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1.3.17Blank Slate Theory and Behaviorism
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
In the first half of the 20th Century, and well into the second half, a school of thought called behaviourism taught, wrongly, that
- Humans are born with “blank slate” brains, and
- Everything we learn comes from the punishments and rewards we receive from the environment.
Behaviourists conveniently forgot to explain how a blank slate brain could actually learn anything: a truly blank slate would have no mechanism for learning. If the brain were a blank slate at birth, you would not be able to learn either language or music.
According to behaviorists, observing behaviour from the outside, via stimulus and response, was the only valid way to proceed in psychology. Behaviourists believed that biology controlled animals, but culture controlled people. Presumably, behaviourists did not consider people to be animals.
(Perhaps the Jesuits invented behaviourism, as evidenced in their oft-quoted myth: “Give me the child until the age of seven, and I will give you the man.”)
Many people still believe in behaviourism, even in the face of mountains of evidence supporting the existence, at birth, of a wide variety of naturally selected brain adaptations such as those for the acquisition of language and music. Some academics even teach that cultural evolution has superceded biological evolution.