APA Journals Dialogue

In this episode of APA Journals Dialogue, Dr. Raymond Bergner discusses his research regarding the definition of behavior and offers his approach for defining the topic.

Article Citation

• Bergner, R. M. (2016). What is behavior? And why is it not reducible to biological states of affairs? Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 36(1), 41–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/teo0000026

Dr. Raymond Bergner is a clinical psychotherapist and a professor in the Department of Psychology at Illinois State University, where he teaches psychopathology, family therapy, and counseling theories and techniques. In addition to the research he discusses in this episode, he studies mental disorders, self-concept and self-esteem, and the integration of psychotherapy into clinical practice.

The Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology^® is devoted to fostering discussion at the interface of psychology, philosophy, and metatheory. The journal addresses ontological, epistemological, ethical, and critical issues in psychological theory and inquiry as well as the implications of psychological theory and inquiry for philosophical issues.

Visit the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology website.

Marla Bonner: Hello, I'm Marla Bonner. Welcome to APA Journals Dialogue, a podcast featuring research from the journals program of the American Psychological Association. In this episode, we look at an article from the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.

Dr. Raymond Bergner is a clinical psychologist and a professor in the Department of Psychology at Illinois State University. His research primarily focuses on the application of a general theoretical framework known as "Descriptive Psychology" to clinical problems and to issues in the philosophy of behavioral science.

In his article, Dr. Bergner argues for a certain understanding of the concept of "behavior" and for the position that there is much more to behavior than the occurrence of physical events.

We're pleased to have with us today Dr. Raymond Bergner. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Bergner: Thank you. Thank you, and APA for this. I feel honored by being asked to do this.

Marla: Great, thanks so much! So, just to give our listeners an overview, could you just briefly summarize the main points you're trying to make in your article?

Dr. Bergner: Okay, sure. The title of the article is "What Is Behavior? And Why Is It Not Reducible to Biological States of Affairs?" That kind of encapsulates it; the two basic questions that I try to deal with.

The first is, what is behavior? What I'm trying to do there is to provide a better formulation of that concept for the field, rather than what the default notion of behavior as just "observable, physical motion." I'm saying, I think we can do a lot better. I think that's not a very good definition. Let me propose a better one.

Secondly, then, I use the formulation that I give there to address the question, why can't you reduce that to just biological stuff? You look in the media now, you read magazine articles, and so many places people seem to be trying to say, "Hey, it's all really biological. Someday you'll see." This is saying, "Well, you know what? Human behavior, you really can't say that." There's really strong reasons to say you can't get away with that one.

So that's kind of a quick overview.

Marla: And, actually, one of the first points you make is that psychology, as a field, lacks consensus on the definition of a few key terms — in particular, behavior. How does the lack of consensus affect the study of behavior?

Dr. Bergner: There's a quote I really like from a New York Times science writer a few years ago, a woman named Natalie Angier, and she says, and I quote: "Certain things should never be taken for granted; among them, the precise meaning of words that are at the heart of your discipline." And I thought, "Thank you, Natalie." I really liked that.

So, she's saying any science (and I agree) should really upfront be stating the nature of its subject matter, the nature of its core concepts. If you look at other mature sciences, if they're going to talk about vertebrates, they tell you, "Here's what a vertebrate is." "Here's what an atom is." "Here's what an isotope or an acid or a chromosome, whatever." They tell you what it is before they launch into some theory about it.

But we are not very good at doing that. We talk about personality, we talk about mental disorder. In the first chapter, those books routinely, they say, "Well, we're not really sure what these terms mean." To the point here, this is what we do with behavior.

I looked at 26 psychological dictionaries and glossaries in intro psych books, and I looked for the concept of behavior. In those 26 sources, only seven of them even defined the term. So you say, "Wait a minute — this is what? The science of behavior?" But nobody even seems to be bothered, often, by even trying to say, "what is behavior?"

So, I think it's pretty important to the science. That's the main thing. I can say more later, but right now, the main thing I want to say is, as a science of behavior, we really need to do better.

Marla: And so, given that people are generally unable to define many terms, such as humor and personality, as you actually acknowledge in your article, is it even possible that the field of psychology can reach a consensus on the definition of behavior?

Dr. Bergner: I say in the paper that we're not really good at defining terms. So, you know, you walk up to somebody on the street and you say, "can you define humor?" and they're gonna go, "Errrrr, no." "Can you define time or personality?" — same thing.

But that doesn't mean that we can't. I can't go into all the methodological details, but we have done studies where what we do is look at the way people use terms. We deduce from that meanings, the meanings they are using when they use the term, and what you see is that there's a heck of a lot of uniformity in the use, even for a term like "love".

When we did a study, we spoke to a lot of people. It was one thing about "love" — basically, they would always say, "This is essential. If this is missing, it ain't love!" And that one thing was "an investment in or a concern for the well-being of the other person for that person's own sake."

So here's a difficult term. You ask somebody to define it; they say "uuh, that's a bad one." But when you ask them to use it in certain ways, that is an essential characteristic they state for love, or that they use in their judgments.

At the end of the day, can we reach a consensus in our field? I don't know. The picture at this point is not very promising, and people don't seem to care a whole lot about this kind of problem, but as my chair likes to say, "Get your meanings out there and hopefully people will like it."

Marla: What is a parametric analysis of behavior, and how might a parametric analysis give us a more complete picture of behavior that still fits with more commonly held definitions?

Dr. Bergner: The first thing to say is it's not going to fit with commonly held definitions. It's going to be really different.

So, what is a parametric analysis? It's a pretty strange bird in psychology. It's used a lot in math, it's used a lot in physics, but one thing in psych we are pretty familiar with is the concept of "color." We'll use that as, not exactly an analogy, but something like that.

Let's say I'm not concerned about behavior, but about color. Can I define color? No, you can't. You can't state the necessary and sufficient conditions and universal, essential characteristics for color. You just can't do it.

Can you do the other thing psychologists do? Can you specify a prototype? Like in psychology we say, when looking at depression for example, "here's a picture of eight characteristics. Not everybody has all these, but the more resemblance to this prototype, the more we're entitled to say that's a case of depression." Can you do that for color? No, you can't do that for color.

So what can you do? Well, what people did is, they said, "Well, you can specify parameters. You can specify aspects of color or dimensions of color." And they came up with three: hue, saturation, and brilliance. What you get here, when you can specify the values of all three of those for some color, you specify what exact color that is. Also, you can use those parameters to say, "Here's how one color differs from or is exactly the same as another." If you're a scientist dealing with colors, this is proven to be a very successful, very handy way to nail down a core concept.

We're not really concerned with color here. We're concerned with behavior. What we're saying here, in something called "Descriptive Psychology," where this comes from, is that the best way to capture our concept is not definition, it's not prototype — it's parametric analysis.

We're saying behavior has seven parameters. This is a bit of a laundry list but let me go through it and try to give you the flavor of the idea here.

One parameter of behavior we'd specify as W: this is the motivational parameter. Basically what we're saying here is that an aspect of every behavior is that it's an attempt to bring about some state of affairs. It's an attempt to achieve some end.

So I'll use an example — here's Mary, and Mary's playing bridge, and she lays down a card on the table. We say, okay, she's attempting to bring about some end. What is it? Well, to win a trick in the bridge game. And it would be pretty nonsensical to say that Mary laid down the card, but she wasn't really trying to accomplish anything by doing that. That would just be nonsensical to say, "That's not a parameter for behavior."

Secondly, we have what we call a K parameter: K stands for "know," as in "knowledge." This is the cognitive parameter. Here's the idea: an aspect of every behavior is that it's a case of bringing to bear knowledge that you have, or concepts that you have, or distinctions that you're capable of making.

So here's Mary, and she lays down that card, and in doing that, there's a distinction involved. She has distinguished queen from king, hearts from diamonds, whatever. It would be kind of nonsensical to deny it, to say, "Well, Mary did that, she just played her queen of hearts, but no distinction took place between queens versus other cards."

I'm going to shorten this list, because it is kind of long and a bit of a laundry list, so I won't do them all, but enough to give you the idea.

Third parameter (I'll do three more) is called K-H, or "know-how," and this is the skill or competency parameter. What this is saying is an aspect of every behavior is that it involves the here-and-now exercise of some competency, or some ability.

So, when Mary makes her move in the card game, she exercises her abilities to act in accord with the rules of the game of bridge, or to grasp and move physical object — different competencies she has. Again, it would make no sense to say, "Mary did this, but no ability on her part came into play in the act. That was irrelevant here, that didn't happen here." Nobody would believe you.

Performance (P) — performance is the process aspect or the procedural aspects of behavior. An aspect of every behavior is that it involves the occurrence of physical processes.

These might be, in Mary's case, arm movements, brain events, etc. It would be nonsensical to say, "Mary just played her queen of hearts, but no process of a physical sort took place." It would just be nonsensical.

One more! Finally, one of the parameters is A — achievement. This is the outcome parameter, and it's saying an aspect of every behavior is that it's the bringing about of some outcome.

Let's just say that the outcome of Mary's behavior is simply that she put the card on the table. It would be nonsensical to say that she did this, but there was no outcome.

I won't go through the rest, but it's just saying that whenever a behavior occurs, aspects of these sorts (and these are actual states of affairs — they're not airy-fairy spirits or ghosts, these are actual states) — whenever a behavior occurs, these things occur. These are aspects, these are parts, these are dimensions of that behavior. They're in the behavior.

Let me leave that there.

Marla: Thank you for that. I think that piques the interest of our listeners just enough so they can actually read your article in its entirety.

Dr. Bergner: When I was going through it, I think, "Oh, this could be kind of tedious," which is why I shortened it.

Marla: No, that was very helpful, thank you for that. So, to continue on a little bit more on the topic of parametric analysis, you explained how this can be and has been used to integrate the subfields of psychology. So could this integration also include other fields of social science?

Dr. Bergner: That's a good question and it led me to think a bit about it. So I thought about things like history, economics, sociology; and off-hand I don't think so, but it's also true that I'm not an expert in any of those fields and so, if I took a more in-depth look, maybe. But it's really designed for psychology. Psychology is the science of behavior, per se, so in my mind it's really first and foremost about our key concepts, and not that of, for example, history.

Marla: In the second part of your article you explain that while biology may have an impact on behavior, behavior is not reducible to biology. Could you explain this concept?

Dr. Bergner: Sure. So, reducible — when you say something reduces to something else, you're saying, "basically, A is nothing but B. This something is nothing but that something. This something is nothing over and above that something."

Probably the classical example here is we say that water is nothing but H2O. This thing over here that we've called for centuries "water" is nothing over and above this chemical compound, H2O. A is nothing but B.

So, if you're saying behavior reduces to biology, essentially, if you think about it from where we're coming as I've been talking, basically you're saying, "behavior is just that physical process aspect, that P aspect." So I talked about a cognitive parameter, a motivational parameter, ability parameter, outcome parameter — but you'd be saying, "No, no, no, no, no. Those really didn't happen. The only thing that really happened here was those biological events."

If you accept what I'm saying about behavior, then you start to say, "No, you can't say that. It just doesn't make any sense to say it's just that one aspect and it doesn't have those other aspects."

So that's probably my basic argument to the effect that you can't reduce the one to the other. There's other arguments but it's probably best to move on here.

Marla: Fantastic. And finally, it seems like when we look at the scientific literature, as well as reports in the major media, we consistently see how behavioral phenomena are explained in terms of biology. Does this contradict what you're saying?

Dr. Bergner: No, it doesn't. First of all, yeah, it's certainly true that biology has done and is in the process of making many amazing and very helpful discoveries, and they are relevant to behavior, of course. So, we have some drug that help people to stop obsessing. We're looking into the genetics of autism. There's all kinds of things.

But none of that contradicts my thesis. Why? Well, if you look at these biological findings, they really kind of almost all fall into two families. In fact, all the ones I can think of fall into two families.

The first are what I call "deficit-based explanations." The general form of a deficit-based explanation is, if a given behavior calls for something (call it X), but the person lacks that something, then the person will be restricted in their ability to do that something. If a behavior calls for vision, but I'm blind, I'm going to be restricted in my ability to do that something.

A lot of the biological findings fit under that. If we say that a person lacks sufficient serotonin levels, he or she may be depressed and they may be very restricted in their ability to get out of bed in the morning or to concentrate or do all those things that come with depression. If they lack certain intact brain structures — maybe they can't remember or maybe they can't read or whatever — it's a deficit-based explanation. If they lack something, they can't do something else.

We can say two things about it. First of all, that applies to all the parameters that we just talked about. If a person lacks the cognitive necessities for doing something, then they're going to be restricted in doing that something. If Mary is restricted in her ability to be assertive, because she lacks the concept that equal assertion is fair play (she thinks it's being selfish or something like that), she lacks something she needs, and it's a cognitive something. The deficit-based applies to cognitive stuff, if the person lacks the ability, if a person lacks the motivation, and so forth. They're going to be restricted. It's a general explanation.

But maybe the punchline here is that I might lack the biological necessity — say my serotonin's depleted — doesn't mean that it's all biological, any more than the behavior of getting out of my bed is all biological, or that grieving my loss any more than if I lack the cognitive wherewithal, that doesn't mean that behavior is all really cognitive. If I lack the motivation, I wouldn't say, "oh, well, it's all really motivational." I wouldn't say that.

All you're saying here is that, for any behavior, if you're missing something of one of these parameters or a combination, that's going to restrict you, but it doesn't add up to the logical conclusion, "Ah! So, it's all really biological!" These deficit-based explanations don't lead to that logical conclusion.

The other kind of explanation you see is what I call "localization of function-based explanations." Here, you think of all these fMRI studies. You see them all the time — here's the show on obsessive-compulsive disorder, and here is John and they took this fMRI when he was at his worst and look at this, and now he's better and look at this. Or they do it for non-disease things — here's John, John is meditating, and look at the difference in his brain state, look at the difference when he does this or he does mental math or he does this or that.

So here, from the present point of view, what's being said? Well, it's being said, "okay, so these are methodologies that allow us to pick up these physical process aspects or dimensions of behavior. This allows us to pick up things that belong in this physical process category. But that it's been picked up doesn't mean that the other things in the parameters don't exist, that there's no such thing as cognition here; that there's no such thing as skills; that there's no such thing as motivation. It just doesn't have that logical upshot.

None of these really lead to the logical conclusion that behavior is just biological.

Marla: Well, Dr. Bergner, thank you so much for a very fascinating conversation and offering us a new way for us to conceptualize behavior. We hope that you can come back and speak with us again. Thanks again.

Dr. Bergner: Thank you very much.

Marla: To read this article and others from Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, please visit our website at www.apa.org/pubs/journals/teo.

Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Marla Bonner, with APA Journals Dialogue.

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