Innumerable introductory psychology students have witnessed the heart-wrenching film of what happens next: “Little Albert” jerks back suddenly at the loud sound and begins to cry. After seven repetitions, the boy began to cry as soon as the rabbit was presented to him, even without the sound. Little Albert had been conditioned to fear rabbits. Watson was engaged in establishing behaviorism as a major theory to explain human behavior, and it all had to do with observable and objectively measurable behavior, exactly what the science of the day required. Watson had introduced behaviorism to North American psychology.

Psychology is a modern attempt to apply scientific methods to questions that have interested philosophers for centuries:

Psychology finds its roots in the ancient philosophers we explored in chapter 2. Understanding the “psyche,” the Greek word for “soul” or “spirit,” was an inseparable part of religious, spiritual, and health teachings throughout most of human history, but the physical and mental were separated in Western thought after medieval times.

As the 19th century changed to the 20th century, problems of business, education, government, and the military were presenting challenges for the emerging dominance of the United States. As psychological critic Isaac Prilleltensky (1994) wrote, psychology “did not hesitate to volunteer its services in exchange for recognition as the ‘master’ science of human affairs” (p. 28).

Psychology was successful in negotiating this exchange. It fulfilled its part of the bargain by assuming the mantle of value-free seeker of objective truth. According to Prilleltensky (1994), “By portraying itself as a strictly ‘objective’ endeavor, psychology erroneously interprets many of its prescriptive biases as merely descriptive assertions about human behavior” (p. 25, emphases in original).

Psychology also adopted a pillar of Western capitalist ideology: that self-interest is the primary route for the promotion of well-being. In this view, “the self is conceived of as a supreme entity with magnificent powers” (Prilleltensky, 1994, p. 17). Once it is assumed that the self supersedes the system, change can come only from the self, and not the organization or society. This assumption relates not only to understanding behavior but also to how we go about changing it. The shift to recognizing social context as a crucial aspect of maintaining and creating change is a theme of great relevance to coaching. It appears in nearly every chapter of this book.

But the beginning of the 20th century was the heyday of mechanistic science. In taking on the mantle of science, psychology rejected the subjective approach of James, the holistic perspective of classical healers, the dialectic and historical traditions of Hegel and Marx, and the willingness to admit and examine underlying values. These “systemic” elements lay fallow, to be rediscovered in North America at the very time when coaching emerged. How psychology lost and then began to recover these elements is the story that underlies the topics in this chapter.

Psychology is divided into a number of subdisciplines, most of which have applications to various areas of human or social endeavor, and many of which have direct relevance to coaching. Because of the breadth of psychological inquiry, other subdisciplines will be examined in subsequent chapters. These four bedrock areas and a summary will be presented in order to discover their usefulness in a coaching context:

However, in his time, Watson was in a line of eminent researchers including the famous Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) in Russia. Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate to a bell after it had been rung time and again just before the introduction of meat powder into the dogs’ mouths. Pavlov’s careful documentation and Wundt’s measurement of human sensory abilities combined with Watson’s experiments, such as those with Little Albert, to make it seem possible to develop a science of mind that was as objective and rigorous as any of the natural sciences.

The impact of behaviorist thought on our daily lives cannot be underestimated. Watson wrote articles for popular magazines of the time, insisting, for example, that parents who show their children too much affection run the risk of ruining their child’s healthy development. He contributed to the development of the self-help movement, one that continues to be guided by whatever psychological or pseudoscientific finding is popular at the moment. Skinner did not hesitate to apply the results of his laboratory research to human life and society in general. The government of the United States used “scientific” principles to sell the public on entering World War I (further discussed in chapter 13 in the section on social psychology). Hitler and the Nazis did the same to garner support for their war efforts. Psychological research has been used to enhance police and military techniques of intimidation and torture and allegedly even political and economic control (Klein, 2007).

The enormous influence of behaviorism on psychotherapy is covered in part IV. While some applications of behaviorism are reprehensible, the field has also left a legacy that has contributed to society in many ways. Behaviorism was behind the growth of the animal research field, which led to a better understanding of issues such as our relationship to drug dependence, motivational systems, learning processes, and how we cope with stress, not to mention a number of neuroscience discoveries.

In terms of research, behaviorist literature is enormous. Some of the specific principles that have emerged include:

Behavioral psychology’s impact on coaching is also substantial. From this field, we learned that people can change and that we—and they—can arrange consequences to impact that change.

For example, Skinner introduced a three-stage behavior training method:

Dog owners and parents will recognize these steps. The fact that attention, treats, or praise work only when the professor, dog, or child is “hungry” for that particular reinforcement brings up cognitive questions of expectation, motivation, personality, and context. For reasons such as that, both coaching and neuroscience have moved beyond behaviorism while retaining its useful elements.

Coaches can help clients develop behavioral methods to manage and improve their results. For example, if we break a large project into smaller steps and then reward ourselves for completing each step, or if we allow ourselves dessert when we exercise three times a week, we are engaging the principles of operant conditioning. Behaviorism has a reputation of being manipulative, but when a client is involved in the development of an action plan, it becomes behavioral self-control rather than manipulation.

The behaviorist approach also contributed significantly to the development of “competencies” to capture observable performance standards. Professional regulatory or licensing bodies, such as for accounting, management, counseling, and coaching, have attempted to specify competencies (see, for example, the International Coach Federation website in Internet Links). Organizations identify specific behaviors that employees should be exhibiting in their various roles. Leadership competencies, for example, are now common in many organizations, with behavioral coaching made available to executives to help them improve competencies identified as less than optimal.

One of the proponents of “behavioral coaching” is Marshall Goldsmith (2003), an organizational coach who begins a coaching engagement by establishing an agreement with the client and his or her manager. The agreement defines the behaviors that are seen to be most likely to improve leadership effectiveness (establishing a goal or terminal behavior). A further agreement sets out who in the organization will determine whether the change has occurred after a year of step-by-step work with Goldsmith (comparing current behavior with desired future goal).

Overall, the behavioral approach is very much alive and well in organizational settings. When business leaders want to change the behaviors of large numbers of people, they often look first to behaviorism. Most managers swear by the principle of rewarding good behavior (e.g., with bonuses) in order to get more of it. This is the basis of the field of performance management. Managers also tend to believe in some form of punishment for behaviors that are not desired, though their options for delivery of punishment are increasingly limited by legal restrictions, union contracts, and an emphasis on promoting respectful relationships that has helped to fuel the popularity of coaching. How management is moving beyond this paradigm to a model that relies on “leadership” is covered in part V.

Even before technology provided the means for neuroscientists to observe events inside the black box of the brain, cognitive psychology had broken through the behaviorists’ objections to the scientific investigation of thought, emotion, meaning, and intentions. More on that in chapter 8. Meanwhile, it is important for coaches to realize that there are aspects of behaviorist discoveries that are difficult to ignore and that form part of the bedrock for both coaching and neuroscience.

Assessment for such things as “intelligence” did not strictly fit the behaviorist paradigm, as the traits being tested were often “unseen mental processes.” However, because psychometrists dealt with measurement and statistics, many saw this as qualifying what they were doing as “real” science. Thus, psychometrics lent its weight to the growing acceptance among policy makers and social institutions of psychology as a science:

Psychological tests are used extensively in nearly every other subdiscipline of psychology, and assessments have been developed to identify almost every conceivable trait or skill or attitude or potential. The computer has made it possible to conduct much more complex statistical analyses than were possible in the early attempts to determine school achievement, job fit, or military readiness. However “scientific” or “statistically valid” a test is, the question our clients ask is “What does it mean for me?”

In chapter 1, we referred to Clyde Kluckhohn’s quote:

All people are the same.

Some people are the same.

No people are the same. (Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948, p. 35)

These statements yield three different frameworks for thinking about and dealing with people. When comparative psychologists and linguists ask about how human empathy or language ability compares with that of apes or other animals, they are engaging the first framework and focusing on ways in which all people are the same.

Typically, psychometrists are interested in the second of Kluckhohn’s frameworks: the ways in which some people are the same. They devise measures that put people into categories based on the similarity of their responses.

The process of one-on-one coaching utilizes the third framework. A coaching engagement is, after all, a relationship between unique, one-of-a-kind individuals, and effective team or organizational coaching also honors this principle. Using “objective” assessments to ignore the uniqueness of clients (i.e., treating them as test scores or labels) is destructive of the respect and intimacy that is at the core of coaching. It may be useful to conceive of coaching about assessments as an opportunity to translate from the second to the third of Kluckhohn’s frameworks: to explore how assessment scores or categories are revealed or modified in this person’s unique life and context.

Many coaches consider it important to become trained in administering, or at least interpreting, the assessment instruments that are most often used in their context.

Whatever the specific assessment instrument that a coach uses or that a client brings to us for interpretation, certain principles apply:

The development and distribution of assessments is an industry in itself. Coaches who consider administering or interpreting a particular test are fortunate to have the resources of the Internet as an aid to due diligence. Many assessments and their scoring are also available on the Internet. Courses on how to deliver and interpret testing instruments abound. But we should never hesitate to ask test distributors for a plain-language explanation of how the assessment was developed and where and how others have used it.

In summary, coaches would do well to remember that:

Developmental psychology studies age-related changes in behavior across the life span. Whereas behaviorists claimed that “we are whatever our conditioning makes us,” developmental psychologists said that “we are our stage of life.”

It must also be noted that some theorists, such as Alfred Adler, downplayed the assumption that every person went through the same stages in the same order. This matched with his focus on the uniqueness and creativity of each individual. More recently, feminist and postmodern theorists have questioned whether stages of personality, cognition, or moral development apply universally or only to the men or specific ethnic or cultural group on which the theory was based. When a certain developmental pattern is accepted as “normal,” then people who differ (remember, “no people are the same”) may think of themselves or be treated pejoratively as “abnormal.”

Despite these criticisms, the major emphasis of developmental psychology has been on understanding the characteristic changes in appearance, behavior, interests, and goals from one developmental period to another. Early research concentrated on schoolchildren. Later, interest spread to preschool, then infancy. Shortly after World War I, research studies of the adolescent years began. Between then and World War II, there were some studies of the early adult years, but they concentrated mainly on specific problems. Adulthood, middle age, and old age were ignored; it was as if no changes took place between adolescence and death. In the 1970s, books and journals began to appear that indicated stages in adult life that were as important as the stages in a child’s life.

With the exceptions of parent coaching and coaching with educators, coaches are more likely to use theories of development focused on adults.

Erik Erikson (1902-1994) was one theorist who emphasized developmental change throughout the human life span, not just in childhood or adolescence. In Erikson’s theory (Coles, 1970), eight stages of development unfold as we go through life. Each stage consists of a crisis that must be faced. According to Erikson, this crisis is not a catastrophe but a turning point of increased vulnerability and enhanced potential. The more successfully an individual resolves the crises, the healthier his or her development will be.

The stages include:

It can be enormously helpful for a coach to reframe a client’s midcareer questions as an opportunity to generate new goals or to confirm forgotten values.

Frederic Hudson has also contributed to the theoretical understanding of adult development (Hudson, 1999; Murphy & Hudson, 1995). Called “Dr. Midlife” by the LA Times, Hudson has brought a welcome theoretical depth to pioneering work in coaching.

Otto Laske based his Interdevelopmental (IDM) Institute coach training on what he calls a “Constructive Developmental Framework” (Laske, 2007). Laske claims that coaches must themselves pay attention to their own developmental level. Laske claims that “Interventions are developmentally counter-productive wherever the coach resides at a lower stage than does the client” (p. 239). Laske’s emphasis on values and his appreciation of constructivism and dialectic method are indications of developmental psychology’s contribution to the shift to a systemic worldview.

Evolutionary psychology understands human behavior as a result of the human brain’s evolution via natural selection. According to Cosmides and Tooby (1997), “Psychology is that branch of biology that studies (1) brains, (2) how brains process information, and (3) how the brain’s information-processing programs generate behavior.” They define the mind as “a set of information-processing machines” (p. 1). Their reduction of the mind to activities of the brain and their identification of the brain with a machine, albeit a computer, locates evolutionary psychologists firmly in the mechanistic paradigm.

Matt Ridley attempts to step beyond mechanism by resolving the nature/nurture debate. In Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999), Ridley celebrates the mapping of the human genome, comparing it to our species discovering its own recipe, with genes as the active ingredient. But Steven Quartz and Terry Sejnowski (2002) point out that experience, such as seeing different sights, turns on genes that build our visual pathways. A parent’s touch stimulates the development of genes that protect offspring against stress. “Genes, then, are the tools experience uses to change the brain’s response to new demands in new environments” (Quartz & Sejnowsky, 2002, p. 46). Nature and nurture cannot be disconnected.

What human beings inherit is the potential to produce a brain. Our brains are much more adaptable than was once believed, so adaptable that we cannot be said to “inherit” them. Rather, we inherit the capacity to participate, as Leslie Brothers (2001) puts it, to reformulate the details of the recipe as we are putting the socially derived ingredients together. The mind, unlike what would be possible in a purely Newtonian universe, is able to take a conscious and influential part in the mixing and making. In their book Mean Genes (2001), authors Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan argue that to understand human behavior, we need to stop looking at Freud and start looking at Darwin. Modern neuroscience suggests that we need to look beyond both Freud and Darwin to a new paradigm.

This is not easy to do, since the claims of evolutionary psychologists often seem so commonsense. One of these claims is that our brains have evolved little since we left the African savannah. Cosmides and Tooby (1997) state a major principle of evolutionary psychology: “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind” (p. 1). The claim is that many of our current everyday mental habits were created in response to environments that we no longer live in. Steven Rose (2005) lists several problems with this claim:

How can we who are not experts in these fields evaluate the claims and counter claims that surround evolutionary psychology? First of all, we can recognize that the new scientific paradigm that forms a theme throughout this book transcends either-or, nature-nurture, genes-environment dichotomies. That is, brains and physical bodies, minds, and environment have co-evolved. As brains and bodies have adapted to changing environments, minds have changed in response, and environments have changed as a result of the evolving behavior. In a linear sentence, there is no way to show the arrows of influence and adaptation going in all directions. Even the most complex graphic illustration, with bidirectional arrows connecting every element, is still just a snapshot of a moment in time that cannot capture the dynamism of an interacting system over time. It may be that the next challenge faced by our evolving thinking processes is how to conceptualize such complexity.

For example, Burnham and Phelan (2000) ascribe modern tendencies to eat the wrong food to “powerful, instinctual hunger” that enabled Stone Age ancestors to survive by eating as much as they could any time that they could. We can leave aside possible contrary examples of plentitude illustrated by “potlatches” on the North American West Coast in more recent history. Certainly anyone who has tried to maintain a strict diet knows the feeling of “powerful, instinctual hunger.” If attributing this to our “Stone Age mind” helps us eat more healthful meals, then perhaps it is a harmless misapprehension.

Evolutionary psychology suggestions on diet can be applied to being served food on a plane that includes a brownie for dessert. Our Stone Age “instinctual hunger” for the brownie can be overcome by immediately opening a package of mustard and smearing it over the brownie so as not to be tempted.

As the section on change theory in this book has shown, rather than attributing our behavior to genetic inheritance from the Stone Age, modern neuroscience suggests other ways to explain difficulty with change, ways that are being directly tested and proved rather than surmised in hindsight.

The rediscovery of Darwinian principles has helped speed a resolution to the dualistic conflict that arises from the question “Are we determined by nature or by nurture?” In short, the answer is both and neither. As evidence of Alfred Adler’s forward thinking, he got it right nearly a century ago when he wrote, in awkward English,

The discovery of neuroplasticity means that neither nature, or heredity, nor environment, or nurture, determines who we are. Seeing the two as linked in a dialectic process is part of a shift to a systemic paradigm. Both nature and nurture set limits and contribute influences, but complex self-determining systems such as human beings and their societies are capable of demonstrating emergent properties. Evolutionary psychologists tend to see the mind as “caused” by an information-processing machinelike brain.

Attributing modern-day difficulties to having inherited a “Stone Age” brain and behavior may help clients avoid self-blame, but the scientific basis for this claim is questionable.

In 1956, a new cognitive approach replaced the association of stimulus and response that guided Skinner and his predecessors. Learning theory grew beyond its assumptions of passive receivers of knowledge. These new approaches assumed an active mind and provided a pillar to support the systemic paradigm, coaching, and neuroscience.