ABSTRACT
There are three kinds of evidence that suggest that the means-end hypothesis is a strategic hypothesis. First, treating contingencies as independent variables has allowed the authors to produce a body of well-replicated findings in the laboratory. Second, the means-end hypothesis lets the authors to clarify many persistent doubts about the direction taken by psychology. The hypothesis helps to clarify doubts about individualism, reductionism, psychocentrism, and other matters of concern to critics. Third, the means-end hypothesis implies much about the general nature of psychological phenomena and about the general nature of psychological inquiry. These implications include the distinctions between organism and person, between content and structure, and between contiguous causality and action-at-a-distance. The means-end hypothesis requires that psychologists move beyond behaviorism in how they think about psychology's subject matter and task. Even so, there is a case for saying that behaviorism is a stimulus-response psychology or, better, a S-O-R psychology that accepts individualism, reductionism, and mechanistic causality.
