DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

New Wine in an Old Bottle

The New Behaviorism: Mind, Mechanism, and Society
By John Staddon. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. 2nd Ed., 2001. xiii + 211 pp. Paper, $14.95.

In a very brief work (177 pages of text), John Staddon reviews behaviorism's history, criticizes its major failings, and offers us, if we are to believe his subtitle, a behaviorist theory of mind and of society while also promising us a behaviorist account of the causal processes underlying mental phenomena. I should also add that, besides reviewing behaviorism's history, he has written a historiography of behaviorism in that he treats Skinnerian neobehaviorism as the culmination of all other behaviorist and neobehaviorist theories while also implying that Skinnerian experimental procedures (especially the invention of the Skinner box and the discovery of schedules of reinforcement) provided the jumping-off point for the recovery of behaviorism's fortunes within the animal science movement. Consistent with that approach, he ignores the grand, nonempirical behaviorist theories of the 1920s.