ABSTRACT
Stimulus-response psychologies are psychologies based on the concept of the reflex. The concept of the intervening variable is associated with modern forms of S-O-R psychology. Interactionism might seem to have replaced S-O-R psychology. S-O-R psychology persists in cognitivism, the metatheoretical position that dominates modern psychology. Cognitive processes are theoretical entities. Moreover, stimulus-response psychology treats units of behavior as punctate events, whereas the behavioral units that properly interest psychologists are classes of variants, the members of which might look very different from each other. Radical behaviorism seems like a stimulus-response psychology because radical behaviorists continue to use the terms stimulus and response. Radical behaviorists are engaged in developing a critique and reformulation of psychology that rejects the mechanistic formulation and accepts the means-end nature of conduct. Stimulus-response psychologies impose an assumption of contiguous causality on psychological thinking. The concept of action-at-a-distance is an alternative to contiguous causality.
