Controlling social behavior

Since the 1870s, psychologists had demonstrated methods for engineering human activities. Most famously, John B. Watson (Watson & Rayner, 1920) experimented on babies to illustrate how he could use classical conditioning to program and control human development (Harris, 1979). To Watson and his fellow behaviorists, human behavior was little more than stimulus-response connections to observe, predict, measure, and control.

After his “little Albert” experiments, Watson lost his standing in the academic community and has since earned no place in social psychology readings (Goldhaber, 2000; Harris, 1979). However, Watson is essential for two reasons.

• In the 1920s, influential social psychologists like Floyd Allport (1924) saw social psychology through the behaviorist lens. He proposed that the individual is at the center of social behavior, suggesting that “there is no psychology of group which is not entirely a psychology of the individual” (p. 4). From the behaviorist perspective, human nature is understandable and controllable.
• Since psychological experiments like those conducted by Watson shifted perspective from understanding individuals in a social context to actively changing human activities to solve social problems.

Allport’s significant contribution to social psychology brought “theoretical rigor and experimental precision” to a field that had been “a loose amalgamation of sociology, instinct psychology, and evolutionary theory” (Post, 1980, p. 369). By combining the mechanistic perspective with experimental social psychology, Allport tried to study the individual as the fundamental unit in society objectively. Through behaviorism, social psychologists could simultaneously control the individual while liberating the individual from threatening cultural forces.

As summarized by Ian Nicholson, “behaviorist psychology served to confirm the authenticity and primacy of the individual while providing a technology for managing the individual” (Nicholson, 2000, p. 465). From this perspective, social psychologists would focus on “marriage and family problems… social movements, social control, and government, [and] rural problems” (Allport F. H., 1920). Though today’s social psychologists mostly reject behaviorism, they tend to consider social psychology through the perspective of the social problems they need to fix (Kipnis, 1994).