The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, S. 815

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

and things like a seal-skin coat which shared the property of furriness. The conditioning had put a widespread twist into its mental structure.

But such impulses can be de-conditioned, and the fear again taken out of the objects into which the conditioning experiment put it. Watson, for instance, gave one child of eighteen months a conditioned fear of a bowl of goldfish. The goldfish had been associated with painful stimuli, and whenever the child saw the bowl, it said “ bite ” and refused to come within a couple of yards of it. But we will let Dr. Watson tell his own story.

“Tf I lift him by force and place him in front of the bowl, he cries and tries to break away and run. No psycho-analyst, no matter how skilful, can remove this fear by analysis. No advocate of reasoning can remove it by telling the child all about beautiful fishes, how they move and live and have their being. As long as the fish is not present, you can by this verbal organization get the child to say: ‘Nice fish, fish won’t bite’; but show him the fish, and the old reaction returns. Try another method. Let his brother, aged four, who has no fear of fish, come up to the bowl, and put his hand in the bowl and catch the fish. No amount of watching a fearless child play with these harmless animals will remove the fear from the toddler. Try shaming him, making a scapegoat of him. Your methods are equally futile. Let us try, however, this simple method. Get a table ten or twelve feet long. At one end of the table, place the child at meal-time, move the fish bowl to the extreme other end of the table and cover it. Just as soon as the meal is placed in front of him, remove the cover from the bowl. If disturbance occurs, extend your table and move the bowl still farther away, so far that no disturbance occurs. Eating takes place normally, nor is digestion interfered with. The next day, repeat the procedure, but move the bowl a little nearer. In four or five such sessions, the bowl can be brought close to the food tray without causing the slightest bit of disturbance.”

By continuing this process of substituting a pleasant conditioning stimulus for an unpleasant one, the identical object was finally changed from a source of irrational fear to an agreeable reminder of dinnertime. This is in entire harmony with Pavlov’s work.

The learning and unlearning of reflexes can go on equally well in adult human life,

just as we have seen it go on in the case of dogs. Everyone who has been in the reptile house at the Zoo knows how the spectators will jump back and_ blink every time a snake strikes in their direction, even though there is a stout bit of plate glass between them. This blinking and starting back is an automatic reflex defence-mechanism. But it can be inhibited. An apparatus was rigged up in which a heavy wooden hammer, faced with rubber, could be made to hit a piece of plate-glass just in front of a man’s face. At first blinking and shrinking occurred at almost every stroke of the hammer. Later, as nothing happened to hurt him, the reflex was more and more : thoroughly inhibited. In a series of trials, each of which comprised 400 blows of the hammer, one subject raised the percentage of times in which he refrained from blinking thus: one per cent, three, nine, sixteen, sixty-seven, eighty-eight per cent. This recalls the fading away of the dog’s secretion of saliva when a stimulus which usually brought feeding in its train was repeated over and over again without any food after it.

Watson and his school have made a real contribution to psychology in showing how plastic the mind of the child is, and what a huge part conditioning plays in the building up of much human behaviour that looks at the first glance simple, characteristic, and instinctive. The human mind, they have demonstrated, is a mass of acquisitions and has a smaller proportion of innate dispositions than that of any other creature. But they have asserted this with a strange lack of balance. They have over-asserted it. Because human minds are built up, so to speak, upon a practically blank sheet by an accumulation of conditioned reflexes, they have run on to the absurdity that any system of conditioned reflexes can be built up in any infant. They have leapt on to the assumption that every human being starts with the same blank sheet of the same texture and capacity for receiving and carrying impressions. They deny that heredity counts for anything in determining personal quality.

In Watson’s own words : ‘‘ The Behaviourist no longer finds support for . . . special abilities which are supposed to run in families. He believes that, given the relatively simple list of embryological responses, which are fairly uniform in infants, he can build (granting that environment can be controlled) any infant along any specific line —into rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief.’ He can, in fact, train the offspring

789