3. Guilt in the Social Science

3 Guilt in the Social Sciences O. HOBART MOWRER Some years ago, when I still thought that protracted personal counseling and psychotherapy were more effective than I pres ently do, psychology graduate students in my own department sometimes came to me with their personal problems; and not infrequently, during the course of our interviews, these students would confess-often with considerable embarrassment-that one of the main reasons they had gone into psychology was that they had suffered acutely from guilt and saw psychology, with its emphasis upon scientific determinism, as a "way out." If all our actions and attitudes are strictly determined by our heredity and our environment, with no element of personal freedom or choice in the equation, then, they had reasoned, the whole notion of guilt, accountability, responsibility is meaningless and quite unjustified. Yet, as these students themselves clearly realized, the very fact that they were now "in therapy" meant that this maneuver had not saved them.

The fact that psychology students have sometimes found them selves in this predicament, while suggestive, does not, to be sure, constitute a major problem in and of itself. But this dilemma, in one form or another, is actually very common in our society and therefore calls for the best thought and attention that can be given to it. It constitutes a major challenge to both academic 38 Guilt in the Social Sciences 39 and clinical psychology and to the social sciences in general. The present paper therefore represents an attempt to come to grips with certain aspects of this problem and, hopefully, to find ways of thinking about and dealing with it that are both logically defensible and practically useful. 1. Cross.-Culturallnductions Concerning Social Morality If one examines the monumental four-volume work, The Science of Society) by Yale Professors William Graham Sumner and Albert Galloway Keller, which was published in 1927, one discovers that the entire second volume is devoted to moral and religious concerns and controls. With enormous erudition, these authors, drawing from a great wealth of both historical and cross-cultural materials which they had assembled over a lifetime, came to the conclusion that, despite their not infrequent arbi trariness and error, religious and moral concerns are not only found in all human societies but are, in the long run, functional and adaptive. In the last chapter of the second volume of their work, Sumner and Keller summarize this argument as follows: An evolutionist [which is the authors' term for a person who takes both a long and a broad approach to the understanding of social insti tutions and cultural mores], viewing the universal existence of religion throughout the races of mankind, cannot but believe that it has pos sessed survival-value, for there must once have been races without it and it must on a time have risen as a variation that has withstood selec tion and has persisted. If one considers, further, that it is precisely the most advanced races that have suffered most and longest under the cult-burdens and other alleged disadvantages accruing from religion, he comes unavoidably to the conclusion that religion constitutes for society an adjustment with high survival-value. Along with the family, property, and government, religion has taken its place as one of the major institutional adjustments in the evolution of society. (P. 1475.) And then, with equal clarity and eloquence, these writers continue their analysis thus: 40 Psychiatry and Responsibility There is always reason behind the success of a persisting adjustment, whether in the organic or the social realm; in fact, our very idea of reason is derived from observation of the constitution and operation of things that "work." Adjustments do not survive selection and last only when they are wrong-headed and contrary to reason or despite the fact that they are whimsical, capricious, and unamenable to law. If one looks dispassionately into the charges against religion and admits all of them, either wholly or in some degree, and then surveys and ac knowledges the costs in capital, effort, and pain that religious systems have imposed cold-bloodedly and offensively upon mankind, he is yet, in the end, constrained to believe that the article was worth the cost.

Exceedingly expensive, it has also been incomparably effective. (P. 1475.) Writing, as they did, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sumner and Keller were, of course, aware of the growing conflict in our particular culture and era between science and religion. Science, they contend, is a useful and necessary correction for the essentially conservative character of religion; and, far from being inherently opposed, both operate in a dialectical way, for the continued adaptation and evolution of society. Religion does not, like science, look to its own correction and readjust ment. In science man can advance in a straight line indefinitely, while in religion he has had to revolve around certain fixed points from which he could not depart far. It is next to impossible with the weapon of reason to attack and carry a position held by religion; for religion can at any juncture fall back upon its characteristic "doctrine of mystery." (P. 1440.) It is possible to make out a strong prima facie case against religion, since its apparent disservices are concrete and evident, while to appre ciate its services to society one must have done enough reflection to realize that methods of indirection may be quite as effective as those which are direct and obvious. Short-sighted preoccupation with the obvious has convinced not a few emotional people that religion must be uprooted, along with private property, the monogamic family, and government. It is needless to say that such persons are not intelligent Guilt in the Social Sciences 41 evolutionists, accustomed to discounting incidentals in favor of a long perspective. (P. 1468.) No other agency has purged religous conceptions of their gross ele ments as has science. It has been the prime instrument in securing society's adjustments to its material life-conditions; the mores have followed upon its trail; and religion has fallen in behind the mores.

If the conferring of refinement is a friendly function, even though it involves faithful wounds, then science is the best friend religion has ever had. (P. 1481.) As events have actually moved in our society in the three or four decades since the foregoing statements were written, the validity thereof is not immediately apparent. But presently we shall be able to demonstrate their exceptional pertinence. In the meantime it will be useful to indicate more precisely just how Sumner and Keller develop their position regarding the over-all social value of religion and moral concern. Here a longer quotation will be necessary to carry the exact flavor and full force of their thinking: If anyone recalls that the sanction of religion tends to preserve the old and to oppose the new, let it be said, first, that tradition is as im portant in societal evolution as the corresponding factor, heredity, is in the organic process. If all were variation, life would be an unrelated chaos, just as, if all were tradition, it would take on the immobility of death. This is no apology for the discreditable view that has been harbored by not a few of the orthodox as to their function in the world, which they have interpreted to be that of brakemen, but merely the suggestion that religion has a distinct function and one useful to society in connection with the upholding of tradition. Such conserv atism cannot continue to be indiscriminate nor can important services to society any longer be discharged by an agency that is not adjustable to the spirit of its age.

Not to prolong a discussion of relatively minor matters, much less try to combat the detailed complaints about religion and the priesthood, let us consider what is, after all, the first and last service of religion to 42 Psychiatry and Responsibility a society, namely, the discipline it exercises. Not without justice has it been written that fear is the beginning of knowledge. It is certainly the beginning of that discipline through which alone wisdom arrives. Discipline was precisely what men needed in the childhood of the race and have continued to require ever since. Men must learn to control themselves. Though the regulative organization exercised considerable discipline, its agents were merely human; the chief had to sleep occa sionally, could not be everywhere at once, and might be deceived and evaded. Not so the ghosts and spirits. The all-seeing daimonic eye was sleepless; no time or place was immune from its surveillance. Detection was sure. Further, the penalty inflicted was awesome. Granted that the chief might beat or maim or fine or kill, there were yet limits to what he could do. The spirits, on the other hand, could inflict strange agonies and frightful malformations and transformations. Their powers extended even beyond the grave and their resources for harm outran the liveliest imaginings. In short, they inspired, not a daylight-fear but a grisly, gruesome terror-ghost-fear. Consider the threat of the taboo, and its effectiveness. It is beneath this unearthly whip of scorpions that humanity has cringed for long ages and there is no doubt that its disciplinary value has superseded all other compulsions to which man kind has ever been subject. (Pp. 1478-1479.) I apologize to the reader for quoting at such length from an analysis which was published more than thirty years ago. But these are strangely prophetic words, which have special relevance for our time. Under the impact of forces that we shall consider shortly, the Sumner-Keller argument concerning the basic social value of discipline, morality, and religion fell, by and large, upon a generation of deaf ears. In 1927, when The Science of Society made its appearance, the lnovement to "debunk" religion, moral ity, tradition, and history itself was in full swing; and a major economic depression and a second world-wide war were yet to leave their scars upon the human mind and soul. But now, as we end the first decade of the second half of this century, we cannot look back upon the work of Sumner and Keller without being impressed by its deep insight and perspicacity.

For a long time, these writers had no direct descendants among social scientists. Many picked up and elaborated upon their com ments concerning what they were frank to call the "disservices Guilt in the Social Sciences 43 of religion" (p. 1467); but very few writers continued to argue the main Sumner-Keller thesis concerning the long-term necessity for a stable, undergirding value system. Now, however, a .reac tion has set in, and social scientists are beginning, once more, to consider what may be loosely called "the value problem." Here, as illustrative of this new trend, I would call attention to the following: Helen Lynd's 1958 book, On Shame and the Search for Identityj the chapter on conscience in Patterns of Child Rear ing by Sears, Maccoby and Levin (1957); John Whiting's 1959 paper on "Sorcery, Sin, and the Superego"; an article, also pub lished in 1959, on "Pride and Shame in Children" by Levin and Baldwin; Richard LaPiere's 1959 book, The Freudian Ethic; and an article by Hill (1960) on "Learning Theory and the Acquisi tion of Values." Here one sees, once again, a tendency on the part of social scientists to take morality seriously, in both individual personality and in society, along lines clearly adumbrated in the passages that have here been quoted from Sumner and Keller.!

2. Creativity) Conscience) and Coercion Three features of the Sumner-Keller analysis invite our special attention. Recall first of all, if you will, the point that religious and moral traditions are to a society what physical heredity is to an individual organism. Without heredity an organism has no identity, biologically speaking; without it we would not know what an organism is. And the same is true of social tradition: without it we lack personal identity and do not know who we are. Social tradition and values give form and definition, without which organization is impossible; and society is an organization, an established, agreed-upon way of doing things, particularly very vital things of a personal and interper sonal nature. "If all were variation," Sumner and Keller say, "life would be an unrelated chaos, just as, if all were tradition, it would take on the immobility of death." In our time, the first danger is obviously more immediate and real than the second. Certainly there is no prospect of our stag nating as a race of stodgy, sodden conformists. But we are, it 44 Psychiatry and Responsibility seems, threatened by a form of chaos as a result of the fetish we have made of so-called creativity. Recently I spent a very illuminating day in company with a group of highly placed and able professional educators in southern California; and although there were some persons in the group who were willing to stand up for such old-fashioned virtues as personal integrity and char acter in children, the greater emphasis was upon education for spontaneity, variation, creativity. To what extent is this latter position empirically based, and to what extent is it a projection of a personal philosophy, which is today very widespread, to the effect that moral restraint and self-discipline are indeed Hthe bunk" and that Hself-expression" is the measure of all things?

It is perhaps not without significance that in southern Califor nia one also meets so many persons who are "in therapy." Can it be that there is a connection between this philosophy of personal freedom, spontaneity, and "creativity" and the personal disorgani zation and crisis that We ambiguously refer to as "neurosis"? The dominant emphasis in psychotherapy has been in the direction of pushing the individual toward the belief that his difficulty lies in overrestraint, too much character, too much self-discipline; but now it looks very much as if, in trying to move toward greater personal freedom and spontaneity, we are making matters worse rather than better. Sumner and Keller insisted-and the more recent writers cited are also again holding-that the capacity for self-discipline is personally and socially indispensable. One cannot, I think, escape the feeling that many persons who are today the devotees of The New Freedom have become "spon taneous" and "creative" without first attaining the balance and wisdom and perspective that comes from restraint and self control. Someone once said of Christopher Morley that he "got mellow before he got ripe." Something of the same unfortunate type of development seems to have occurred in many of the apostles of so-called spontaneity and creativity. Let us have change, yes, but seasoned, ripened change, and not change merely for the sake of change. If one has never given a traditional, established way of life an extended trial, how can one argue convincingly against it? Inexperience hardly qualifies one as an Guilt in the Social Sciences 45 expert in other areas; and it is not immediately apparent that it should do so in the moral realm. If a person has devoted a considerable piece of his life to a given moral principle and found it invalid and void of sense, and if he can obtain con sensual support from others, both historically and contemporane ously, then he is perhaps in a position to speak out in favor of a different and supposedly better way of dealing with the problem.

But ignorance must not be mistaken for evidence. Someone has said, uHe who finds pleasure in vice or pain in virtue is inexpe rienced in both." Vice is what works and seems rewarding and attractive immediately; and virtue, as Sumner and Keller say, is what works and rewards us in the long run. Before we follow the prophets of the new personal liberty and of psychological and moral emancipation, we need to be sure that they have long-term rather than mere short-term support for their views. The second conception put forward by Sumner and Keller in the passages quoted to which I wish particularly to call attention is this. Social controls, they say, cannot be adequate if they are entirely external and objective. By one means or another, the norms of the culture and the penalties for violating them must be internalized; and this, these authors hold, is the essence of morality and of religion. "Discipline)" they say, "was precisely what men needed in the childhood of the race and have con tinued to require ever since. Men must learn to control them selv'es." This, obviously, is the function of character, of con science, to replace external supervision and sanctions by internal ones. "The chief," these writers say metaphorically and yet quite literally, "had to sleep occasionally, could not be everywhere at once, and might be deceived and evaded." Therefore, some sys tem of beliefs and emotional forces had to be devised that would work toward the enforcement of morality even though the chief did indeed sleep.

For a generation now, we have been pummeled by the perverse argument that conscience is an impostor and morality a super stition, and that in combination they produce those states which we call mental illness. In one sense, this is, of course, true: as Sumner and Keller point out, conscience can indeed "inflict 46 Psychiatry and Responsibility strange agonies and frightful malformations and transformations" upon us. But it does so for socially necessary and functional reasons; and we are at last waking up to the fact that we cannot solve the problem of "neurosis" by the naive expedient of abolish ing conscience and moral principle. We are now realizing that such a procedure is tantamount to dehumanization and reverses the long social evolution that we call history and progress. In an article entitled "Relationships benveen Shame and Guilt in the Socializing Process," which D. P. Ausubel published in the Psychological Review in 1955, this argument is put forward with special cogency as follows: Guilt is one of the most important psychological mechanisms through which an individual becomes socialized in the ways of his culture. It is also an important instrument for cultural survival since it constitutes a most efficient watchdog within each individual, serving to keep his behavior compatible with the moral values of the society in which he lives. Without the aid rendered by guilt feelings, child rearing would be a difficult matter indeed. If children felt no sense of accountability or moral obligations to their hedonistic and irresponsible impulses, to conform to accepted social norms, or to acquire self-control, the social izing process would be slow, arduous, and incomplete ... And since it is plainly evident that the maintenance of perpetual vigilance is impractical, that fear alone is never an effective deterrent against anti social behavior, and that the interests of personal expediency are not always in agreement with prescribed ethical norms, a social order un buttressed by a sense of moral obligation in its members would enjoy precious little stability. (P. 378.) Here, three decades later, is a revival of the Sumner-Keller argument, which is made all the more impressive by the fact that Ausubel at the time of writing was apparently not aware of that argument; at least there is no specific reference in his paper to The Science of Society. It is, of course, true that Ausubel does not relate personal morality and self-control to explicitly religious forces and concepts. Instead of stressing the socializing role of ghosts and daimons and gods, Ausubel speaks of conscience and the capacity for guilt in purely naturalistic and psychological Guilt in the Social Sciences 47 terms; but conscience and the concept of a spirit world are mani festly related. Sumner and Keller suggest that ghosts and spirits came first and were used to create and enforce personal responsi bility; whereas Ausubel, writing in midtwentieth century, might well hold that conscience is the primal fact and that ghosts and gods are the projected, externalized transformations thereof.

But what is important for our purposes is that all the writers thus far cited acknowledge, in one way or another, the social ne cessity of internalized moral standards and of the capacity for self-punishment when these standards are disregarded and in fringed. Much of our erstwhile effort in the field of psychotherapy has been directed toward "reducing the severity of the superego," as if conscience, morality, and guilt were the villains of the piece. Now we are realizing that they are, instead, socially and person ... ally indispensable and that we must not only inculcate conscience in our children but also teach them, as they grow into healthy adulthood, to respect and trust it, rather than to try to outwit, defy, and neutralize it. We have been the victims of a strange misconception in recent decades, namely, the view that conscience is bent upon taking the joy out of life and imposing quite unnecessary and crippling limitations upon us. Anyone who has seen Walt Disney's "Seal Island" will recall that here, during the breeding season, a few powerful bull seals, in the height of their physical vigor, main tain large harems of females, whereas. the young males, fallen monarchs, and males that have never made the grade even during the prime of life live together at one end of the island in what the makers of the film refer to as "bachelor quarters." It is not hard to imagine a similar state of affairs among human, or at least protohuman, beings forty or fifty thousand years ago. And why have we moved, evolved toward monogamy? Because it was a way of circumscribing and inhibiting sexuality? Not at all! It was rather because allotment of one woman to one man not only assured optimal care and training of the young, but also provided maximal sexual satisfaction for the greatest number of individuals and thus greatest social stability. George Bernard Shaw, with his acute sense of paradox, displays shrewd insight in this connection 48 Psychiatry and Responsibility when he refers, in one of his plays, to marriage "as the most li centious of institutions." And yet we have had a spate of self styled "therapists" and would-be social reformers literally selling us the pernicious notion that society and conscience are sexually repressive and must be fought back if one is to escape the neu ..

roticstate that such repression supposedly produces. 2 This is not, of course, to deny that society is in certain respects "repressive" as far as sexuality is concerned. For example, in our particular culture, we ask the young to forgo marriage during the second decade of life, until after, as we say, they get their education. 3 But what must be remembered is that this restraint is imposed, not for the sake of restraint as such, but for much larger and more far-reaching reasons. Finally, I would call attention to the quite unabashed and un apologetic way in which Sumner and Keller recognize the neces sity of force, coercion, and punishment in the socialization process. Fear) they remind us, is the beginning, not of neurosis, but of knowledge. It is true, of course, that without discipline and "fear of the Lord" a child never develops those inner conflicts and crises that we call mental illness; but neither does he become a complete, wise human being.

In the Chicago papers there was recently an account of the hearings that were held concerning the right of the Chicago School Board to dismiss Marie G. Thomas from her position as a teacher because of a failure to maintain classroom order and discipline. Mrs. Thomas' defense was that teachers are so circum scribed and delimited in what they can today do to enforce order that the task has become quite impossible and hopeless. Mrs. Thomas is probably going to lose her job, and there may be special, undisclosed reasons why she should; but on the face of it, the situation is one that makes a great deal of sense as she presented it.4 We seem to have become completely unrealistic in our assumptions concerning the socialization of children and are in process of reaping the practical consequences of our folly. A few days ago my wife, who is a specialist in child develop ment and family relations, told me of a book she had been read ing which makes the point that the reaction that is today setting Guilt in the Social Sciences 49 in against the Freudian philosophy of permissiveness is coming very largely from individuals who themselves welcomed it in their earlier years but who now, as parents and teachers, are beginning to see the whole matter in a very different light.

It therefore looks as if Sumner and Keller were right; as indi viduals we do need discipline froln those around us, discipline that must eventually be internalized as the capacity for self discipline; and it now appears that this course of development presupposes some, perhaps a very considerable, element of coer cion and force, or what political scientists commonly term power. Paradoxically, it is not the self-indulgent but the disciplined who, with a clear conscience, are genuinely free and soundly cre ative. And "neurosis" is the end result of systematic (and secret) efforts to avoid being subject to this power (also often called Law or God).5 3. Learning and Freedon'l) or from Reflex to Feedback Now that we are returning, once· again, to the historically derived and empirically confirmed view of morality so clearly described and documented by Sumner and Keller, it is not with out relevance to ask why the impulse to deny and deviate from it reached such remarkable proportions during the past three or four decades. Many factors were undoubtedly involved. First of all, it should be observed that we human beings always wear the mantle of morality uneasily. We live in perennial tension between the long-run, disciplined way of doing things and the temptation to take short-cuts, to find easier, more direct routes to pleasure and comfort; and anything that seems to make reward for virtue less certain or its disregard less hazardous encourages doubt and deviation. Many persons now living have gone through two world wars; and war always makes the future uncertain and contracts the moral perspective. Moreover, the rise of an economy of abundance, yea excess, in this and at least a few other coun tries of the world has intensified advertising, with its emphasis upon the importance of pleasure and comfort,· 'without much regard for moral considerations. When a well-known brand of 50 Psychiatry and Responsibility beer admonishes us to "know the real joy of good living," the accent is hardly upon morality or virtue.

But I have also been intrigued recently by another historical circumstance which is not ordinarily considered in this context and which may well have been a decisive factor in the situation. I refer to that strain of Reformation theology which has insisted that whereas man is responsible for his evil actions and thus sus ceptible to personal guilt, he can do nothing, unaided, to help or save himself and is left in uncertainty and despair, pending the action of a capricious divine dispensation and grace. It 1vas this doctrine that caused S~ren Kierkegaard, as a Lutheran, to write his book Sickness unto Death) in which he voiced his own Christian anxiety; and it was also this doctrine that caused Fried rich Nietzsche to shout angrily that, as far as he was concerned, God was dead; for he and many others of his time and since felt that they wanted to have nothing to do with a God who was so one-sided as to condemn men for their faul ts and failures and yet give them no credit for their efforts at restitution and reform.

Freudian psychoanalysis, I have argued elsewhere (Mowrer, 1961), arose and achieved its strange success because it holds out a perverse but very subtle promise of deliverance from this Protestant dilemma. The straightforward way to deal with the Calvinist misinterpretation of human nature and moral justice was to reject it. Freud did something equally audacious, but thor oughly destructive rather than healthily corrective. In essence, he agreed with that strain of Protestant theology which holds that sin ful (neurotic) man is practically unable to save (cure) himself; but he took the momentous further step of affirming that neither is man responsible for his neurosis, sickness, sin in the first place. Here was a doctrine that seemed to extend rather than refute Reformation theology; and we thus see why so many Protestants, laymen and clergymen alike, 'have been attracted to psychoanalysis, both as personal therapy and as impersonal theory. Not infre quently one today hears it argued in Protestant circles that Freud ian psychoanalysis, while admittedly antireligious, is nevertheless necessary to free a person so that he can become truly reli gious, fully Christian. Analysis is thus perceived as a form of Guilt in the Social Sciences 51 salvation within the Protestant framework that Protestantism itself has not been able to provide.

Having already elaborated this argument, I have no wish to pursue it here. But in this context I do want to point to yet another cultural development that, again, has not ordinarily been linked with the personal despair into which Calvinist theology can plunge us, but with which I believe there is, actually, a very intimate and important connection. I refer to the rise of the movement within academic and, indeed, popular psychology known as behaviorism. Ostensibly in revolt against nineteenth century structuralism and introspectionism, this movement ac tually gained much of its deeper energy from the fact that it too, like psychoanalysis, denied the reality of moral accountability and thus, in a negative sense, also promised to deliver us, where as introspectionism, with its emphasis on internal states and faculties that could presumably be best studied by means of self-examination, held that our essential nature is to be found on the inside, within us, and that our psychological inquiries should therefore have an introspective cast. But this approach also implied a kind of personal autonomy and capacity for self direction and independent decision and action that conformed with the Calvinist doctrine of accountability for evil without corresponding provision for self-liberation and redemption.

Behaviorism, at one fell swoop, obliterated all this. Nothing within the organism, it maintained, is of any consequence. All that matters is behavior: external, observable stimulation and equally objective, verifiable response. John B. Watson, as the formal founder of behaviorism, took Pavlov's conception of the reflex as the functional unit for all behavior and also followed Pavlov in his hypothesis as to how behavior is modified. Fig. 1 indicates schematically the familiar notion of the conditioning of a reflex response, i.e., the process whereby a response that initially is elicitable only by a so-called unconditioned stimulus Su becomes capable of being called forth by a formerly neutral stimulus, or conditioned stiw.ulus Se' Thus, all behavioral adapta tion was supposed to occur on the basis of this type of "associative shifting" or "stimulus substitution," without any reference what52 Su Fig. 1.

Psychiatryand Responsibility Sc If, Schematic representation of conditioning as conceived by Pavlov. ever to internal states, consciousness, or a self of any kind; and in such a frame of reference the notion of personal accountability or responsibility is, of course, a patent absurdity. E. L. Thorndike, with his emphasis upon the Law of Effect, put fOrward a logically different interpretation of behavior adaptation, but one that was equally reflexological. He spoke of neural bonds or connections, rather than of reflexes, but the intent and practical implications were much the same. If some stimulus or drive Sd produced some response Rb and if Ri were followed by reward, the connection between Sd and Ri was pre sumably strengthened (see Fig. 2); whereas if Sd produced Ri and was followed by punishment, the result was a "stamping out" of Sd---..- ...................-Ri :punishment Fig. 2. Thorndike's Law of Effect.

this bond and a diminished tendency for Sd to produce Ri on future occasions. Adaptation and intelligence were thus assumed to be built into this mechanism; but mechanism it waS, pure and simple. There was no personality, no self within the organisIll (between the Sd and the R1); and here, again, the notion of personal accountability was logically excluded. Although both the conditioned reflexology of Pavlov and Watson and the bond or connection theory of Thorndike had great appeal and considerable conceptual power, neither has proved scientifically adequate. And during the last twenty ..five or thirty years, a series of developments has transformed both theories almost beyond recognition. During the 1930's and early Guilt in the Social Sciences 53 1940's, a great deal of animal research was carried out on what is called avoidance learning, which is best explained by the assump tion that when a formerly neutral stimulus,· such as a buzzer or blinking light, is paired with an inherently noxious stimulus for example~ an electric shock-the shock arouses the response of fear) which is then conditioned to the formerly neutral stimulus or, as we now are likely to say, the danger signal. Under the impulsion of the secondary drive or motive of fear thus aroused, the subject will engage in a sequence of actions, one of which may succeed in getting rid of the danger signal. If this happens, we find that when the danger signal subsequeIl1ly recurs, the organ ism-understandably enough-will show a greater and greater tendency to make the response that is thus effective in eliminating it-and avoiding the noxious event of which the signal is premoni tory.

In the light of the observations just reported, it was not long before a new theory of punishment emerged. If fear could be conditioned to an external, environmentally produced stimulus of some kind as a result of the temporal conjunction of this stim ulus with a painful, fear-arousing event of some sort, it followed that if a bit of behavior occurs and is followed by such an event, which we would not call "punishment," the fear aroused by this event will be conditioned, not to an external danger signal, but to the proprioceptive and other types of stimulation associated with the occurrence of the act itself. Therefore, when the organ ism subsequently starts to repeat this action, these response-cor related stimuli will be aroused, which, in turn, will call forth fear; and the only way for the subject to get rid of the stimulation producing the fear is to stop or radically modify the response in question.

Thus, there emerged around 1940 what may be termed a feed back theory of punishment, in opposition to the stamping-out conception previously advocated by Thorndike. This idea that punishment achieves its effect, not by weakening or obliterating direct stimulus-response connections, but by conditioning fear to response-produced stimuli is represented diagramatically at the right in Fig. 3. On the left is shown Thorndike's original con ception of how habits are established. For a time many workers in 54 Psychiatry and Responsibility Sd-----R i : reward "Sfi-----Ri: s _~, B ---.:::(rt) Sp-Rp Fig. 3. I~ Sd-----R j Sd Ri : s--rt s~ Schematic representation of the second version of two factor learning theory. this field continued thus to accept the positive half of the Law of Effect, even though they had rejected the negative half in favor of the more complicated but conceptually more adequate scheme shown on the right. This new theory of the way punishment operates has proved to have many strengths and to be capable of resolving any number of paradoxes into which the original Thorndikian hypothesis inevitably led. But the scheme is mani festly asymmetrical, in that it continued to accept, essentially un modified, Thorndike's notion of how habits are formed while positing a quite different way of thinking about how they are eliminated.

In the last twenty years, a radical change has now likewise occurred in our understanding of the way in which habits are established and of what habits inherently are. This new concep tion of habit formation is the counterpart of the explanation just given of how habits are eliminated. Now it is believed that a habit is not a thickened S-R bond, but is instead the more complex phenomenon shown in Fig. 4. It has long been known that if an external, independent stimulus is associated, not with the inflic8" " S -----R · s...... S -----R·· s ...',d i· ---~ d 1· S _::::::.~ (r.t)8----(rh) Sr-·-' Rr Sp-R p s~ s~ R S r S R·· 8--1':£Sd----- i: 8~ h d 1° 8~ Fig. 4. Schematic representation of revised two-factor theory.

Guilt in the Social Sciences 55 tion of pain, but with a satisfying, rewarding state of affairs, such as hunger reduction mediated by the ingestion of food, such a stimulus takes on the capacity to arouse positive interest, or hope} and to attract rather than repel the subject; and approach rather than avoidance behavior results. Now suppose that the stimula don assoc~ated w~th drive reduction is response-dependent .. rather than independent. What would one then expect to happen? In order to get more of this type of stimulation, the best thing for the organism to do is to make or intensify the response with which such stimulation, or sensory feedback, is associated; and when this occurs, one has, obviously, that facilitation of response which we call habit. This is the gist of the argument implied in the schematization shown in Fig.· 4, which now provides an exact counterpart of the conception of the way punishment operates that is shown in the same diagram.

4. Response Selection and Responsibility This new, revised way of thinking about habit formation and inhibition is proving extremely successful in resolving many para doxes that previously dogged learning theory; it is also suggestive of numerous new and powerful practical applications. For a long time it has been known that the motor pathways between the central nervous system and a given set of muscles, e.g., those involved in the act of walking, may be completely normal, yet the individual will be rendered incapable of carrying out this type of behavior if the sensory feedback from the lower extrem ities is, for any reason, cut off. Such a condition exists in tabes dorsalis. And now we see why the cutting off of the sensory return from a muscle system destroys voluntary action or a so-called habit involving this system. The learning that is important here has to do, not with the connection between Sand R (in Figs. 2 and 3), but with the connection or connections between the stimuli produced by the occurrence of R and the anticipation of reward or satisfaction, i.e., hope} which has become conditioned to these stimuli (Fig. 4).