rather have remained in solitary confinement"³² than take part. A typical program consists of several differenct "levels" of privileges that the prisoner must attain by displaying the right behavior, which is rewarded by the distribution of token-points by guards and psychiatric staff 

on their own arbitrary discretion. . . Inmates are awarded tokens for proper responses to guards, such as 'Good morning sir? how are you, sir? Yes, sir,' etc . . . . (During group therapy, the prisoner's therapist) will point out what problems as inmate has, and, whether they're real or not, that inmate is required to solve his problem in the group. If the inmate doesn't try to solve this problem forced on him, then he's not cooperating with the behavior modification program, which results in a hard way to go on all fronts. One way in which an inmate is harassed is in receiving less tokens per day. Since tokens are given out by state employed personnel at their own discretion, an inmate could find himself in a tight situation if he starts receiving just enough tokens for everyday necessities and nothing else .... if one doesn't have enough tokens to pay rent, one is simply thrown (down to a lower level) for a period of time.³³

In this program, too, the uncertainty of indefinite sentencing is routine:

It usually takes a six-month period for one who is cooperating with the behavior modification program to complete it and be transferred out. However, with this arbitrary means of distributing tokens, and in the name of therapy, an inmate can be forced to remain (in the program) until the maximum of his sentence is up.

These anecdotal reports come to us from individual inmates who, it can be argued, are hardly supplying us with careful documentation and may, in addition, be prone to exaggeration. But confirmation of the agonies of "indeterminate sentencing" comes from another, more articulate source-one who might be expected to support the status quo of the prison system, not oppose it: Charles Colson was a crack Washington lawyer and Richard Nixon's top aide who, in the wake of his conversion to Christianity decided to plead guilty to certain Watergateconnected offenses and take no privileges for the duration of his prison sentence. Now working full time in the cause of prison reform, he writes in his recently-published autobiography, that one of the most agonizing aspects of prison life is the guessing game which all inmates must constantly play with regard to the probability of being paroled or not at their next hearing-a probability which appears to be almost totally determined by the caprice of an overworked, underinformed committee.³⁴

One is also reminded of the question, raised in an earlier part of this essay, as to whether or not environmental manipulation of behavior can work at all effectively if the target of that manipulation is a human being who knows, or has guessed, the nature of those manipulations and simply decided that he does not agree with their goals. Again, the first-hand reports of prisoners in behavior modification programs would suggest not: "The guards put on a front of politeness, concern, and friendship. I had had enough of the cells, guards, and phoniness those few hours between the 6th and 7th of April and refused to eat or talk to anyone." Fellow inmates co-operating with the program are regarded no less cynically: they are

brain-washed inmates . . . stool pigeons, snitches, puppets, and serve the purpose of carrying out the personnel's wishes to a fuller degree. These inmates set 'examples' for the newer block residents, advocate block policy, and of course keep the personnel up on all the activities of inmates whom officials are keeping a close eye on, and especially those inmates who are in opposition to the program.³⁵

In light of such comments, Lewis' words of two and one half decades ago ring particularly prophetic:

To undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psycho therapy knows how to deliver; to he taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to be remade after some pattern of normality' hatched in a Viennese (or Harvardian?)³⁶ laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grow wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared-shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust-is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard³⁷

This lengthy discussion of the potential for abuse inherent in applied behaviorism-abuse of the rights of the law-abiding majority, but also of the crime-performing minority-is intended to emphasize the fact that Christian responsibility for the uses of these techniques extends beyond the confines of our individual lives as the parents and teachers of children and into the very bedrock of our society and the social consequences of its policies. We are living with the legacy of several centuries of combined belief in the "science ideal" (the notion that the entire universe is impersonal and mechanistic) and the "freedom ideal" (the notion that man, on his own can somehow transcend his own determinism and play God)-and both ontological and applied behaviorism are part and parcel of this legacy. Change will not come easily-partly because of the longstanding and pervasive nature of this "alternative religion," but also partly because, for all its errors, it is not totally lacking in elements of biblical truth, as I have tried to indicate. This makes the business of separating wheat from chaff one which requires all of the wisdom that the Holy Spirit can give to us, both as individuals and as interdependent members of the one Body of Christ. It also renders very challenging the business of deciding under what circumstances we should or should not support the schemes of applied behaviorism, and (just as important) the process of articulating clearly, forcefully-and if necessary, sacrificially-our reasons for taking either of these stands at a particular time. This trio of articles has been a preliminary attempt to provide some Christian guidelines to that end.

REFERENCES

¹Some standard works which discuss ease studies and principles of behavior modification include
a) Allyon, T. and Azrin, N. The Token Economy: A Motivational System for Therapy and Rehabilitation. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1968.
b) Honig W.K. (Ed.) Operant Behavior: Areas of Research and Application. New York: Appteton-Century-Crofts, 1966,
e)Wolpe, J. The Practice of Behavior Therapy. New York; Pergamon, 1969.
²See particularly, Wheeler, H. (Ed.) Beyond the Punitive Society, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1973.
³A criticism repeatedly levelled by Noam Chomsky. See his essay ''Psychology and Ideology" in his anthology For Reasons of State. New York: Random House, 1973.
⁴To the best of my knowledge, Lewis never tackled behaviorism by that name and probably was not even in touch with the actual psychology literature on it. But his aversion to a behaviorist world-view is clear in his novel That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1945), his essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949; reprinted in God in the Dock, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), and his Abolition of Man, London: Wm. Collins & Sons Ltd., 1943.
⁵The Weight of Glory," in a collection by the same title. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1965
⁶ Matt. 6:25
⁷cf. Genesis 1-2
⁸As implied in the triune nature of God and the "Body" analogy of the church which Paul develops in 1 Cor. 12 and Eph. 4.
⁹Psalm 104:26
¹⁰Mark  6:25
¹¹Dale Evans Rogers' Angel Unaware and Brother Andrew's God's Smuggler both contain heartwarming accounts of the spontaneous religious impulse in retarded children.
¹²Greene, 0. and Lepper, MR. "How to Turn Play Into Work." Psychology Today, September, 1974, pp. 49-54.
¹³Novak, M. "Is He Really a Grand Inquisitor?" in Wheeler, Op. Cit. pp. 230-246.
¹⁴ibid., p.232.
¹⁵Judges 17:6, 21:25
¹⁶Lewis, CS. That Hideous Strength. London: John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1945.
¹⁷Ephesians 6:19
¹⁸Gray, F., Granbard, P.S., and Rosenberg, H. "Little Brother is Changing You." Psychology Today, March 1974, pp. 42-46.
¹⁹Goodall, K. "Shapers at Work." Psychology Today, November, 1972. pp. 53-62, 132-13g.
²⁰See particularly the writings of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohtberg for an elaboration of this position.
²¹Novak, M. Op. Cit., p.233.
²²1bid., p. 234.
²³Amiel, B. "The Chaos of Criminal Justice in Canada." Saturday Night, Sept. 1975, 19-25.
²⁴Ibid.
²⁵ibid.
²⁶Ibid.
²⁷Lewis, CS. "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," in God in the Dock Grand Rapids: Eerdmnns, 1970.
²⁸Ibid.
²⁹Ibid.
³⁰Wheeler, H. "A Non-Punitive World?" in Wheeler, H. (Ed.) Op. Cit., p. 19.
³¹Babbage, SB. "CS. Lewis and the humanitarian theory of punishment" Christian Scholar's Review, 1972, 2(3) 234-235.
³²Nicholson, W.G. "Michigan intensive program center," R. T.: A Journal of Radical Therapy, 1975, 4(6).
³³ibid.
³⁴Colson, C. Born Again. Old Toppan, N.J.: Chosen Books, 1975.
³⁵Nicholson, Op. Cit.
³⁶My parentheses.
³⁷Lewis, CS. "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.

ism leaves no room for spiritual realities over and above what is reducible to the purely physical; "mental processlessness" leaves no room for activities such as reasoning, feeling, or creatively imagining - activities which we know to be characteristic of God himself and therefore (however imperfectly) of human beings made in His image. Moreover, we pointed out that ontological behaviorists themselves, once they bump up against created reality, cannot themselves consistently live up to the assumptions of their position: in one way or another, autonomous man, morally-accountable man, thinking man, spirituallyoriented man returns to the behaviorist system which claims to have dispensed with him. This is a further reason for questioning the validity of this "new gospel."
However, the serious flaws of ontological behaviorism
129MARY STEWART VAN LEEUWEN
do not alter the fact that the applied techniques of behaviorism are everywhere around us, are much used, and in many ways apparently "work." Since, as we have already pointed out, the applied behaviorist does not necessarily adhere to behaviorism as a total world view, perhaps we need to examine the track-record of applied behaviorism separately, trying to distinguish those components which a Christian may feel at ease in using from those towards which he should turn a skeptical eye. We will begin with some typical examples and standard working principles of behavior modification techniques, then go on to suggest what Christians might accept and reject from the system, and why. The following examples are based on techniques of operant conditioning exclusively, since it is these techniques that the lay reader is most apt to see being applied in schools, clubs, and homes. The application of respondent conditioning techniques, as described in Part I of this essay, is still largely restricted to the professional therapists' office and to very selective institutional settings.'
Applied Behaviorism: Some Typical Examples
Let us return to Billy, the autistic child whose bizarre, unmanageable behavior was described at the beginning of Part I of this paper. When I first met Billy, although I had only a modicum of training in the techniques of behavior modification I spent some time showing Billy's parents how certain (essentially simple) principles of behavior modification could be used to "shape" socially desirable actions in their son and at the same time "extinguish" his bizarre habits: since he was a good eater, I simply took charge of his food dish while he was captive in his highchair and made each spoonful contingent on his emitting some approximation to the word "food." To begin with, I promptly rewarded, or "reinforced" any chance grunt with a mouthful of food, but as the child began to make the association between vocalizing and getting food, I could begin to require progressively more of him: not just any grunt, but only an "oo-o" sound would then be rewarded, and a little later, only an "oo-d" and finally, only the entire word "food." In less than 10 minutes, Billy was saying a word, and (just as important) paying close attention to another human being. As an amateur behavior modifier, I had made use of essentially the same principle as animal trainers use to teach circus animals complicated tricks: one begins by rewarding remote approximations to the final "trick" - bits of behavior which the animal is likely to display anyway in the normal course of its activities, and once these "simple" behaviors can be reliably elicited by the food treats, the trainer can gradually require more and more complicated behavior for the same reward until the tiger is finally waltzing with the bear, or (a much-quoted example from B.F. Skinner's Harvard laboratory) the pigeons are playing ping-pong with each other by batting a celluloid ball back and forth across a table with their beaks. Of course, the pigeons don't "know" that they're playing a game called ping-pong, nor did Billy "know" that the noises he was emitting constituted a real word in a real language that could be used to communicate - but in the case of autistic children like Billy, what begins as a mere noise emitted to food which cannot be obtained any other way can gradually be taught to be used as a label, then as part of a request or question, and eventually as part of a real (albeit still somewhat mechanistic) conversation.
130
Another example: a severely regressed schizophrenic woman has been vegetating on the back ward of a mental hospital for years, unreachable by more traditional forms of therapy, spending what time she is not eating or sleeping in the endless repetition of bizarre phrases and actions, apparently almost totally oblivious to the real world around her. Then the hospital institutes a behavior modification program. The behavior modifiers point out that, far from helping the woman by tolerating or even indulging her bizarre behavior, the hospital staff are effectively rewarding, or "reinforcing" it, in the first place by giving her food and shelter while she persists in it, and secondly by paying attention to her when she engages in it. Suddenly the entire working operation of the ward changes. The woman discovers, for instance, that she will not get a meal until, for example, she begins to use the toilet for defecation instead of soiling herself. To the surprise of the skeptical ward attendants (who have been cleaning her up for years), she is toilet trained within days. A little later, she is made to "earn" yard privileges (or cigarettes, or candy, or whatever she finds particularly rewarding) by washing and dressing appropriately. Still later, she learns to hold a coherent conversation, or help with tasks around the ward, and "earns" not direct rewards, but plastic poker-chips, a sort of "local currency," with which she can "buy" a number of things, from tuck-shop items to a day-trip away from the hospital. Her "work," which began with the very basic task of being toilettrained and was rewarded with the very basic reinforcement of food, becomes (as she is able to cope with it) gradually more socially demanding, and is rewarded with gradually lessimmediate and less-tangible rewards: poker chips rather than food; social approval and encouragement rather than cigarettes. In this way, her once-vegetable-like existence is replaced by a life of at least relative social usefulness and the prospect of a return to the outside world.
A final example: a difficult child in a school-room situation is constantly disrupting the class by jumping up and speaking out of turn. The teacher (who has just arrived back from a summer course on applied behavior analysis and behavior modification) stops scolding him each time he does this and simply ignores him, counselling the other children to do the same. If he gets too disruptive, she may calmly and without fanfare isolate him from the others for a few minutes. At the same time, she lavishly praises him whenever he does put his hand up to speak, or even appear to be moving towards such a response. Meanwhile, she is keeping careful records on a graph of the number of times per day that he speaks out of turn and the number of times he puts his hand up first. Within a couple of weeks, the child has stopped disrupting the class and patiently waits to have his upraised hand recognized.
Standard Working Principles
These are fairly typical case-studies from the broad range of behavior problems which have responded to behavior modification techniques. What are the working principles which unify all three examples? In fact, the ground-rules are neither complicated to understand nor difficult to apply. Indeed, behavior modification programs have won a large following in part precisely because their principles need not always be put into practice by highly-trained specialists, but can be easily learned by parents, teachers, ward-attendants and other non-psychologists with a mini
JOURNAL OFTHEAMERICAN SCIENTIFIC AFFILIATION
APPLIED BEHAVIORISM
mum of direction from a specialist in the field. The basic working principles (in which you will see clear remnants of ontological behaviorism) are as follows:
1. Identify precisely the behavior you wish to change.
Make sure that it is clearly describable in terms of outward
behavior (e.g., "defecating on the floor"; "taking off his clothes in public"; "speaking out of turn in the classroom"). Do not give into the temptation to appeal to "inner states of mind" when dealing with the behavior problem (e.g., by saying "he's insecure"; "he's lonely"; "he's jealous," etc.). Stick to the external behavioral activity which you wish to change. At the same time, do not make any assumptions about the child's or adult's innate capacities for learning. Do not say "He's schizophrenic, so he'll never be able to eat with a knife and fork," or "She's retarded, so she'll never be able to read." If (as the ontological behaviorist maintains) behavior is largely, if not totally, controlled by environmental conditions, then it follows that we should be able to teach just about anyone to do just about anything, provided we discover how to structure the environmental conditions the right way. The business of "discovering how to structure the environmental conditions the right way" is precisely the specialized task of the behavior modifier, but the applying of those conditions, once discovered, can be done by any reasonably intelligent lay person.
2. Try to identify the "reinforcers" (or rewards) which have been maintaining that activity. Often these may be surprising, and contrary to your naive intuitions: for example, in all three cases mentioned above, undesirable behavior was being reinforced by "attention" (from parents, ward attendants, teacher, fellow students, etc.). The schizophrenic woman's entire bizarre life-style was being reinforced by the custodial care she received day after day regardless of how she behaved.
3. Before trying to intervene and change the undesirable behavior, keep a log of its frequency for several weeks: At what times of day, in what situations, and how regularly does it occur? Only if you have a record of this "baseline" behavior will you be able to affirm, later on, that your behavior modification strategy has worked. This log is also continued throughout the entire behavior modification process.
4. To actually modify the undesirable behavior, two processes must go on at once: (a) systematically ignore (i.e., fail to reinforce) each instance of the undesired behavior at the same time as you (b) reinforce or reward each instance of the desired behavior. Some elaboration is needed here: first of all, with regard to (a), most behavior modifiers (drawing on the results of laboratory research with animals) maintain that it is better to ignore (or "extinguish through non-reinforcement") undesired behavior than to actually punish it. This is because punishment does not so much suppress the behavior as it simply motivates escape from the punishing circumstances. Thus, the undesired behavior may persist, but merely be transferred to circumstances where punishment is not forthcoming. Actual punishment is also eschewed because (as in the case of the disruptive school-child) it may actually be functioning as a kind of
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We need to examine the track-record of applied behaviorism separately, trying to distinguish those components which a Christian may feel at ease in using from those towards which he should turn a skeptical eye.
twisted reward: negative attention is better than no attention at all! Secondly, with regard to (b), the reinforcement of the desired behavior should take place promptly after each occurrence (at least in the preliminary stages) and, where the state of the person permits, be accompanied by an explanation that clearly links the reward to the new behavior (e.g., "I gave you that toy because you put your hand up so nicely."). Finally, the process of determining "what constitutes a reward, or a reinforcer?" is a very individual one, qualified by the old dictum that one man's meat is another man's poison. Most people with biologically-normal bodies are reinforced by food - provided they are hungry - but beyond that, the would-be behavior modifier must simply discover what sorts of things are peculiarly rewarding to his client, easy to administer, not overlycostly, and not easy for the client to obtain elsewhere. Once this is done, the desired behavior should become more and more frequent as it is systematically rewarded, and the undesired behavior should disappear, or "extinguish," as it consistently fails to be rewarded anymore.
5. During the preliminary (or "acquisition") phase of the new, desired behavior, it will need to be reinforced upon each occurrence of the behavior. Additionally, one may have to begin by rewarding not the full-blown behavioral response, but rather begin by rewarding anything that resembles a "try" or an "approximation" to the behavior, gradually requiring a closer approximation to the final behavior before the reinforcement is given. However, once the behavior reliably occurs, it can be maintained thereafter on intermittent reinforcement - that is, reinforcement given only occasionally. Laboratory research in operant conditioning seems to show that once a behavior is established, it is in fact better not to reward it after each occurrence; otherwise, if for some reason the constant reward suddenly ceases, the newlylearned behavior will also cease, whereas behavior which is only intermittently reinforced is very "resistent to extinction"; it will even persist long after all rewards have been totally withdrawn.
6. As a final point, a distinction needs to be made between "primary" and "secondary" reinforcers. Primary reinforcers are said by behaviorists to be those rewards to which an organism "naturally" responds (if it is biologically normal): food during a state of hunger, water when thirsty, sleep when fatigued, sexual release during a state of sexual tension - these are all primary reinforcers to which we are largely "pre-wired" to respond and for which we do not normally have to acquire a taste. Secondary reinforcers
This is the third of a three-part series on behaviorism from a Christian perspective.MARY STEWART VAN LEEUWEN
(and we will have reason to question these definitions a little later) are said to be those acquired through association with primary reinforcers. Thus, to return to a practical illustration, the autistic child may begin by learning to make sounds only for a food reward. But if that food reward (a primary reinforcer) is always accompanied by the presence of his mother and her delighted praise over his accomplishment, then "mother's presence" and "mother's praise" become secondary reinforcers for which the child will eventually work regardless of whether they are accompanied by the more primary ones.
Since would-be behavior modifiers rarely want to follow around their clients popping food rewards into their mouths indefinitely, they tend to try to "wean" them from primary to more secondary reinforcers as quickly as possible. This means that even while primary reinforcers are the standard rewards, they are accompanied clearly and consistently by other things which can later act as secondary or alternative reinforcers. In point of fact, just about anything can become a secondary reinforcer. The pokerchip "tokens" given to the mental patients in the casestudy cited above are a clear example: like ordinary money, they have no intrinsic value to the one who possesses them; rather, they acquire their value by their association with other, more primary, reinforcers such as food, clothing, cigarettes, and so forth. But even the setting in which primary reinforcement is given may become a secondary reinforcer. Thus the autistic child who has become used to getting his food rewards (primary reinforcers) in his highchair may soon perform desired behaviors simply for the privilege of getting into the highchair (which has become a secondary reinforcer by its association with food). The process of discovering and exploiting secondary reinforcers is another skill exercised by the professional behavior modifier, but one which, once understood, is easily applied by the lay worker as well.
Applied Behaviorism: What Can Christians Accept?
As we have stated in earlier parts of this essay, ontological, methodological, and applied behaviorism all have a host of critics,' whose guiding values, if not Christian, may be humanistic, rationalistic, Marxist or whatever. And so it is not simply applied behaviorism itself but also its critics which must be judged by the standards of biblical revelation. In the absence of thoughtful reflection guided by biblical principles, it is all too easy for Christians either to accept or reject unconditionally the entire enterprise of applied behaviorism. This is hardly surprising, since it is our contention that applied behaviorism is compatible with certain biblical truths and incompatible with others. The difficulty comes in distinguishing among these. What follows is a preliminary (and far from exhaustive) attempt to do so by discussing three common criticisms of applied behaviorism.
Criticism 1: "Behavior modification techniques work on the assumption that man is purely selfish, hedonistic pleasure-seeker motivated to work only for the sake of reward. "
This is a criticism which, from a Christian standpoint, is valid if the concept of "reward" is too narrowly-defined, but invalid if it assumes that man is intrinsically more self
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sacrificial than we know him to be on the basis of biblical revelation. To elaborate, there is nothing in Scripture which contradicts the notion that even the redeemed man is a seeker after rewards: C. S. Lewis (who was otherwise no friend-indeed, he was a deadly foe-of behaviorism)' points out in his essay, "The Weight of Glory" that
The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ (but) nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it, is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, footing about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.'
Lewis is making two very important points here: firstly (on the side of the behaviorists), an appeal to "reward" for work done (even the "work" of learning a new behavior) is not an intrinsically un-Christian notion. Indeed, the opposite assumption-that man at his highest can work in a purely disinterested, self-sacrificial manner-although it sounds superficially Christian, is actually a legacy of optimistic humanism and not of Christianity at all. Not only does God build the incentive of ultimate heavenly rewards into the description of the redeemed life (as Revelation 21 and 22 unashamedly show) but the entire history of His dealings with Israel indicates clearly that God's people were regularly exposed to His reward and favor when they lived by his standards and to his chastisement when they did not. And if the Creator in His wisdom assumes the need for immediate and long-range incentives in us, we are scarcely being un-Christian in assuming like needs in one another.
Having thus apparently opened the door to the unapologetic use of behavior modification techniques by Christian parents and teachers, let me hasten to make a second very important qualifying point from Lewis' quote. Lewis points out that "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak;" this leads us to the very important consideration of what constitutes a "reward" or reinforcer in a behavior modification scheme. A little earlier, we spoke of the behaviorist distinction between "primary" and "secondary" reinforcement. This distinction, in its extreme form, assumes that man's only "built-in" motivation is that of physical comfort, and that all other motives (desire for approval, desire for satisfying work, desire to learn, desire to find the meaning of life) are simply derived from the primary incentive to work for physical comfort. Such an assumption would hold, for instance, that a child's interst in religious matters derives from the fact that his parents reinforce him with "social approval" for such interest, and that child's capacity to be reinforced by the parents' social approval in turn derives from the fact that the parents are the ones who feed, clothe, and protect him. Now it cannot be emphasized too strongly that this "hedonistic assumption," about the nature of man is no less a faith-assumption of ontological behaviorism than the
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assumptions of determinism, materialism, and "mental processlessness" with which we dealt earlier. It is an assumption (or hypothesis) which precedes behaviorist research-not one which has been unequivocally demonstrated by it, as some seem to believe. While not all applied behaviorists adhere to this ''hedonistic assumption," it is part and parcel of ontological behaviorism and as such constantly creeps into behavior modification schemes when they are applied by unreflective people or by those who are tempted to see the entire behaviorist enterprise as some kind of gospel for the solution to all man's problems.
The practical question is not whether Christians should exercise the authority which accompanies whatever office we fill, but the style in which that authority is exercised by the Christian.
What is wrong with such an assumption from a Christian standpoint? After all, isn't it true that without the basic physical necessities such as food, shelter, and sleep nothing else would get done? True, but "is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?' 16 If we are made in God's image, then included among our most basic motives will be such things as the desire to do creative, meaningful work,' the desire for fellowship,' the desire for "play,"' and (if we are true to our biblical image of man) none of these can be assumed to be mere derivatives from the desire for food, shelter, sleep or sex. Indeed, biblically speaking, the most basic need of all men (if they could only recognize it) is not their need for physical survival, but their need for reconciliation with their Maker. "Thow hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee," wrote Saint Augustine. God Himself is man's "primary reinforcer," and we forget this scandalous truth only at our own peril-"for what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?""
So what does all this mean for the judicious use of behavior modification by Christians? In practical terms, it means that the physical rewards of food, candy, cigarettes and trinkets so over-employed by so many behavior modifiers should not be used unless it has become abundantly clear that the person is temporarily incapable of responding to the "higher order" reinforcers such as social fellowship, the opportunity for creative work or play, the opportunity to exercise aristic talents-yes, even the opportunity to worship and learn more about God. For despite man's profound and inbuilt ambivalence towards that "ultimate reward" of reconciliation with God, we should expect to find traces of that yearning for God even in emotionally disturbed, autistic, or retarded children-especially when they have been claimed by their parents for God's kingdom through baptism or dedication.''
Even the recent research literature on behavior modification is beginning to caution against the naive over-use of
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tangible, physical rewards in situations where they are not needed. In one study, it was shown that children who originally showed a spontaneous interest in coloring activities tended to stop doing so after they had been systematically rewarded with a gold ribbon for being "good colorers." They had, it was concluded, been transformed from happy amateurs who colored for the sake of coloring into mercenary professionals who now required tangible rewards for the exercise of their talents. The research report concludes with a warning against the use of "extrinsic rewards'' in situations where it is clear that ''intrinsic rewards" (such as satisfaction in the mere doing of the activity) are already at work." Christians can welcome this developing recognition among behavior modifiers that their original notions about ''rewards" were far too simplistic-but they should be warned that there often still exists a tendency to resort to primitive physical rewards as the "easy way out." We know of this temptation in our own lives as parents: it's easier to give the child a cookie when he scrapes his knee than to take the time to comfort him or read him a story. And the cookie "works"-at least in the short run. So do cigarettes and candies when used as reinforcers for learning new behaviors-but do we really want the wholesale addictions to sugar and nicotine which can be the long-term results? It is ironic that the behavior modification community includes both those who routinely use cigarettes and candy as reinforcers for new behaviors and those who, for a fee, will help you to eliminate your nicotine and calorie dependencies through the use of behavior modification techniques! Beware, therefore, lest an over-reliance on primitive, lower-order reinforcers turn you into someone who is educating a child or adult for dependence rather that for responsible freedom-into someone who more resembles a drug-pusher than a true teacher.
Criticism 2: "The practice of Behavior modification divides people into two classes: the 'controllers,' who know and practice the system and the 'controlled' who must submit in passive, ignorant helplessness. This then opens the door to authoritarian, totalitarian regimes."
Like the first criticism we considered, this second one is both valid and invalid, Christianly speaking, depending on certain other considerations. It is invalid if it assumes that there is something intrinsically wrong with the existence and exercise of authority and the capacity for control which accompanies that authority. But it is valid inasmuch as it reflects a concern about the potential for exercising control in a powerhungry fashion with no acknowledgement of accountability for the way it is used. Again, let us elaborate both qualifactions of this criticism.
Catholic theologian Michael Novak, in a recent essay on behaviorism" comments that "there is a widespread belief, in this Protestant (sic) nation, that Christianity is a religion of individualism, each man his own priest and pope, each conscience inviolable, each person a potential source of autonomy and dissent." Novak then goes on to point out that this concept of man as a free, autonomous being answerable only to himself and perfectly justified in resisting any and all attempts at control is a legacy of the Enlightenment, and not of Christianity at all (however much the church has been mistakenly tainted by this teaching.)
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Three critical factors tell against the model of Christianity as individualism: the teachings of the scriptures; the practice of early Christianity, and the actualities of Christian life. The reaction against an exaggerated and errant (although in some ways helpful) emphasis on individualism has been well under way for several decades .... Professor Skinner's emphasis on the social character of human existence is thus, from a theological point of view, confirmatory of a well-established trend)'
Hence legitimate authority in the context of community is not to be confused with authoritarianism, and Christians are to listen to the voice of Scripture, not to the drumbeat of secular humanism, in deciding what circumscribes the exercise of control in applied behaviorism. The biblical view of man and society clearly includes authority structuresparents over children, husbands over wives, the state over its citizens, the judge over the criminal, the church elders over the congregation-and for this reason Christians need not reject applied behaviorism on the alltoo-popular grounds that it smacks of "control" and that "control of anyone by anyone else is always intrinsically bad." It isn't. Indeed, according to Scripture, the fruit of rebellion against legitimate authority is not sweet tolerance and freedom but chaotic and ugly self-seeking (as the book of Judges vividly testifies in documenting an era when "each man did what was right in his own eyes" 5). Only a naively optimistic view about the perfectibility of man holds otherwise.
Again, lest I appear to be opening the door to the very excercise of despotism so feared by the secular critics of applied behaviorism, let me qualify the above remarks. The critics of behaviorism do well to be concerned about the misuse of behavioral technology in the hands of the unscrupulous-or even simply in the hands of those who trust too naively in the claims of the system. Observing the trends in British government, law, and social science in the post-war period, C.S. Lewis took up his pen at almost the same time Skinner was writing Walden II and produced an anti-behaviorist fantasy novel called That Hideous Strength." In this novel too, science has been given a blank check (this time by the government of a country rather than an experimental community) to perfect man and further harness the powers of nature. Here too, an elite of specialists works for the supposed greater good of mankind. The difference between Walden II and Belbury (the scientific think-tank of Lewis' novel) is that the planners in the latter situation, through willful misuse of their power, through sheer ignorance of their own limitations, or a combination of both, degenerate into a dog-eat-dog competition for control. This competition eventually ends in the destruction of the entire institution and the merciful restoration of normal life to the surrounding area, whose people and resources had been appropriated and manipulated in the name of progress. Lewis' novel is, of course, no less a work of fiction than Skinner's, and his negative version of the results of a scientifically-planned society no less speculative than Skinner's positive one. To support his case for the finiteness and depravity of man, he appeals to the evidence of history and of Scripture, while Skinner appeals to the past achievements of science and the present successes of behavior modification as evidence that man can not only plan his own destiny, but do so without necessarily abusing the accompanying power. Adherence to either position takes the reader beyond evidence to basic faith-assumptions about man's capacity for unlimited progress and goodness.
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How, then, are Christians to walk the fine line between legitimate exercise of authority and sinful degeneration into despotic authoritarianism? We are not guaranteed immunity from the temptation to assume selfish power in a way that is being so consistently role-modelled for us in the twentieth century industrialized world. However, a few reminders from the scriptural comments about authority may be of help.
Whatever authority a Christian exercises in the offices of parent, teacher, husband, employer, or governor is never self-generated, but is derived from God Himself, accountable to Him, and therfore to be exercised with an awe verging on fear and trembling. Our office is not accorded to us because of any intrinsic merit: we are as fallen and prone to sin as those under our command. And so the apostle Paul, even as he admonishes children to obey their parents and servants their masters, promptly warns those same parents and masters not to abuse their authority "knowing that both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with Him."" The practical question is not whether Christians should exercise the authority which accompanies whatever office we fill-be it parent, teacher or whatever. Let me rather suggest four important questions regarding the style in which that authority-and its accompanying power to dispense rewards and punishments-is exercised by the Christian.
Firstly, in what spirit are you exercising control? Are you trying to change the person's behavior in order to indulge your own desire for power? Are you exercising control to compensate for the frustration of being controlled by other people or other circumstances, pecking order fashion? Are you putting on a show of authority to cover up your own uncertainties about the situation? Are you merely trying to tailor the other person's behavior to fit your peculiar needs and idiosyncrasies? None of these, I submit, are valid motives for resorting to the powerful tools of behavior modification. Ontological behaviorism may insist that the existence of such motives (being irrelevant internal mental processes) makes no difference whatsoever to the effectiveness of a behavior modification program-but such thinking must be resolutely rejected. Just as God discerns and judges the spirit behind an action, so do those over whom we exercise authority-and that spirit makes all the difference in the world as to the effectiveness of our program. In the long run, only when fueled by a sincere and unselfish desire for the other's good will any attempt at behavioral control succeed. Again, this is a truth that is being brought home to applied behaviorists by the realities of their accumulating professional experience. The architect of one behavior modification project with difficult children in a California school system has concluded that
sincerity is an integral part of instruction in behaviorial engineering
The teachers working with (me) on the experiment have sometimes doubted each other's sincerity. One person compliments another, who says 'You're just reinforcing me!' And the response is 'Oh, the hell I am! I really mean it!' With the kids and the staff, we've had to continually stress being sincere. You should really want the other person to change."
Secondly, for what are you exercising control? Is your
long-term goal the training of an equal, fellow-member of the Body of Christ-someone who may well at some future
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time be in a position of responsible authority over you, circumstances and gifts permitting? Or are you, consciously or unconsciously, playing the role of the animal-trainer, educating for a more and more total dependence on yourself? If the latter, then beware! You are not God; any sovereignty you have over the life of another exists only to direct that other to the true Master of us all. We are called to be willing bondsiaves of Jesus Christ and Him alone: deference to all other legitimate authority is the by-product of obedience to Him, and cannot-indeed, dare notexist on its own.
Thirdly, how independently are you exercising behavioral control? As Christians, we are given the gifts of prayer, Scripture, and the counsel of fellow-believers as safeguards against our sinful tendency to distort reality. Is the use of behavioral techniques being subjected to these three courts of appeal for endorsement, modification, or outright rejection? In particular I would stress the responsibility of believing bodies of Christians not to be intimidated by the scientistic trappings of behaviorism: it is for us to hold applied behaviorism accountable to the standards of the Word, and not vice-versa.
Finally, how hastily are you resorting to the techniques of behavioral control? A recent reviewer of the behavior modification scene reported suprise when one of the most prestigious pioneers of behavior modification introduced a token-reinforcement system into a highly disruptive seventh-grade class "only as a last resort after more traditional methods had failed to end the chaos, When I asked why, he replied, 'Why use tokens when something else will work?' "a If a non-Christian specialist in applied behaviorism employs his tools only as a last resort, we would do well to ask ourselves why. I suspect that the emerging cautiousness of such practitioners reflects their growing awareness that learning is not simply a matter of tangible rewards and punishments, however much of these do enter into the picture. Indeed, a constant reliance on such rewards and punishments may simply cause the child to regress to notions of primitive reciprocity ("you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours") in his dealing with others when, in fact, his behavior was already quite amenable to change based on an appeal to reason, emotion, religious conviction or a combination of all three. Ontological behaviorism does not make room for the possibility that children may pass through definite stages in their social, intellectual, and moral development (with a rewards-andpunishments orientation a legitimate, but very immature phase in that development)." Rather it assumes that the stimulus-response laws of respondent and operant conditioning are the sole vehicle of learning for all organisms (animal or human, normal or abnormal) at all ages and stages of life. But the truth of the matter is that we know far too little about the degree to which these techniques pioneered almost exclusively on animals and "marginal" human beings-such as retardates and severly disturbed personsare applicable without substantial qualification to persons leading ordinary lives in ordinary homes, classrooms and workplaces. The track record of applied behaviorism increasingly suggests that a healthy skepticism is warranted.
Criticism 3: "By locating all causes for behavior change in the environment, behavior modification programs deny, or at least ignore, the existence of free will, and hence assign human beings no credit for their accomplishments and no blame for their misdeeds."
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This final criticism to which this paper addresses itself is a rather complex argument to handle from a Christian point of view, given the theological differences which have historically existed within the church regarding the part played by man's will in the process of both Salvation and Sanctification. But I am personally inclined to agree with Novak,2' when he maintains that the thrust of Scripture is such as to give man no credit for anything good he does (all such goodness being rooted in the grace of God), but, on the other hand, to hold him (but for the work of Christ) fully responsible for his sinful deeds even while acknowledging that such sin is not merely personal because the entire creation has been flawed by man's fall and is never totally supportive of good actions. This is one of the apparent paradoxes of Scripture which is hardly amenable to analysis by the fragile tools of human logic-but even so, it does shed light on two issues regarding the Christian's attitude to applied behaviorism: firstly, if the source of our goodness lies outside ourselves, then we need not reject applied behaviorism merely on the grounds that it denies man due "credit" for his good deeds. True, behaviorism errs in citing not God, but the environment as the ultimate source of man's accomplishments; but the opposite position whereby man himself is exalted as the autonomous source of all noble actions is simply another legacy of the humanistic rejection of God and His replacement by so-called autonomous man as the center of the universe. Hence we can agree with Novak when he supports Skinner to the extent of saying "at no point is man's autonomy such that he can take credit for it. Such as it is, it has been given to him, both in its abiding tendencies and in its actual exercise. It is 'grace' or 'gift,' rather than his own creation," although as a Christian he then parts ways with Skinner in affirming that the ultimate source of that gift is in God and not (or only secondarily) in the impersonal pressures of the environment. "Hence," (he concludes) 'theonomy" rather that 'autonomy' is a more accurate name for the human reality.""
On the other hand (and this is my second point) if the source of our badness lies essentially within ourselves, and we are answerable for it, then the Christian and behaviorist views of justice must diverge quite radically from one another. For it will be recalled that, according to strict ontological behaviorism, man's behavior (aside from certain genetically-programmed dispositions) is totally determined by the events of his environment and that for this reason both personal freedom and the personal credit (i.e., "dignity") resulting from our accomplishments are illustory. By the same reasoning, however, the notions of personal responsibility and accountability are also illustory: if my enviroment is to be credited with my achievements, it must also take the blame for my mistakes and misdeeds. This leads to a philosophy of justice according to which law-breakers are regarded not as responsible agents who have willingly and knowingly violated certain standards of conduct, but as persons whose misdeeds should either be entirely overlooked ("Poor fellow-he's just a victim of his past!") or at most treated as "illnesses" needing to be "cured," rather than as "sins" needing to be "punished." At first glance, this seems like a very enlightened attitude; but in point of fact, its practical application results all too often in one of two opposite abuses: either the victimization of society at large or (paradoxical as it may seem) of the criminal himself.MARY STEWART VAN LEEUWEN
If the Source of our badness lies essentially within ourselves, and we are answerable for it, then the Christian and behaviorist views of justice must diverge quite radically from one another.
With regard to the first abuse, the growing tendency to regard the criminal as "more sinned against (by his environment) than sinning" appears to be generating a state of increasing judicial anarchy in the western world. Reduced or suspended sentences have become increasingly the norm even for what used to be regarded as serious crimes-with no accompanying evidence that this attitude of sympathy and leniency has in any way reduced the likelihood that the criminal will repeat his offence." In the traditional system of criminal law,
vengeance and retribution were recognized as important threads of the social fabric, not because they deterred or reformed the offender, but because they reasurred and satisfied the offended. This was not the satisfaction of some dark animal need. Citizens entered into the social contract with the understanding that society would guarantee-or at least put a premium on-their lives, dignity, and the right to enjoy their possessions. It was only when retribution followed injury that citizens could be reassured and satisfied that society really did place some value on other persons. This wasand is-a central need for any society. And, just as excessive or unjust punishment brutalizes the offender because it suggests that he is of no value, insufficient punishment brutalizes the victim for the same reason. 14
These are not words written by a Christian journalist-but we can echo her sentiments when we recall that Romans 13 speaks of the civil government (whether she realizes this fact or not) as being "God's servant for your good. . .(and) the servant of God to execute his (i.e., God's) wrath on the wrongdoer."
But one result of the ascendency of a behaviorist view of crime has been the unquestioned assumption that it is only environments, not people, that can be held accountable for crime. Consequently, the state whose penal system rests on such an assumption may violate the biblical imperative in two serious ways: In the first place, it assumes that persons are not born prone to evil, but are merely tabulae rasae ("blank slates") on which the environment alone writes the program of our subsequent behavioral tendencies. By this reckoning, crime is totally the outcome of poverty or deprived social conditions-although this, (continues the same journalist)
does not explain why the overwhelming majority of poor Canadians do not commit crimes, nor why so many well-off ones do, (nor why), during the 1950's- 1970's when Canadians were enjoying rapidly im
proving standards of living and social services unequalled in any other period of history, the crime rates-instead of going downwere rapidly going up,"
In the second place, in refusing to exercise its retributive mandate against the wrongdoer, the behaviorist-leaning penal system, and the state which condones it, have failed to strike the balance between justice and mercy demanded by biblical norms for society.
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Regardless of whether punishment deters or rehabilitates, it is necessary for justice .... Cynicism and callous indifference to good and evil are the products of a society that, like ours, is less concerned with the needs of those who observe its rules than with those who break them."
If journalists of the secular press-without the privilege of biblical faith or literacy-are, on the basis of the observed chaos in criminal justice, appealing for a return to a more biblical view of crime and punishment, it should give thinking Christians much cause for reflection on the type of government they wish to support in the future.
But the victimization of society by criminals held inadequately responsible for their actions is only one result of adherence to an environmental determinist view of behavior. The other, strange as it may seem, concerns the likelihood that the criminal himself will be unjustly victimized. For it is not always the case that behavioristinfluenced penal systems end up doing nothing to the criminal, on the grounds that his crime is "really his environment's fault, not his." It is just as likely that such a theory of criminal treatment may very well acknowledge that the offender's environment has indeed disposed him towards continuous wrong-doing and that he therefore merits the privilege of re-education at the state's expense. C. S. Lewis was prophetically sensitive to the hidden potential for injustice inherent in such a view when the jargon of criminal "rehabilitation'' first began to replace the traditional notion of "retribution" in the minds of penologists a quarter of a century ago. According to this newly-fashionable theory (Lewis called it ''The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"), when a criminal himself is held responsible for his crime and punished accordingly, he is being victimized by a barbarous and unenlighteded spirit of revenge, whereas when he is exposed rather to "treatment," "rehabilitation," or "reeducation," he is being treated in an enlightened and scientific manner which is kinder to the criminal and also promotes the goals of future crime-deterrence. "Thus," (in changing from retributive to a behaviorist theory of penology) "it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick."" But, Lewis goes on to say, let us not be fooled by a change in terminology:
the things done to the criminal, even if they are called cures, will be
just as compulsory as they were in the old days when we called them
punishments. If a tendency to steal can be cured by psychotherapy, the thief will no doubt be forced to undergo the treatment."
Even worse, Lewis warned, once a person passes from the category of "morally wrong" to the category of "psychologically sick, " then there is an accompanying loss of precision both in the definition of what is "sick" and the definition of what constitutes adequate "treatment." Seriously "sick " people, having no specialized knowledge themselves of medicine, must necessarlily trust their doctors to know both that they really are sick, and what and how long it will take to treat them. The traditional concept of "deserved" punishment was rooted in the notion that not just a specialized elite, but that all adults capable of functioning in society were able to distinguish between lawful and unlawful acts. Once we concede that people passively "catch" bad behavior from their environment in the same way they "catch" measles or
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bubonic plague, then it is up to the specialists both to diagnose the disease and prescribe the cure. In extreme cases, the sick person can be quarantined indefinitely for his own good and the good of society, whether he likes it or not. Hence an additional danger of a behaviorist-rooted theory of penology is that the definite sentence for a definite type of crime, to which traditional jurisprudence adhered, may be replaced by an indefinite sentence which can be lengthened or shortened at the discretion of the psychological "experts."
A further danger is that, having conceded to specialists their superior wisdom in defining what is "criminally sick," we may find ourselves, under an unscrupulous political regime, being labelled "sick" and forced to undergo "treatment" for any opinion or practice that is deemed threatening to the status quo.
We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient so government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to 'cure' it? . . And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the treatment of the ideologically unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life long, even if it is fatal, that will only be a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine, there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are 'treatment,' not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice."
Eager to assimilate and apply these "progressive" concepts of prison reform, the Britain of the early 50's would give Lewis no hearing for his arguments (he finally published them in an Australian legal journal.) It was only a little later, however, that the first reports of so called brainwashing procedures began to leak out of China. A recent Skinnerian critic writes:
When China began industrialization, it adopted procedures much
like those described in Beyond Freedom and Dignsty. It often applied reinforcement rather than aversive methods to induce its people to accept the new behavioral environment. It then arranged its reward system so as to positively reinforce actions that were in conformity with the values of the new environment. Deviation was not so much punished as it was treated. Recalcitrant individuals were given group-think treatments-called brain-washing-in which they were rewarded for expressing approved sentiments. °
The judicious arrangement of reinforcers in the outside
environment has now been buttressed by the use of drugs to alter-or at least render innocuousthe internal minds of dissidents in Russia, as Solzhenitsyn and others have reported. And lest we be tempted to think that such abuses (naive or deliberate) could "never happen here," it needs to be pointed out that in California (unquestionably the most eager state in the union when it comes to employing the latest ideas from psychology and the personnel to implement them), since the introduction of rehabilitative, behavior modification types of prison programs in the fifties, "the median term served by 'felony first releases' has risen from twenty to thirty-six months-twice the national average."" This strongly suggests the materialization of Lewis' fears of "indefinite sentencing." Reports from prisons in other parts of the country where behavior modification programs are in use stress repeatedly that prisoners would "rather have remained in solitary confinement"" than take part. A typical program consists
SEPTEMBER 1979
of several differenct "levels" of privileges that the prisoner must attain by displaying the right behavior, which is rewarded by the distribution of token-points by guards and psychiatric staff
on their own arbitrary discretion. . . Inmates are awarded tokens for proper responses to guards, such as 'Good morning sir? how are you, sir? Yes, sir,' etc . . . . (During group therapy, the prisoner's therapist) will point out what problems as inmate has, and, whether they're real or not, that inmate is required to solve his problem in the group. If the inmate doesn't try to solve this problem forced on him, then he's not cooperating with the behavior modification program, which results in a hard way to go on all fronts. One way in which an inmate is harassed is in receiving less tokens per day. Since tokens are given out by stateemployed personnel at their own discretion, an inmate could find himself in a tight situation if he starts receiving just enough tokens for everyday necessities and nothing else .... if one doesn't have enough tokens to pay rent, one is simply thrown (down to a lower level) for a period of time."
In this program, too, the uncertainty of indefinite sentencing is routine:
It usually takes a six-month period for one who is cooperating with the behavior modification program to complete it and be transferred out. However, with this arbitrary means of distributing tokens, and in the name of therapy, an inmate can be forced to remain (in the program) until the maximum of his sentence is up.
These anecdotal reports come to us from individual inmates who, it can be argued, are hardly supplying us with careful documentation and may, in addition, be prone to exaggeration. But confirmation of the agonies of "indeterminate sentencing" comes from another, more articulate source-one who might be expected to support the status quo of the prison system, not oppose it: Charles Colson was a crack Washington lawyer and Richard Nixon's top aide who, in the wake of his conversion to Christianity decided to plead guilty to certain Watergateconnected offenses and take no privileges for the duration of his prison sentence. Now working full time in the cause of prison reform, he writes in his recently-published autobiography, that one of the most agonizing aspects of prison life is the guessing game which all inmates must constantly play with regard to the probability of being paroled or not at their next hearing-a probability which appears to be almost totally determined by the caprice of an overworked, underinformed committee. "
One is also reminded of the question, raised in an earlier part of this essay, as to whether or not environmental manipulation of behavior can work at all effectively if the target of that manipulation is a human being who knows, or has guessed, the nature of those manipulations and simply decided that he does not agree with their goals. Again, the first-hand reports of prisoners in behavior modification programs would suggest not: "The guards put on a front of politeness, concern, and friendship. I had had enough of the cells, guards, and phoniness those few hours between the 6th and 7th of April and refused to eat or talk to anyone." Fellow inmates co-operating with the program are regarded no less cynically: they are
brain-washed inmates . . . stool pigeons, snitches, puppets, and serve the purpose of carrying out the personnel's wishes to a fuller degree. These inmates set 'examples' for the newer block residents, advocate block policy, and of course keep the personnel up on all the activities of inmates whom officials are keeping a close eye on, and especially those inmates who are in opposition to the program."
In light of such comments, Lewis' words of two and one
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MARY STEWART VAN LEEUWEN
half decades ago ring particularly prophetic:
To undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psycho therapy knows how to deliver; to he taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to be remade after some pattern of normality' hatched in a Viennese (or Harvardian?)'5 laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grow wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared-shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust-is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which
the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard''
This lengthy discussion of the potential for abuse inherent in applied behaviorism-abuse of the rights of the law-abiding majority, but also of the crime-performing minority-is intended to emphasize the fact that Christian responsibility for the uses of these techniques extends beyond the confines of our individual lives as the parents and teachers of children and into the very bedrock of our society and the social consequences of its policies. We are living with the legacy of several centuries of combined belief in the "science ideal" (the notion that the entire universe is impersonal and mechanistic) and the "freedom ideal" (the notion that man, on his own can somehow transcend his own determinism and play God)-and both ontological and applied behaviorism are part and parcel of this legacy. Change will not come easily-partly because of the longstanding and pervasive nature of this "alternative religion," but also partly because, for all its errors, it is not totally lacking in elements of biblical truth, as I have tried to indicate. This makes the business of separating wheat from chaff one which requires all of the wisdom that the Holy Spirit can give to us, both as individuals and as interdependent members of the one Body of Christ. It also renders very challenging the business of deciding under what circumstances we should or should not support the schemes of applied behaviorism, and (just as important) the process of articulating clearly, forcefully-and if necessary, sacrificially-our reasons for taking either of these stands at a particular time. This trio of articles has been a preliminary attempt to provide some Christian guidelines to that end.
REFERENCES
Some standard works which discuss ease studies and principles of behavior modification include
a) Allyon, T. and Azrin, N. The Token Economy: A Motivational
System for Therapy and Rehabilitation. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1968.
b) Honig W.K. (Ed.) Operant Behavior: Areas of Research and Applica
tion. New York: Appteton-Century-Crofts, 1966,
e)Wolpe, J. The Practice of Behavior Therapy. New York; Pergamon, 1969.
'See particularly, Wheeler, H. (Ed.) Beyond the Punitive Society, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1973.
'A criticism repeatedly levelled by Noam Chomsky. See his essay ''Psychology and Ideology" in his anthology For Reasons of State. New York: Random House, 1973.
'To the best of my knowledge, Lewis never tackled behaviorism by that name and probably was not even in touch with the actual psychology literature on it. But his aversion to a behaviorist world-view is clear in his novel That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1945), his essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949; reprinted in God in the Dock, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), and his Abolition of Man, London: Wm. Collins & Sons Ltd., 1943.
"The Weight of Glory," in a collection by the same title. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1965
5 Matt. 6:25
'cf. Genesis 1-2
'As implied in the triune nature of God and the "Body" analogy of the church which Paul develops in 1 Cor. 12 and Eph. 4.
'Psalm 104:26 'Mark g:36
Dale Evans Rogers' Angel Unaware and Brother Andrew's God's
Smuggler both contain heartwarming accounts of the spontaneous religious impulse in retarded children.
"Greene, 0. and Lepper, MR. "How to Turn Play Into Work." Psycho
logy Today, September, 1974, pp. 49-54.
''Novak, M. "Is He Really a Grand Inquisitor?" in Wheeler, Op. Cit. pp. 230-246.
''ibid., p.232.
''Judges 17:6, 21:25
"Lewis, CS. That Hideous Strength. London: John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1945.
''Ephesians 6:19
"Gray, F., Granbard, P.S., and Rosenberg, H. "Little Brother is Changing You." Psychology Today, March 1974, pp. 42-46.
"Goodall, K. "Shapers at Work." Psychology Today, November, 1972. pp. 53-62, 132-13g.
"See particularly the writings of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohtberg for an elaboration of this position.
"Novak, M. Op. Cit., p.233.
211bid., p. 234.
"Amiel, B. "The Chaos of Criminal Justice in Canada." Saturday Night,
Sept. 1975, 19-25.
"Ibid.
"ibid.
"Ibid.
"Lewis, CS. "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," in God in the
Dock Grand Rapids: Eerdmnns, 1970.
''Ibid.
"Ibid.
"Wheeler, H. "A Non-Punitive World?" in Wheeler, H. (Ed.) Op. Cit., p. 19.
''Babbage, SB. "CS. Lewis and the humanitarian theory of punishment" Christian Scholar's Review, 1972, 2(3) 234-235.
"Nicholson, W.G. "Michigan intensive program center," R. T.: A Journal
of Radical Therapy, 1975, 4(6).
"ibid.
"Colson, C. Born Again. Old Toppan, N.J.: Chosen Books, 1975.
"Nicholson, Op. Cit.
"My parentheses.
"Lewis, CS. "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.
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