Well, if I can interpret this, it suggests that environment is the illiciter or cause of specific behavioral evolution. That is, that behavior is modified by environment. In one sense this seems obvious - but I feel it ignores certain evolutionary constraints imposed by internal factors not as yet thoroughly understood. (It would be difficult to conceive of an environment that would transform a pidgeon's behavior into a falcon's)I have some reservations regarding behaviorism (which have found a home with many defenders of capitalist ideology).
Contained within the operant conditioning and he behaviorist approach is an underlying idea of behavior modification with its implication of manipulation. This can appeal to those with a totalitarian disposition and frame of mind.
Thus by definition if one person controls another (say, by offering some sort of reward), the two are in an asymmetrical relationship, facilitated by the "reward" structure. In our society, specific objectives of "behavior modification" include such things as ensuring that prisoners, students, children, or workers be less complaining, more attentive, submissive, and willing to work. Who Really benefits when a child quiets down and sits still? Such behaviorism is actually a profoundly conservative doctrine posing as a value free technique. Essentially the idea seems to be - control the environment and you control people.
Kahn: "According to Skinner, the reason we have no cause to fear abuse by behaviorists and their surrogates - the reason Waldon Two will not come to resemble the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four - is that the Chief Reinforcer 'doesn't control others; he designs a world that controls others' [Skinner]. This line of reasoning has not reassured everyone."
Studies of rewards and reinforcements have been shown to fail at one essential level - while they may produce compliance, they fail to transform attitude or emotional commitments. At some level a task performed for a reward will be felt as manipulation.
In group situations, rewards tend to set people competitively up against one another with the potential result that each will regard the other with suspicion as a potential threat or rival.
It has been said that the core of behaviorism is the assumption that people are no more than what they do. Thus more attention is paid to extrinsic motivation (does the job pay well) than intrinsic motivation (is the job interesting). Thus Kahn: "Rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance…coming to see ourselves as engaging in a task to get a reward typically alters the way we view that task." And "As rewards continue to co-opt intrinsic motivation and preclude intrinsic satisfaction, the extrinsic needs…become stronger in themselves. Thus people develop stronger extrinsic needs as substitutes for more basic, unsatisfied needs… they end up behaving as if they were addicted to extrinsic rewards."
This is American Capitalism today. In Marxian terms - the extrinsic rewards (products of alienated labor) and commodity fetishism have created self-alienation replacing intrinsic qualities (e.g. sense of free agency) natural to the human species.
Well, this may not be the place for such give and take, but so what. I've enjoyed busting my mind.
quotes from "Punished by Rewards" Alfie Kohn (1993)
