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Behaviorism and the Mind

A (Limited) Call for a Return to Introspection

DAVID A. LIEBERMAN University of Stirling, Scotland

ABSTRACT: Though perhaps few psychologists wouldnow describe themselves as strict behaviorists, a re-view of the literature suggests that methodological andradical behaviorism continue to exert a powerful influ-ence on current research, even in such nominally cog-nitive areas as imagery and hypothesis learning. Inmany ways this influence has been healthy, leading toa productive emphasis on the importance of environ-mental variables in shaping behavior, but some of itsconsequences have been rather less benign. After re-viewing the historical arguments against the use ofintrospection, this article concludes that most either areinvalid or no longer possess their original force, so thebenefits from a wider use of introspection now seemlikely to outweigh the possible costs.

Over the last two decades there has been a dra-matic increase in cognitively based analyses of be-havior, with terms such as memory, attention, andexpectation becoming part of the common parlanceof our profession. If psychologists have largelyaccepted the language of mentalism, however, therehas in many cases been a continuing reluctance toaccept the reality of the processes to which theseterms refer, and thus a reluctance to study theseprocesses through the use of introspection. Insome cases this caution is undoubtedly healthy.The mere fact that people say they experiencedsome thought or emotion, after all, by no meansproves that they did so. Suppose, for example, thatthe defendant in a murder trial was a young andattractive woman. Even if all the jurors involvedinsisted that they had not been influenced in anyway by her appearance, we might still questionwhether it had played some rale, and experimentalevidence from related situations suggests thatour skepticism might well be justified (see, e.g.,Nisbett& Wilson, 1977).

If introspective reports are sometimes wrong ormisleading, however, there is equally compellingevidence that in some instances they may provide

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information of truly impressive accuracy and re-liability. Assuming for the moment that this isso—and I shall return to the validity of this as-sumption later—why have some psychologists beenso reluctant to use introspection as a scientifictechnique? The answer, I believe, is that althoughexperimental psychologists have largely abandonedthe language of behaviorism, many have continuedto be influenced by its philosophical and methodo-logical assumptions. The mind, in this view, isat best of uncertain epistemological status, andintrospection is, in any case, an inherently flawedtool for its analysis (see, e.g., Kanfer, 1968).

This view is not quite so baseless or absurd assome critics have implied (e.g., Joynson, 1974),but neither does it represent a fully balanced as-sessment. The dangers of introspection (and ofthe mind), I argue below, are not nearly so greatas has sometimes been suggested. Before trying

i to develop this point in any detail, however, it maybe useful to review briefly the history of introspec-tion in order to provide some perspective on theissues involved.

The Emergence oj Introspection

The early experimental psychologists—Wundt,Titchener, Kulpe, for example—took as their goalan understanding of the human mind, and to thisend they relied on the technique of introspection,the observation by a subject of his or her thoughtsand feelings. As used in the early psychologicallaboratories, however, introspection bore little re-semblance to the more casual processes of self-awareness familiar from everyday life. Introspec-

Requests for reprints should be sent to David A. Lieber-man, Department of Psychology, University of Stirling,Stirling, Scotland FK9 4LA.

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • APRIL 1979 • 319Copyright 1979 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

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tion was regarded as a skill, requiring just as muchtraining and practice for its development as, say,learning to be a professional wine taster. InWundt's laboratory, for example, subjects were re-quired to practice at least 10,000 separate intro-spections before they were considered ready toparticipate in a genuine experiment, and onceproperly trained a subject might require as muchas 20 minutes to report fully on his or her ex-periences during a l.S-sec experiment (Boring,19S3). In some areas—notably psychophysics—this painstaking effort paid off handsomely, and westill owe much of our current knowledge to thisearly experimentation. Within only a few decades,however, the systematic use of introspection as ascientific method was to disappear almost com-pletely.

One reason for its demise was the impact ofFreud's revolutionary theories of the unconscious.The foundation of introspective analysis was thebelief that all of the mind's functioning was acces-sible to conscious observation, for unless everyaspect of human thought and emotion could beobserved, introspection could provide at best onlyan incomplete and fragmented picture of mentalfunctioning. If consciousness represented onlythe visible tip of the iceberg, with vast areas ofthe mind permanently curtained off behind pow-erful defensive barriers, then introspection wasclearly doomed. The same conclusion was sug-gested, moreover, by the introspectionists' ownfindings. In trying to analyze the thought pro-cesses involved in solving a problem, for example,subjects reported experiencing a sequence ofthoughts, each one moving closer to the goal ofsolution, but they could discover no consciousprocess that guided these thoughts and determinedwhich one occurred at which time, Ach (1905)coined the term determining tendency to describethe unconscious process, hidden from introspection,that guides thinking along its proper course.

Inaccessibility of mental processes was badenough, but the problem was compounded by theinability of introspectionists to agree even whenthe object of study was ostensibly accessible. Inthe controversy over imageless thought, for ex-ample, workers in Kulpe's laboratory reported thatabstract thoughts could occur without being ac-companied by any form of mental imagery. Titch-ener, on the other hand, insisted that when heintrospected he could see "vague, evanescent pat-terns of sensations and images" (Boring, 19S3).

As this inability to agree became increasingly com-mon, introspection began to appear increasinglysterile and unsuitable as a vehicle for scientificprogress.

Reacting to the growing sense of stagnation andfutility, Watson and other early behaviorists vig-orously criticized introspectionists for their pre-occupation with mental functioning and called in-stead for a new emphasis on overt behavior. Thegoal of psychology, they argued, should be thepractical one of understanding (and thus poten-tially changing) human behavior, and the propermethod for achieving this goal should be the ob-jective observation of behavior. It is perhaps notalways appreciated, however, that two logicallyseparable arguments are implicit in this position:One might well agree that the proper goal of psy-chology should ultimately be the prediction andcontrol of behavior yet still argue that one methodfor achieving this goal could be the systematicstudy of mental processes. Indeed, this forms thethesis of this article: Behaviorism succeeded bril-liantly insofar as it argued for a new emphasis onbehavior, both as goal and as method, but in re-acting to the limitations of introspection it wenttoo far in rejecting it totally. Introspection islimited in what it can achieve, but an acknowledg-ment of its limitations does not thereby requireits total proscription. This rigid rejection mayinitially have been the only way in which a newgeneration of psychologists could be shielded fromthe siren call of mentalism, but in their efforts toavoid the difficulties posed by introspection, theearly behaviorists may also have ignored the ad-vantages to be gained. As psychology has grownmore mature, however—thanks in no small partto the work of behaviorists such as Watson andSkinner—we may have now reached a point wherewe are sophisticated enough to reap the fruits ofintrospection without becoming entangled in itsthorns.

To develop this case, I first consider some ofthe arguments that have been raised against theuse of introspection as a scientific technique, andI argue that, ultimately, the only reasonable cri-terion is an empirical one: whether or not intro-spective data help us to understand behavior.I then turn to an examination of such data andargue that at least in some areas introspection hasalready contributed significantly to our under-standing of behavior and thus to our ability tomodify it. Finally, having argued for the ad-

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vantages of introspection as an empirical method,I consider some of the implications of its use forthe status of the mind itself within psychology.

Does the Mind Exist?

There are several possible strategies within thegeneral framework of behaviorism for dealing withthe problem of mental events. Perhaps the sim-plest, most commonly associated with John B.Watson, is simply to deny their existence. Wat-son himself, however, vacillated in his positionon this issue. On some occasions he did indeedappear to deny the existence of the mind (e.g.,Watson & McDougall, 1929), but on others heargued simply that it could not be usefully studiedby psychologists: "If you will grant the behavior-ist the right to use consciousness in the same wayas any other natural scientist—that is, withoutmaking consciousness a special object of observa-tion—you have granted all that my thesis re-quires" (Watson, 1913, p. 174). In any case,whatever Watson's personal beliefs may have been,virtually no psychologist in the years since haschosen to attack the mind by denying its exis-tence. Whatever the merits of such a position maybe, therefore, I shall henceforth ignore it andassume that there is at least a tacit consensus thatthe mind—however we may choose to define it—does exist. The real issue, therefore, is notwhether the mind exists but whether it is a properobject for scientific investigation.1

Is the Mind an Epiphenomenon?

A second, somewhat more subtle argument hasbeen to accept that the mind exists but to denythat it plays any causal role in behavior. Ac-cording to the epiphenomenal version of this posi-tion, events in the external world trigger a chainof neural activity, and this neural activity eventu-ally results in overt responding. As a result ofthis activity in the brain's neurons, the state wecall consciousness may arise, but this state is onlyan incidental by-product of the neurons' electricalactivity and does not itself play any causal rolein directing behavior.

One objection to this view might be that it isimpossible to test empirically, since as far as wenow know, neural and mental states seem to beperfectly correlated. There is no known technique

for producing images, say, without also producingneural activity, and there is thus no way of de-termining whether the images by themselves couldinfluence behavior. Even if the mind were onlyan epiphenomenon, moreover, this would not be anargument against studying it. Consider, for ex-ample, the status of fever. Fever is in somesense an epiphenomenon produced by disease:When the body is invaded by bacteria, blood isdiverted from the periphery of the body to thecenter so that the white corpuscles carried by theblood can be concentrated in the body's core, wherethey can then attack the invading bacteria. Oneresult of this diversion of blood from the peripheryis that less heat is carried to the skin, where it isnormally dissipated, and the body temperaturethus begins to rise. Fever, then, is not directlyproduced by the bacteria that invade the bodybut is a by-product of the body's reaction to thatinvasion. If fever were eliminated by giving apatient aspirin, for example, this would relievethe symptom but would have no effect on theunderlying pathogenic process.

In some sense, then, fever is an epiphenomenon:an incidental by-product of disease rather thanpart of its causal mechanism. Does this thenimply that fever is irrelevant to disease and shouldnot be studied? The answer, quite obviously, isno. Provided that body temperature is correlatedwith the causal processes, its measurement canprovide the physician with valuable informationfor both treatment and prevention. Whether fever,or the mind, is an epiphenomenon, therefore, isirrelevant to its scientific investigation. The onlyquestion is whether such measurement will helpthe scientist in reaching his or her goal—in thecase of the psychologist, the prediction and con-trol of behavior. Provided that mental andneural states are at least correlated, therefore—and epiphenomenalists would in no way deny this—the possibility that the mind is not causal is notan adequate argument against studying it.

1 Perhaps it is worth noting at this point that an ac-ceptance of the mind's existence does not necessarily implyany commitment to a dualistic framework. Thus, althoughsome philosophers have argued that mind and body existin totally different realms, with neither influencing theother, others have argued with equal force that the mindis the brain, or rather, the neural processes of the brain.The assumption that people really do have thoughts andfeelings, therefore, does not necessarily imply that thesephenomenological experiences exist in some nonphysicaluniverse, and no such implication is intended in this article.

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Methodological Behaviorism

Still a third argument against the use of intro-spection is that by its very definition it involvesthe observation of private events, ones not acces-sible to outside observers. If observations cannotbe independently confirmed, however, there is noway to determine whether they are true or false,accurate or inaccurate. According to this position,therefore, any psychology that relied on introspec-tion would inevitably be doomed to failure. With-out any means of confirming observations, dis-agreements will inevitably arise and progress willbecome impossible.

There is some validity to this objection: Whena person reports having a headache, for example,it is obviously very difficult for any external ob-server to confirm this directly. Reports from otherobservers, however, are by no means the only wayof evaluating the validity of a report. Onemeasure of a report's accuracy, for example, is itsreliability—can the observation be repeated withthe same results?—and this technique has beenused extensively, and successfully, in psychophysi-cal studies. If a subject reports that one lightappears to be twice as bright as another, for ex-ample, we may present these two lights again lateron in the test series, observe whether this responseis still the same, and so on. Furthermore, we maytest more than one subject, and if each subjectindependently reports the same observation—LI= 2La—then we may begin to have considerableconfidence in the reliability of the report. It wasprecisely this method, after all, that allowedWundt and Fechner to establish the laws that nowbear their names and that still form the corner-stone of modern psychophysics.

Even in cases where repetition is not possible,we may still evaluate the accuracy of a report interms of its correlation with other evidence. Sup-pose, for example, that an astronomer on vacationin a lonely forest later reports having seen agigantic meteor pass overhead. Ideally, other as-tronomers might like reports from other observersto confirm this sighting, but the absence of suchevidence would hardly mean that the original re-port would have to be ignored. In the case of themeteor, for example, investigators might traceradar records at nearby airports for any sign ofdisturbance, or look for impact craters in thenearby woods, and so on. No piece of evidenceby itself might be sufficient, but together they

might allow considerable confidence in the originalreport's accuracy.

Similarly in psychology, even if no external ob-server can directly observe a mental event, wemay still evaluate reports of such events in termsof their correlation with other data. In an experi-ment by Cohen (Note 1), for example, subjectswho were exposed to an absolutely uniform visualfield (Ganzjeld) for extended periods of time some-times reported they could no longer see—not thatthere was nothing to see but that they had liter-ally lost the sense of seeing at all. At first, itmight seem unlikely that vision itself would reallydisappear in this way, and it is in any case difficultto see how such a claim could be tested. It wasfound, however, that reports of "not seeing" werereliably correlated with systematic changes inbrain-wave activity and also with the disappear-ance of saccadic eye movements (see also Tepas,Note 2). And what is even more striking, whenvarious test stimuli, such as a circle or a star, wereintroduced during these periods, subjects were un-able to detect their presence.

It is possible, of course, that Cohen's subjectswere lying: Perhaps to maintain their credibilitythey were deliberately denying seeing the test stim-uli, even though they really could detect them.This explanation, however, could also be tested.Thus, as a test stimulus we might use a light thathad been previously paired with a severe electricshock, and monitor the subject's galvanic skin re-sponse (GSR) during test presentations. If testpresentations during periods of "not seeing" pro-duced no GSR, this would be a fairly strong in-dication that the stimulus had genuinely not beendetected.

The problem of confirming subjective reports,then, is by no means insoluble. A person whoreports feeling hungry is really no different fromone who reports seeing a meteor. Each of theseassertions is simply a verbal report of subjectiveexperience, and the fact that the stimulus for oneoriginated outside the body (in reflected light)rather than inside it (say, in stomach contractions)does not give the former report any greater valid-ity. Reports involving only a single observer maywell be more difficult to confirm—physicists mightwell prefer 100 observers to one, and so might we—but the fact that only one observer is presentdoes not in itself suggest that the evidence shouldnot be used. The real question is the empiricalone of whether the report is useful in predictingand controlling behavior. If it is, then what


earthly purpose is served by arbitrarily choosingto ignore it? The real issue is not the numberof observers present but whether the report isscientifically useful in predicting behavior, and Ishall return to this question shortly.

Skinner's Radical Behaviorism

A somewhat different position toward introspectionand the mind has been adopted by B. F. Skinner(1953, 1963, 1974). Skinner does not deny theexistence of mental events, nor does he believethat they are inaccessible to scientific analysis

' simply because they are private: "Radical be-haviorism . . . does not insist upon truth by agree-ment and can therefore consider events takingplace in the private world within the skin. It doesnot call these events unobservable, and it does notdismiss them as subjective" (Skinner, 1974, p. 16).Nevertheless, Skinner's position differs sharplyfrom earlier forms of mentalism in at least twocrucial respects:

1. He regards mental events simply as a formof behavior. In analyzing vision, for example,rather than assuming that some inner person—the self—is observing a projected image (thusraising the question of what inside the little personallows him or her to see, and so on, in an infiniteregress), Skinner simply interprets seeing as aclass of responses, each elicited by a particular setof stimuli. Seeing an apple, for example, is onekind of response, seeing an orange, another, andeach is assumed to be explicable in terms of thesame behavioral principles that govern overt formsof responding.

2. While accepting mental events as proper ob-jects of study, he does not believe they should beused in the explanation of other behavior.

Over the years, Skinner has stated his objectionsto the use of introspective data in explaining be-havior in many forms, but three themes seem tostand out most persistently, and I shall considereach of them in turn.

Skinner's first objection to the use of introspec-tive reports in scientific explanation is that theyare inherently inaccurate. The nervous system, hepoints out, evolved to deal with biological threatsto survival, and to this end three distinct sensorysystems evolved: interoceptive, proprioceptive, andexteroceptive. The bulk of behavior, however, iscontrolled by the neural circuitry of the brain, andin this key area there are no receptors. At best,therefore, introspection is limited to a tiny fraction

of the causal sequence. Furthermore, Skinner ar-gues, our ability to report accurately even on thislimited realm must depend on how well we havelearned to match words to internal states, and thismay be far more difficult than we ordinarily sup-pose. The heart of the problem is that for theverbal community to train a child in the appro-priate use of words, it must itself know when aparticular use is appropriate. In training a childto say apple, for example, the test is relativelyeasy: Use of the word is reinforced (e.g., praised)when an apple is present but not when the objectis a pear. In the case of internal states, however,it is much more difficult for others to know whenthey are present. To cite an example posed bySkinner (1974), how can we teach a child whetherhe or she is experiencing embarrassment or diffi-dence? To some extent this problem can be cir-cumvented by using the situation or the child'sbehavior as a cue—if someone has just steppedon a sharp nail or is clearly wincing, we may feelrelatively confident that they are experiencing pain—but Skinner argues that such discriminations arenever likely to be fully accurate.

Skinner's arguments on this point have con-siderable force: Much of our internal world is in-accessible, and the correlation between verbal re-ports and those states that are accessible is un-likely to be perfect. As long as some correlationexists, however, such reports may still be useful,and in some cases these correlations may be veryhigh indeed. We do, after all, converse with eachother concerning a wide range of thoughts andfeelings, and such communications often seemhighly accurate. We may not always be able totell the doctor the exact nature of our pain, forexample, but we may still say whether we feel itin our stomach or- in our big toe. Similarly, wecan sometimes say with considerable accuracyhow we feel about political candidates andwhether or not we intend to vote for them. It isimportant to recognize that such reports maysometimes be inaccurate or misleading, but it isequally important to recognize that on other occa-sions they may be accurate and reliable.

Skinner's second objection to the use of mentalevents in explaining behavior is that they are notnecessary in a functional analysis. Assume forthe moment that the mind is the second link in athree-link causal chain: Changes in the environ-ment produce changes in our psychic state, andthese changes in turn produce changes in our be-havior. If our goal is to be able to practically


modify behavior, Skinner argues, then we mustknow how behavior is related to the first link inthis chain: the genetic and environmental condi-tions that ultimately control behavior. If we al-ready know the relationships between the first andthe third links, however, then why bother withthe second:

Unless there is a weak spot in our causal chain so thatthis second link is not lawfully determined by the first,or the third by the second, then the first and third linksmust be lawfully related. If we must always go backbeyond the second link for prediction and control, wemay avoid many exhausting and tiresome digressions byexamining the third link as a function of the first. Validinformation about the second link may throw light uponthis relationship but can in no way alter it. (Skinner1953, p. 35)

A similar view has been expressed even moreforcefully by Howard Rachlin, a one-time studentof Skinner and the author of an influential intro-ductory text, Introduction to Modern Behaviorism.In a theoretical article concerning mechanisms ofself-control, Rachlin (1974) argued that analysisin terms of internal processes is unnecessary, sinceall behavior must ultimately be explained in termsof environmental variables:

To say that the origin of self-control is not in the self isnot to say that the organism has no properties or hasbeen subtracted out of consideration. The biological prop-erties of the organism determine which environmentalevents control which behavioral events. What has beensubtracted out are those psychological (as opposed tobiological) properties of the organism such as memory,expectancy, response strength, etc. which serve only tobridge temporal gaps. . . . If a man is stabbed and hebleeds, no one will be tempted to talk about memory ofthe stabbing and response strength of the bleeding inter-vening between stabbing and bleeding, although the prop-erties of his body determined that he would bleed whenstabbed. But for temporally extended events such as hisdissatisfaction with a bad job, traditional psychologicalanalysis will invoke memory, expectancy and responsestrength in order to bring the cause and effect into im-mediate temporal proximity. It is certainly somethingabout the man that reacts to the long hours, the low pay,the hostile boss, etc., by complaining, going on strike orquitting. But it is nevertheless these temporally extendedevents that cause his behavior and not his immediatememories, expectations, and response strengths, (p. 99)

As a desirable goal, we may fully sympathizewith Skinner's and Rachlin's arguments: If be-havior could be fully predicted from observableconditions of environment, then why bother withthe inherently messy conditions of the mind? Butis this assumption correct? Can we really predictbehavior solely from our knowledge of an individ-ual's past experience and current conditions? Evenat a theoretical level, this is simply not obvious.To predict accurately how an individual will be-

have in a given situation, we would presumablyhave to know not only all the relevant laws ofbehavior but also all the relevant aspects of theindividual's past experience. Is this really likely?Suppose, for example, that we wanted to knowwhether Rachlin's factory worker was going toquit his job at 9:00 tomorrow. Is it really likelythat we will ever know enough about worker psy-chology and all the factors in a particular in-dividual's past history to predict not only whetherhe or she will quit but when? Might it not bemuch simpler to just ask the worker? Or, to takeanother example, consider voting behavior: Byasking voters about their intentions, opinion pollscan now generally predict election results with anerror of only \% or 2%. Would any social sci-entist be likely to do nearly as well if he or shehad to rely solely on knowledge of the environ-mental .conditions that presumably determine voterbehavior? At least for the foreseeable future, it isdifficult to see how any effective analysis of be-havior will be able to bypass information aboutthe second link in Skinner's causal chain.

A related objection raised by Skinner to mentalexplanations is that they too easily lead us to apreoccupation with the mind and thus to a neglectof the environmental factors that ultimately con-trol behavior. If we attribute someone's drinkingto his or her thirst, for example, Skinner arguesthat all too often we are tempted to stop at thispoint and thus to ignore the environmental condi-tions that produce the thirst. To the extent thatthis occurs, of course, we will not discover thecrucial variables in the environment and hence willbe handicapped in any later effort at practicalcontrol.

Such tendencies certainly exist, among currentpsychologists as well as past ones. Thus, althoughFreudian psychology is often cited as the mostglaring example of this tendency, the inclinationcan also be seen in the enormous effort devoted byattitude theorists to developing elaborate ques-tionnaires to measure attitudes while they largelyignore whether the attitudes so measured have anypredictive relation to behavior. In a famous studyby La Pierre (1934), for example, he accompanieda Chinese couple to 250 hotels and restaurantsand found that they were refused admission onlyonce. When he later sent a questionnaire to thesesame establishments, however, he found that morethan 90% of them said they would not serveChinese. McGuire (1969), summarizing this liter-ature, concluded that "the person's verbal report


of his attitude has a rather low correlation withhis actual behavior toward the object of the atti-tude" (p. 156), and a similar conclusion wasreached by Wicker (1969). Whatever the truthto this conclusion (for one dissenting view, seeDillehay, 1973), it is clear that considerably moreeffort has been devoted to measuring attitudesthan to determining their usefulness in predictingbehavior.

Again, therefore, we may sympathize with Skin-ner's concerns. The fact that a certain line ofinvestigation poses dangers, however, is not nor-mally considered a sufficient reason for ignoring it.Atomic reactions are also potentially dangerous—exposure to radiation, after all, poses risks morelethal than mere speculation about the mind—but this has hardly led physicists to the conclusionthat such reactions should be ignored. Rather,physicists have had to weigh the potential dangersof atomic research against the benefits that mightbe gained, and in this particular case, they havefound the balance to overwhelmingly favor con-tinued research. Similarly in the case of intro-spection, in order to evaluate its usefulness weneed to take into account not only its potentialcosts but also its potential benefits. It is to thisquestion—the possible benefits from introspection—that I now turn.

The Empirical Value of IntrospectionDo introspective reports of a person's thoughts orfeelings have any value in predicting his or herbehavior? At least insofar as everyday life isconcerned, the answer is self-evident. Whether,we are trying to determine how people will vote,where they will go on vacations, or the sources oftheir phobic reactions, it is clear that one of themajor sources of information for predicting (andthus potentially modifying) behavior are people'sintrospective reports. We can, of course, chooseto label such reports as verbal behavior ratherthan as introspections, but there should be nodoubt that we are dealing with exactly the sameclass of behaviors so carefully studied by classicalintrospections and, presumably, condemned byearly behaviorists.

If we turn to the laboratory for confirmationof introspection's value, however, information sud-denly becomes harder to come by. Due in largemeasure to the methodological heritage of be-haviorism, introspective data were largely ignoredfor many years. With the recent explosion of in-terest in cognitive processes such as memory and

attention, however, there has been renewed interestin the extent to which subjects' reports providereliable information about the nature of theseprocesses. One relevant set of evidence involvesstudies in which introspective reports have beenused at a relatively informal, anecdotal level inorder to identify potentially interesting phenom-ena. One striking example of this heuristic func-tion has been the burgeoning research over the lastdecade on the value of mnemonic devices in facili-tating memory.

In the mnemonic technique known as the methodof loci, for example, subjects are given a list ofobjects to memorize and are told to do so byimagining taking a walk along a familiar pathand observing each of the objects at some pointalong the path. Accounts of the effectiveness ofthis technique go back at least as far as the an-cient Greeks (see Yates, 1966), but for manyyears they were completely ignored by psycholo-gists, presumably because of their mentalistic taint.Once psychologists began to take these reportsseriously, however, controlled experimentationquickly confirmed the validity of these claims. Inan experiment by Groriinger (1971), for example,one group of subjects were instructed to memorizea list of 25 words using the method of loci, whilea second group were simply given the words andtold to remember them using any technique theywished. When tested 1 week later, the experi-mental group still recalled 92% of the words, andthe control group could recall only 64%. Whentested after 5 weeks, recall for the control grouphad dropped to 36%, while that for the experi-mental group was still at 80%. Introspective re-ports of the effectiveness of this technique, in otherwords, were strongly confirmed, and similar sup-port has come from other studies (e.g., Bower,1970).

Insofar as introspective reports have been usedas an informal source of ideas, then, they havesuccessfully pointed to a number of importantphenomena (see also Bainbridge, 1974; Montague,1972; Newell & Simon, 1972). A second, some-what more direct approach to assessing the pre-dictive value of such reports has been to observethe extent to which a subject's introspections ac-curately predict his or her own subsequent be-havior. One example of this approach comes fromrecent research into the mechanisms of conceptformation.

Inspired in part by Harlow's research on learn-ing set in monkeys, a number of theorists have


proposed that subjects in discrimination tasks donot learn about all stimuli present on a reinforcedtrial but rather form hypotheses about the correctstimulus and then learn only about the particularhypothesis they are testing. To predict the courseof learning, therefore, it is necessary to know whathypothesis a subject is likely to be testing on anygiven trial, and to this end Levine (1966) pio-neered a probe technique in which a series of blanktrials, without any feedback about success or fail-ure, were interspersed among learning trials. Ifa subject retains the same hypothesis until he orshe receives either positive or negative feedback,the subject's responding may be assumed to beguided by the same hypothesis throughout theseries of probe trials, and thus the pattern of re-sponses shown over a series of trials with differentstimulus arrangements can be used to estimate thenature of this hypothesis.

Levine found that this use of blank trialsallowed him to predict many aspects of conceptlearning with considerable accuracy. On the otherhand, it was a lengthy and exhausting techniquefor both experimenter and subject, requiring fivetimes as many trials as in normal experiments,thus making it unsuitable for some subject popu-lations, such as young children. Karpf and Le-vine (1971) therefore suggested a new techniquefor determining a subject's hypothesis. Theytermed this the introtact, and it consisted simplyof asking the subject before every trial what hisor her hypothesis was! They found that thisquestioning procedure did not disturb the learningprocess: Questioned subjects learned at the samerate as did unquestioned controls and generallyshowed similar patterns of behavior. Furthermore,the data obtained for the questioned subjects werevirtually identical to those obtained from the probetechnique, so that they were able to predict per-formance with equal success and in only a frac-tion of the time (see also Phillips & Levine, 1975).This result has since been replicated in other lab-oratories and found to account for an impressiveproportion of the variance in trial-to-trial results(Spiker& Cantor, 1977).

A second illustration of the potential value ofintrospection comes from an experiment by Krolland Kellicutt (1972) on the role of rehearsal inverbal memory. According to a highly influentialmodel put forward by Atkinson and Shiffrin(1968), the critical variable in determining whetherverbal material will be recalled is how often it isrehearsed when it is first presented. If so, one of

the most important tasks facing memory research-ers was clearly to develop techniques for moni-toring the frequency of rehearsal, and a numberof possibilities were soon suggested.

Suppose, for example, that a set of letters waspresented to a subject, and he or she was thenasked to recall them 18 sec later. One methodsuggested for controlling the amount of rehearsalduring the intervening period was to vary the dif-ficulty of the task performed by the subject duringthe interval: The more difficult the task, the lessprocessing capacity would presumably be avail-able for rehearsal (Peterson, 1969). Alterna-tively, the frequency of rehearsal during this in-terval could be inferred from the quality of per-formance on the intervening task: The worse theperformance, the more effort the subject had pre-sumably been devoting to rehearsal (e.g., Johnson,Greenberg, Fisher, & Martin, 1970). Kroll andKellicutt, however, tried a more direct approach:They simply asked their subjects how much theywere rehearsing during the interval. Specifically,using a technique first developed by Montague,Hillix, Kiess, and Harris (1970), they providedtheir subjects with a button and asked them topush it whenever they rehearsed the targetmaterial.

One reasonable expectation was that this tech-nique would prove a total failure, since rehearsalwas a fundamentally unconscious process and thusnot amenable to introspective analysis. In fact,however, the number of reported rehearsals proveda highly accurate predictor of subsequent recall,with correlations ranging from .93 to .97 acrossthe four conditions of the experiment (see Figure1). Indeed, the predictions of recall based onthis direct measure proved to be considerably moreaccurate than those based on indirect ones. Inone of the experimental conditions, for example,subjects were asked to count backward by sevensduring the retention interval, and the number ofcompleted counts was recorded, as well as thenumber of button pushes. According to the anal-ysis sketched above, the more subjects rehearsedthe target material, the more difficulty they shouldhave had in counting backward accurately, so thatthe number of completed counts would be anaccurate guide to rehearsals. In fact, however,the correlation between completed counts and TC-call proved to be only .30, whereas that betweenbutton pushes and recall in this same conditionwas .94! Thus, although estimates of rehearsalbased on introspection are inherently more sub-


jective than those based on visible behavior, atleast in some situations they may also be consider-ably more accurate (see also Kroll, Kellicutt, &Parks, 1975).

For a final illustration of the potential value ofintrospection in helping us to predict behavior, wemay again turn to research on the role of imageryin memory. In a series of experiments, AllanPaivio (1971) and his colleagues found that con-crete nouns were much easier to remember thanabstract ones. The reasons for this difference,

SO

60

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UJ

20

. VISUAL

0 AUDITORY

4 X3

. X7

V'=1J.»R+7».I

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' = 7.1R + IM

0 1 2 3 4 5 4REPORTED REHEARSALS

Figure 1. Percentage of trials on which trigramswere recalled perfectly as a function of the number ofrehearsals reported on those trials. The different func-tions represent the four experimental conditions, whichdiffered in whether subjects were required to countbackward during the retention interval or to shadow alist of letters read aloud. To vary the difficulty ofthese tasks, subjects in the counting task were requiredto count backward by either threes (X3) or sevens(X7) , and subjects in the shadowing task were pre-sented with trigrams in either the same modality asthe material to be shadowed (A = auditory) or adifferent one (V = visual). (From "Short-Term Re-call as a Function of Covert Rehearsal and of Inter-vening Task" by N. E. A. Kroll and M. H. Kellicutt,Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1972,11, 196-204. Copyright 1972 by Academic Press, Inc.Reprinted by permission.)

I

Reported imagery PA learning

2Trial

2Trial

Figure 2. Mean number of word pairs for whichimages were reported, and mean number of wordsrecalled, as a function of trials. The four experi-mental conditions differed in whether the first andsecond members of each word pair were concrete (C)or abstract (A) nouns. (Adapted from Paivio andYuille, 1969.)

Paivio argued, were that concrete nouns were muchmore likely to elicit visual images and that theformation of such images significantly facilitatedrecall. Paivio designed a number of experimentsto test this prediction, and on the whole they werehighly successful—with one glaring exception. Ina study by Paivio and Yuille (1967), subjectswere given a list of paired associates to learn (thatis, a list of word pairs where the subject's task wasto recall the second when given the first), withone group instructed to remember the pairs byforming an image of the objects involved (e.g., aman standing on a piggy bank), or by inventinga sentence or phrase involving the two words (e.g.,"The man went to the bank"). According toPaivio's analysis, the group instructed to useimagery should have been significantly more likelyto recall the pairs (at least insofar as they in-volved concrete nouns), but in fact no differencewas observed between the groups.

One possibility was that Paivio's imagery hy-pothesis was wrong: Whatever the reason for con-crete nouns being easier to learn than abstractones, it had nothing to do with the formation ofimages. Another possibility, however, was thatthe subjects simply had not followed their instruc-tions! Thus, even though the subjects in the ver-bal-mediation group had been told to form sen-tences, perhaps when presented with the materialthey had realized the difficulty of this techniqueand so quickly switched over to imagery. In orderto evaluate this possibility, Paivio and Yuille(1969) repeated their earlier experiment but asked


their subjects at the end of each trial what strategythey had actually used. Subjects in the imagerygroup reported a strong tendency to use imagery,but so did the subjects in the verbal-mediationgroup, and in both cases the tendency to useimagery increased significantly over trials. Fur-thermore, this increase in the use of imageryproved to be highly correlated with the changes inrecall over these trials (Figure 2). The best pre-dictor of performance, in other words, was not thestrategy subjects were instructed to use, but theone they reported having actually used (see alsoPaivio, Smythe, & Yuille, 1968).

In a number of different settings, therefore, sub-jects' reports of their hypotheses and strategieshave proved to be highly correlated with theirsubsequent behavior and, indeed, have often provedto be by far the most accurate predictors avail-able. It would be foolish, of course, to claim thatintrospective reports would always be this reli-able—The history of classical introspection hasclearly shown that they are not. That same his-tory, however, makes it equally clear that certainkinds of reports are useful. Indeed, it is interest-ing to note that Skinner himself, though still pre-ferring a functional analysis, has recently becomeincreasingly explicit in his acknowledgment of thepotential usefulness of introspection:

What a person feels is a product of the contingencies ofwhich his future behavior will also be a function, andthere is therefore a useful connection between feelings andbehavior. It would be foolish to rule out the knowledgea person has of his current condition or the uses to whichit may be put. (Skinner, 1974, p. 209)

Introspection and the MindUntil this point my argument has been that in-trospective reports can be of substantial empiricalvalue and deserve a more prominent place in themethodology of psychological research than theyhave hitherto enjoyed. Some behaviorists, how-ever, might reply that they were by no meansopposed to this: So long as introspective reportsare regarded as objectively observable behavior(verbal reports), they have absolutely no objectionto using one bit of behavior in order to predictanother. Their only objection, they might go on,would be to the assumption that this verbal reportin some way reflected the operation of an innermental state.

In dealing with this hypothetical reply, wemight first question whether it is a completelyaccurate description of the behaviorists' own be-havior. Thus although our behaviorists say they

are perfectly willing to use introspective reports, itseems fair to note that by and large, behavioristshave not exactly been in the forefront of researchin this area. Indeed, I argue below that this re-luctance to use introspection is an inevitable out-growth of behaviorism's position on the mind: Solong as the mind itself is viewed with suspicion,then any behavior that purports to report on theoperations of this mind will also be viewed withsuspicion.

Why, then, have behaviorists viewed the mindwith such suspicion? One reason has undoubtedlybeen the strong influence of operationalism, or logi-cal positivism. According to this view, for anystatement to be admissible within science, it musthave empirical import; that is, it must lead totestable predictions. After all, if there is no pos-sible way of determining whether a particular as-sumption is true or false, what possible purposecan be served by including it within a theory?At best it would serve no function; at worst itwould become a focus for unresolvable controversy.

In atomic physics, for example, the electron maybe regarded as a hypothetical construct, an imagi-nary particle that may usefully be assigned certainproperties within the context of a particular theorybut whose actual existence can never be evaluated.Our theories about electrons can be tested—arethe predictions they make accurate?—but the ques-tion of whether the electron itself really existscan never be directly answered. Applying thisanalysis to psychology, it has been argued thatthe mind occupies a position analogous to thatof the electron: an invisible entity whose statescan never be directly observed by outside ob-servers.

The heart of this argument is that statementswhose validity cannot be tested are scientificallymeaningless and should thus be avoided. Asreasonable as this argument may be, however, itis not a completely accurate description of howscientists in other disciplines actually behave.Thus, although it is true that some untestable as-sumptions have been rejected as scientificallymeaningless—there is no way of producing de-cisive evidence either for or against the existenceof God, for example, and this question has there-fore been considered beyond the realm of science—it is by no means the case that all unprovableassumptions have been treated in this way. Someuniversally shared assumptions about the natureof reality have always been accepted as basicgivens, and they have remained unchanged re-


gardless of how often the theories in which theyare embedded have been modified. Newton's the-ory of gravity, for example, might have proven adisastrous failure, but this would not have changedin any way the reality status accorded to theobjects of this theory: the sun and the planets, themoon and the waves. These phenomena havealways been accepted as fundamental givens, thestarting points from which all scientific theoriesmust begin. It is true that the moon, say, couldbe regarded as only a hypothetical construct, animaginary entity that we find convenient to postu-late within our theories, but physicists have notseen any value to such a position and have foundit far more convenient simply to accept the evi-dence of their senses, insofar as it was not contra-dicted by other facts. Thus, although one couldin principle adopt a position of total skepticism—nothing really exists, it is all in the mind (!)—in fact physicists have not done so, and certainobvious phenomena have simply been accepted asreal.

If psychological practice is to be founded on ananalogy with physics, then, it might be more ap-propriate to regard the-mind as being parallel toan object that can be seen, such as the moon,rather than a hypothetical one such as an electron.In a real sense, after all, we do see the mind, or atany rate its contents: We may perceive a pain inour big toe, for example, just as vividly, if notmore so, as we see the moon on a foggy night.Both perceptions may be misleading in relation tosome external or logical reality—physical measure-ments tell us that the moon when glimpsed at thehorizon may not be nearly as big as it appears;the pain in our big toe may still be felt even afterthe offending digit has been amputated—but asperceptions, both are equally real.

Even if this appeal to naive realism were to berejected—that is, even if it were insisted that themind cannot be perceived directly and so shouldmore appropriately be regarded as analogous tothe electron than to the moon—this would still notestablish that the mind was imaginary, for thesimple reason that many physicists and philoso-phers believe that the electron is also real! Con-sider, for example, the following set of objects:the moon, a speck of dust, an amoeba, a DNAmolecule, and an electron. How are we to decidewhich, if any, are real and which are hypothetical?We might naively argue that only those thingsare real that can be seen with the naked eye, butare we really prepared to reject the reality of dust

because its detection may require the aid of amagnifying glass, or of an amoeba because it canonly be seen through a microscope? On the otherhand, if we once admit that vision can be magni-fied with the aid of artificial instruments, then onwhat grounds will we allow light microscopes (andhence amoebas) but deny electron microscopes(and hence DNA molecules)? And if we admitelectron microscopes and DNA, then on whatgrounds will we reject cloud chambers and elec-trons?

The dividing line between real and hypothetical,then, is partly a matter of convention, for scien-tists to draw wherever they find it most convenient.A hundred years ago, DNA was unheard of; now,to many scientists, it is a proven fact of existence(see also Hempel, 1966; Nagel, 1961). The ques-tion of whether the mind is real cannot thereforebe settled by appeal to any absolute criteria butdepends on the usefulness of such an assumptionto the scientists concerned. For the physicist, theassumption that the moon is real accords with theperception of all observers and is not contradictedby any known data. If the assumption of its exis-tence is therefore universally shared and does noharm, then why insist on its being treated ashypothetical?

In the case of the mind, on the other hand, be-haviorists have argued that scientific acceptanceof its existence would be harmful. Above all, theyhave suggested, any formal acceptance of the mindwould lead to an inevitable increase in the tend-ency to attribute behavior to mental states, witha concomitant decrease in the analysis of the en-vironmental variables of which these states area function. This argument, I believe, deserves tobe taken seriously: It is all too easy to attributebehavior to some hypothetical inner state and thento conclude complacently that the behavior hastherefore been explained. On the other hand, thechances of this happening may now be consider-ably smaller than when the doctrine of behaviorismwas first being promulgated. At that time thepractical results of a behavioral analysis were atbest only a distant shadow on the horizon, so ifpsychologists were to be shielded from distractionas they soldiered on, the only effective prophylaxismay well have been a rejection of the mind in itsentirety. Given the substantial progress that hasbeen made in the intervening decades, however,and the extent to which the value of a behavioralanalysis is now widely accepted (see, e.g., Leiten-berg, 1976b), it may no longer be necessary to


reject other avenues of investigation quite sorigidly. The very success of behaviorism, in otherwords, may mean that we no longer need to takeall its arguments quite so seriously!

In any case, whatever the extent to which thisdanger remains real, it needs to be weighed againstthe advantages that full acceptance of the mind'sreality might bring. Most obviously, franker ac-ceptance of the mind might help to remove a long-standing source of tension from within our disci-pline: the sometimes flagrant contradiction be-tween our actual behavior and our post hoc at-tempts at its scientific rationalization. Consider,for example, the dilemma facing any behaviorallyoriented therapist. In order to select the appro-priate treatment for a particular patient, the thera-pist obviously needs to interview him or her insome detail concerning the nature of his or herproblem. If, however, introspective reports areonly a form of verbal behavior, on what basis doesthe therapist decide that one bit of verbal behaviorwill be more revealing than another; that is, howdoes the therapist decide what questions to ask?And in evaluating the patient's answers to poten-tially painful questions, how does the therapistdecide whether the patient was really telling- thetruth?

If an introspective report is only behavior, thenit has been lawfully determined by past experience,and it makes no sense to ask whether it is honest,any more than it would make sense to ask whethera blink of the eye is honest. In trying to deter-mine whether a patient is accurately reporting hisor her feelings, the therapist is clearly not treatingthe patient's introspective report as an arbitrarybit of behavior but is assuming that the patientdoes have certain internal thoughts and feelingsand is questioning the correlation between these in-ternal states and the external report. It is cer-tainly possible for the therapist later to explainhis or her behavior in different terms—the pa-tient's fears were only a hypothetical construct or,by definition, consisted only of overt behaviorssuch as sweating or trembling—but it seems highlydoubtful that the therapist's actual choice of ques-tions was in any way guided by these assumptions.A more plausible construction is that the therapistbrought to the interview a whole set of intuitiveassumptions about the nature of emotions and theirrelation to behavior, and that it was these intui-tions, based in large part on the therapist's ownintrospective experience, that actually guided hisor her questioning (see also Locke, 1971).

To take another example, consider an articlepublished in Psychological Review by Stoyva andKamiya (1968) concerning the psychological statusof dreams. The authors presented a lucid reviewof the literature on dreaming and of the extent towhich subjective reports of dreaming during sleephave been found to be correlated with a variety ofelectrophysiological measures, such as changes inbrain waves, and rapid eye movements (REMs).Indeed, changes in these physiological states havebeen found to be correlated not only with theoccurrence of dreams but even with their precisecontent. One subject, for example, reported hav-ing dreamed of watching someone walking up astaircase, and examination of his eye-movementrecord showed that his eyes had in fact moved inthe highly stereotyped (and unusual) up-and-downpattern appropriate to walking up stairs (Dement& Kleitman, 1957). Rather than interpreting thisevidence as support for the reality of dreams, how-ever, Stoyva and Kamiya suggested that dreamsshould be regarded as hypothetical constructs,using electrophysiological measures as tests of thetheory's validity. As I suggested above, this in-terpretation is certainly possible, but is it reallyan accurate reflection of what the psychologists in-volved were actually doing? Suppose, for example,that REMs or brain waves had proven not to becorrelated with subjective reports of dreaming.Would the experimenters in this area have aban-doned their theories and concluded that dreamsdid not exist? Or would they simply have pushedon, accepting that dreams exist just as physicistsaccept that planets do, and looking for some otherphysiological correlate of this basic phenomeno-logical fact?

Instead of trying to force our behavior into theProcrustean bed prescribed by theory, I believe itwould be far less taxing, as well as more honest,to accept overtly what we so clearly believe incovertly. Not only might this position reducesome of the mental gymnastics now required ofbehaviorally oriented psychologists, it might alsohelp to eliminate some of the unnecessary con-flicts that now exist between clinic and laboratory(not to mention teacher and student!).

A second unfortunate heritage of behaviorismhas been a widespread reluctance to obtain intro-spective data, even in situations where they mightbe of considerable value. This reluctance is mostobvious in behaviorally oriented areas such as be-havior therapy, where experimenters have tended


largely to ignore patients' thoughts and feelings,even where these are nominally the primary focusof the therapy. Perhaps the clearest example ofthis ambivalence comes from the clinical therapyof systematic desensitization, which has proven tobe a highly effective treatment for phobias (see,e.g., Leitenberg, 1976a). If a patient was afraidof snakes, for example, he or she would be asked tovisualize a mildly frightening scene involvingsnakes while simultaneously relaxing his or herbody. Once the patient was able to visualize thisscene without fear, he or she would then be askedto imagine a slightly more frightening one, and soon, until eventually the fear of snakes had dis-appeared altogether. Now the imagery formed bythe patient is clearly at the heart of the treatment,but until very recently (e.g., Kazdin, 197S; Wade,Malloy, & Proctor, 1977) there have been almostno attempts to examine the nature of the imagesformed by different patients and the extent towhich their content and vividness may be corre-lated with the eventual outcome of the therapy.To be sure, these variables might ultimately proveof little importance, but the failure even to look atthem, in what is otherwise one of the most in-tensively studied therapies of all time, is striking.

If this reluctance to obtain introspective datais most obvious in behaviorally oriented areas suchas systematic desensitization, it is by no meansconfined to these areas. Thus, although cognitivepsychologists have proven far more willing to em-brace mental phenomena such as memory and at-tention, they too have sometimes been hesitantto use introspection in studying these processes,preferring instead to rely on inferences from purelybehavioral observations. One example of thistendency I have already discussed concerns re-search into concept formation, where for manyyears psychologists interested in the nature of hy-potheses rarely made any attempt to ask subjectsdirectly what hypotheses they were using, pre-ferring instead to infer these hypotheses from per-formance on a series of special test trials. Phillipsand Levine (197S) eventually showed that directquestioning offered some potentially significantadvantages, but it is striking that it should havetaken so many years before anyone thought toevaluate experimentally the potential of this tech-nique. To be sure, there were valid grounds forsuspecting that it would not work—for example,that the hypotheses involved might not be con-scious, or that interrupting subjects with questionsmight distract them and thus alter their perform-

ance (see, e.g., Dweck & Gilliard, 1975)—butwhy did no one even try?

A number of other examples could be given, butperhaps just one more will suffice. Mischel (1974)summarized a brilliant series of experiments heand his colleagues conducted to investigate theprocesses by which children learn to tolerate delaysin gratification. If, for example, children aregiven a choice between one marshmallow immedi-ately versus two in 20 minutes, it turns out thattheir ability to endure the frustrating delay is dra-matically affected by the way they think aboutmarshmallows during the delay period. Childrenwho imagined them as soft and chewy, for ex-ample, could wait for an average of only 5 minutesbefore asking for the immediate reward, whereaschildren who imagined them as fluffy white cloudscould wait almost three times as long (Mischel &Baker, 197S). It is striking, however, thatthroughout his studies, Mischel manipulated im-ages solely via the instructions he gave his sub-jects: "When you look at marshmallows thinkabout how light and puffy they are." (Mischel &Baker, 1975, p. 257); at least in his publishedreports, he never systematically interviewed hissubjects to find out what images they actually usedand the extent to which these different imageshelped or hindered resistance to temptation.

This continuing failure to obtain and reportintrospective data—even when the phenomena un-der study are hypotheses and images—appears toreflect the continuing suspicion with which manypsychologists, from all areas, still approach themind. Thus, although methodological behaviorismallows introspective data—its only caveats concernthe relation of the obtained verbal behavior to ahypothetical inner state—so long as introspectivereports are regarded as being of "equivocal status"(Kanfer, 1968), psychologists seem unlikely toventure near this treacherous terrain. After all,if introspective reports correspond to no innerreality, if they are regarded as only one more bitof behavior, then why should psychologists makeany serious attempt to study them, especiallywhen the universally acknowledged limitations ofintrospection are taken into account? If the exis-tence of the mind were accepted more openly, onthe other hand, it seems likely that psychologistswould become far more willing to study intro-spection experimentally, so that we could beginto distinguish more clearly those situations inwhich introspective reports were likely to be usefulfrom those in which they were not.


Summary and Conclusions

In effect, the position advocated here represents aselective mixture of behaviorism and introspection-ism. From behaviorism, I would retain Watson'srevolutionary emphasis on the practical modifica-tion of behavior as the proper goal of psychology.The ultimate criterion for evaluating any line ofresearch, therefore, must be its success in con-tributing to the prediction and control of overtbehavior. I would argue, however, that introspec-tion can play a powerful role in contributing tothis goal. As shown by both classical and modernresearch, introspective data can be highly reliableand useful, helping not only to predict specific be-haviors but to discover fundamental principles oflearning and performance (e.g., Weber's law, andthe role of imagery in verbal memory). Ratherthan rejecting introspection indiscriminately, there-fore, a far more productive strategy might be toidentify systematically the conditions under whichit is most likely to prove useful.

With regard to the mind itself, I have arguedthat formal acceptance of its reality would notonly not violate any of the accepted canons ofscientific methodology but would also offer anumber of potentially profound advantages, rang-ing from a diminution in the unnecessary tensionswithin our discipline to the discovery of new prin-ciples of behavior. Against these potential advan-tages must be weighed the possibility of other,rather less desirable consequences, including inparticular a proliferation of untestable theoriesand sterile controversies. There is no easy formulafor predicting which of these outcomes, beneficialor harmful, would prove more likely in the longrun, so that it would probably be beneficial forpsychologists on both sides of this issue to statetheir positions with some degree of humility. Giventhe increase in psychology's maturity and sophis-tication, however—due in no small part to the in-fluence of behaviorists such as Watson, Tolman,and Skinner—I believe that the dangers of mis-guided mentalism have now receded considerably,so that the balance of arguments now stronglyfavors a more positive attitude not only to themind's existence but to its experimental investiga-tion.

In arguing for a greater use of introspection itis important not to minimize the problems thatmight arise. In particular, introspection is lim-ited not only in its scope (much of the brain'sfunctioning is simply not accessible to conscious

awareness) but in its accuracy. In some cases,this may be because of the subject's limited abilityto discriminate among internal states; in others,because of forgetting, or even dishonesty. Andin some cases, rather than directly reporting ob-servations of their thoughts or feelings ("I feltangry"; "I intend to vote for X"), subjects mayreport inferences from such data ("I hit him be-cause I was angry"; "I prefer X because he ishandsome"); such inferences about our own be-havior may be just as erroneous as our inferencesand judgments about other matters (see especiallyNisbett & Wilson, 1977). Even if we accept cer-tain mental states as real, therefore, we cannotaccept particular verbal reports of them as neces-sarily being accurate. Wherever possible, we needto supplement verbal reports with other circum-stantial or behavioral evidence, and the ultimatecriterion for evaluating any form of introspectivedata must be their usefulness in predicting futurebehavior. Assuming that this criterion can besatisfied in particular instances, however, it wouldseem foolish to continue to ignore such data.

The overriding concern of this article, then, hasbeen with how best to advance our ability to pre-dict and control behavior, and greater acceptanceof introspection and the mind has been advocatedin the belief that it can make a significant, albeitlimited, contribution to this goal. In the wordsof the biologist Seymour Kety (1960):

[To deny] the existence or the importance of mentalstates merely because they are difficult to measure orbecause they cannot be directly observed in others isneedlessly to restrict the field of the mental sciences andto curtail the opportunities for the discovery of newrelationships. The remarkable hallucinogenic properties oflysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) are barely hinted atin behavior, and the behavioral disturbances in schizo-phrenia are a mere fragment of the entire picture. Natureis an elusive quarry, and it is foolhardy to pursue herwith one eye closed and one foot hobbled, (p. 1862)

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1. Cohen, W. Form recognition, spatial orientation, per-ception of movement in the uniform visual field. InA. Morris & E. P. Home (Eds.), Visual search tech-niques (Pub. No. 712). Washington, D.C.: NationalAcademy of Sciences—National Research Council, 1960.

2. Tepas, D. I. The electrophysiological correlates ofvision in a uniform visual field. In M. A. Whitcomb(Ed.), Visual problems of the armed forces. Washing-ton, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences—NationalResearch Council, 1962.

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