ABSTRACT
Behaviorism was once the dominant movement in American psychology. It was eclipsed by the “cognitive revolution” in the late 1970s. Two things seem to have favored the cognitive movement: first, the digital computer, which, for the first time, allowed mentalistic ideas to be simulated and overcame behavioristic criticisms that cognitive theories were inexact and anecdotal, and, second, the overwhelming influence of Skinnerian radical behaviorism, with its strong bias against formal theory and its belief that psychology is little more than the collection of orderly experimental data. Radical behaviorism blocked theoretical advances within behaviorism so that connectionism, a natural “next step” in the associationistic tradition of the early behaviorists, was forced to find an uneasy home in cognitive, rather than behavioristic, psychology.
