One of the confusing things about addiction is that the addict seems to be voluntarily choosing things that are really hurtful - not just for the addict, but for the people they care most about. The same confusion comes up when we see the executives of addiction-based companies voluntarily making choices that harm their customers.

Why? We ask ourselves. How could they act that way? When we speak to the addict, or to the executive, they seem like ordinary people, not monsters.

We can dispel some of our confusion, oddly enough, by asking another question: "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna talk about the difference between proximate and ultimate causes, and (as usual) conclude with a message of hope.

The behaviorist movement in psychology in the early 1900s provided a number of benefits. The behaviorists’ precise measurement of stimulus and response lent psychology a scientific cachet. And precise measurement led to the development of the technology of behavior control that has been quite valuable in a practical sense.

At the same time, the decision to ignore the subjective experience of animals introduced unnecessary confusion about our behavior. The behaviorists mistakenly believed that the power to shape habits lay outside the animal, in an objectively defined “reinforcer.”

But that wasn’t true at all. The animal’s experience of satisfaction is a direct reflection of its inborn drives – the biology underlying its behavior. The same external stimulus could be reinforcing or not depending on the animal’s drive-based interpretation. And that interpretation varied wildly depending upon the environment within which the stimulus occurs.

This fact is tremendously important for our understanding and treatment of unwanted habits – including addictions. To illustrate, Bruce Alexander’s “Rat Park” experiments convincingly demonstrated that rats are far more likely to use addictive substances when confined to cramped laboratory cages than they are when housed in richer environments. The implications for humans are profound: It's likely that our environments are a more important factor in the development of addiction than is the addictive substance.

In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna engage in a lively discussion of this topic, and conclude with a message of hope.

The word “psychology” literally means the scientific study of the mind, or psyche. A little over a century ago, psychologists were in fact avidly studying the mind, mental life, and the subjective experience of self. The most brilliant psychologists of the era – most prominently William James and Robert Woodworth – were assembling knowledge of a broad range of phenomena, pulling together concepts that cast light upon the relationship between subjective experience and overt behavior. Some – for example Ivan Pavlov and Edward L. Thorndike – were actively involved in the study of animal experience, as reflected in their behavior.

Psychologists of that era were examining evidence that the mind is not a single agent but consists of a collection of semi-independent “mini personalities” that operate much as a social system operates. To illustrate, “automatic writing” experiments provided intriguing insights into the subconscious mind and the potential existence of subsystems of personality.

Overall, these experiments suggested that automatic writing could access subconscious thoughts and emotions, supporting the idea that personality consists of multiple subsystems. This early research laid the groundwork for later studies in psychology and psychoanalysis.

Then something strange happened. American psychology abruptly abandoned the study of the psyche altogether. A new breed of psychologists closed their eyes to everything except overt behavior, pointedly refusing to discuss mind or subjective experience any further. These were the “behaviorists,” and they took over the science of psychology for more than 25 years.

How could psychology, the study of the psyche, refuse to study the psyche? Noted theorist Bernard Baars commented upon the odd intrusion of behaviorist concepts into psychology. Baars wrote, “A harsh critic might see the twentieth century as a time of lost opportunities. Psychologists could have built on the magnificent foundation of James’s Principles (1890/1983)—by wide consent the greatest psychological work in English. Instead, they chose to evade some of the most fundamental aspects of human existence.”

Finally, serious scientists have resumed the study of the mind, reclaiming the essence of psychology. And yet scientific psychology continues to suffer from what we might call a “behaviorist hangover.” What's that? It's the lasting impact of the behaviorist movement on modern psychology, even though the movement's peak influence waned decades ago.

In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna turn their attention to this issue in a lively discussion based on Tom Whitehead’s upcoming book, Reimagining Psychology.