ABSTRACT
It was in the 1930 and 1940s that behavioristic theory erupted into what seems to have been its full flower. The person principally responsible for this efflorescence was an engineer turned psychologist, Clark L. Hull. The tendency is especially obvious in the current behaviorism of Skinner, whose rejection of active internal processes has been even more thoroughgoing than J. B. Watson’s. Watson had at least admitted the possibility of “centrally aroused” mental processes; and his rejection of the possibility was quite deliberate, on the grounds that if it were true there would be a “serious limitation on the side of method in behaviorism”. Hull’s behaviorism has often been called “rat psychology,” and there is truth in this derision, to be sure. In “Mind, Mechanism, and Adaptive Behavior,” Hull asserted that “Ivan Pavlov’s conditioned reactions and the stimulus-response ’bonds’ resulting from Thorn- dike’s so-called ’law of effect’ are in reality special cases of the operation of a single set of principles”.
