The rise and fall of behaviorism: The narrative and the numbers
Braat,Michiel Engelen,Jan van Gemert,Ties Verhaegh,Sander
Braat,Michiel
Engelen,Jan
van Gemert,Ties
Verhaegh,Sander
Abstract
The history of 20th-century American psychology is often depicted as a history of the rise and fall of behaviorism. Although historians disagree about the theoretical and social factors that have contributed to the development of experimental psychology, there is widespread consensus about the growing and (later) declining influence of behaviorism between approximately 1920 and 1970. Because such wide-scope claims about the development of American psychology are typically based on small and unrepresentative samples of historical data, however, the question arises to what extent the received view is justified. This article aims to answer this question in two ways. First, we use advanced scientometric tools (e.g., bibliometric mapping, cocitation analysis, and term co-occurrence analysis) to quantitatively analyze the metadata of 119,278 articles published in American journals between 1920 and 1970. We reconstruct the development and structure of American psychology using cocitation and co-occurrence networks and argue that the standard story needs reappraising. Second, we argue that the question whether behaviorism was the "dominant" school of American psychology is historically misleading to begin with. Using the results of our bibliometric analyses, we argue that questions about the development of American psychology deserve more fine-grained answers.
Description
Funding Information: All authors contributed equally to this work. This research is funded by the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences Research Traineeships Programme. In addition, Verhaegh’s research is funded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (grant 275–20–064). We would like to thank Nees Jan van Eck, members of the History of Behavior Analysis mailing list (especially Nicole L. Banks and François Tonneau) and audiences at conferences at the University of Amsterdam, the CEU Institute for Advanced Study Budapest, and the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences for their valuable comments and feedback. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 American Psychological Association. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Date
2020-08
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Keywords
American psychology, Behaviorism, Bibliometric mapping, Co-occurrence analysis, Cocitation analysis
Citation
Braat, M, Engelen, J, van Gemert, T & Verhaegh, S 2020, 'The rise and fall of behaviorism : The narrative and the numbers', History of Psychology, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 252-280. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000146