A review of

Arthur W. STAATS (1996)
Behavior and Personality: Psychological Behaviorism
New York : Springer. pp. xvii + 442. ISBN 0-8261-9311-0.

This long book is an attempt to sell behaviourism to people who really want to hear about personality. Totally rejecting both biological factors and mainstream personality theorists (six of whom -- Rogers, Maslow, Kelly, Rotter, Bandura and Mischel -- are dismissed in half a page), Staats' message is that a 'three factor theory' is all that is needed. This may sound promising enough. Staats, however, is not a champion of Eysenck's 'Gigantic Three.' In Staats' book, Eysenck's post-1965 work merits only a single reference; and R. R. McCrae, P. T. Costa and factor analysis are not mentioned at all.

So what are Staats' own selling points? Staats maintains that his 'psychological behaviorism' (which apparently allows for 'mediating images') will soon prove the universal explicator of absolutely everything. What has been holding him back? Well, potential researchers of 'cumulative-hierarchical learning' are forever led astray by a society and culture that are so 'ignorant of the importance of learning' (p. 162). Thankfully, behaviour therapy is a great success: the author's own work (1963) demonstrated its general advantages in education and psychiatry; and, later, Staats & Burns (1981) showed that "intelligence problems can be treated in behavior therapy" (p. 340). Now the author awaits the recognition that is his due.

This approach to personality is certainly breathtaking; and it has the possible merit of consistency with behaviourist aspirations of circa 1960. Alas, it can hardly work in the 1990's. It would be all very well if Staats used his generous page-space to show how people are conditioned and re-conditioned with the help of the 'unifying odyssey' and 'revolution' that he takes his own intellectual career to have involved. However, the nuts and bolts of his oeuvre are entirely missing. No reader of Staats' book will come away knowing a well-established environmental cause of anything, let alone a cure. Seldom does Staats indicate the strength-of-effect in his unduly brief summaries of claims to therapeutic success, so readers are left to find out for themselves that behavioural treatments provide time-killers and ornamentation rather than the backbone of modern educational and psychiatric endeavour.

Strangely, Staats even ignores the modern behaviourist support that he might have used. Three modern behaviourist sympathizers, Nicholas Mackintosh (Mackintosh & Mascie-Taylor, 1985), Stephen Ceci (1991), Michael Howe (1993) have actually worked quite hard to furnish serious evidence that could lead to important human individual differences being attributed at least partly to learning. These researchers have taken the trouble to argue with psychologists of more hereditarian persuasions, and even to demonstrate that they have read something of what London School researchers say. Yet none of these champions of learning receives a single mention from Staats.

The ultimate fall-back position for any big book about psychology is that -- whatever may be missing -- at least it contains plenty about sex. However, readers will again be disappointed. Staats' coverage of sexual problems occupies less than a page (pp. 319-20). Apparently the key thing (established, of course, by Staats in 1963) is that "in addition to the learning with respect to what will be sexually arousing, the individual must learn sex behavior, and the individual must learn the behaviors that get the individual into sexual situations where the sex behaviors can be learned." This in turn, Staats points out, requires "social skills." And that's it!

Staats does occasionally mention the dread possibility of empirical research concerning the influence of biological factors. Here, his central argument is that evidence for genetic causation in twin- and adoption-studies (evidence which he barely mentions lest his readers grow too curious) is only "circumstantial." However, there are two problems with Staats' lordly idea. The first is that twin- and adoption-studies are equally the only systematic ways of establishing that important human psychological or behavioural differences are in fact under control that is probably environmental. The second problem is that it requires readers to forget (i) that two thirds of the psychiatric beds of the western world were emptied during Staats' lifetime thanks to advances in psychopharmacology; (ii) that particular chromosomes and chromosomal loci are now known to be implicated in at least some forms of mental retardation, dyslexia and homosexuality; and (iii) that, pace Staats, there are in fact no known environmental, let alone 'psychological-behavioristic' cures for any important human trait variation.

Needless to say, Staats doesn't believe in traits or dimensions either, and plainly wishes they would all fracture into 'multiple components' -- starting with a break-up of intelligence. Equally unsurprising, Staats has not a shred of evidence for this theoretical penchant; nor does he ever try to explain to readers why virtually all mental abilities are substantially and positively correlated. Coming closer to a real argument, Staats briefly criticizes the Minnesota study of separated MZ twins by Tom Bouchard et al. (1990) as involving non-random placement of the separated MZs. However, this criticism only shows that Staats has not read the study carefully. Bouchard et al.'s between-twins placement correlation for 'Rearing Father's Socio-Economic Status' was only .27, and the paternal SES differences themselves only correlated at around .17 with the twins' later IQ's. Thus 'placement in homes of similar SES' accounted for only ·27 x ·17² = ·01 of the twins' ·78 correlation in adult IQ. As a more general reservation about twin studies, Staats claims that the sheer physical similarity of MZ's will lead to them being treated similarly even when reared apart. Alas for Staats, he has not a shred of evidence for this notion, while empirical studies actually show no general correlations between physical attractiveness and intelligence or other personality features (except for a correlation of .18 with sexual experience in adolescence) (Brand, 1996, Chapter 3, p. 116). Naturally, Staats is cock-a-hoop about Scarr & Weinberg's (1976) finding that adoption into middle class families raised the IQ's of Black children; but his enthusiasm reveals only his failure to read the more recent developments of Scarr & Weinberg's research programme in the 1990's (e.g. Lynn, 1994) -- where the adoptive parents had markedly less influence on their children in adolescence than they had had in early childhood.

There is thus little of any positive interest in this book, and much that could mislead students to whom it might be prescribed by tenured behaviourists. The only decent point made is that much talk of 'interaction' in psychology is vague and frankly unscientific. (If only behaviourists had been braver in saying this to developmental psychologists in the 1970's!) Certainly there is nothing to explain how the author is a Fellow of no less than eight APA Divisions. For posterity, Psychological Behaviorism will provide a sorry monument -- to behaviourism's wilful neglect of mounting twentieth-century evidence of genetic factors in personality and intelligence.

References

BOUCHARD, T.J., Jr., LYKKEN, D.T., McGUE, M., SEGAL, N.L. & TELLEGEN, A. (1990). 'Sources of human psychological differences: the Minnesota Study of twins reared apart.' Science 250, 223-228.
BRAND, C. R. (1996). The g Factor. Chichester : Wiley Publisher.
CECI, S.J. (1991). On Intelligence -- More or Less. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
HOWE, M. J. A. (1993). 'The early lives of child prodigies.' In CIBA Foundation Symposium 178, The Origins and Development of High Ability. Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
LYNN, R. (1994). 'Some reinterpretations of the Minnesota transracial adoption study.' Intelligence 19, 1, 21-27.
MACKINTOSH, N.J. & MASCIE-TAYLOR, C.G.N. (1985). 'The IQ Question'. Annex D (pp. 126-123) to Chapter 3 ('Achievement and Underachievement') of Education for All -- The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups. Chairman: Lord Swann, F.R.S.E. London : HMSO
SCARR, Sandra & WEINBERG, R. A. (1976). 'IQ scores of black children adopted by white families.' American Psychologist 31, 726-739.
STAATS, A. W. (with contributions by C. K. Staats) (1963). Complex Human Behavior. New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
STAATS, A. W. & BURNS, G. L. (1981). 'Intelligence and child development: What intelligence is and how it is learned and functions.' Genetic Psychology Monographs 104, 237-301.

Publication reference:

BRAND, Chris (1997) 'Utopian behaviourism -- a monument.' Personality & Individual Differences 23, 6, 1094-5.

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