Association of Ideas
Director, Psychological Department, Maudsley Hospital (1946-83). Dedicated to the scientific understanding of personality, he was a vocal critic of psychoanalysis and a pioneer of behaviour therapy and seen by many as a controversial figure. He was the author of various popular works including Uses and Abuses of Psychology (1953) and Fact and Fiction in Psychology (1965).
Man's primary motivation is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to this extent Eysenck is in agreement with the classicist philosophers.
He differs, however, in his dismissal of free will and rationality in human actors. For the stumbling block to this utilitarian notion of motivation is that the punishment of crime - by the inflicting of pain proportional to its consequences (as we have seen in Beccaria)_does not, in fact, eliminate criminality. The task of modern psychology, according to Eysenck, is to refurbish classical hedonism with positivistic refinements.
First, he notes what he terms the principle of immediacy (Eysenck 1969, p. 689):
"To talk about a balance between pain and pleasure, as far as the consequences of a particular act are concerned, is similar to talking about two weights at opposite sides of a fulcrum; we need to consider not only the weights themselves but also the distance from the fulcrum at which they are suspended. A light weight far from the fulcrum may pull down a heavy one near it. In the case of pain and pleasure, what we have to consider is the temporal contiguity of these two resultant states to the action which produces them; the nearer in point of time the consequences are to the action, the more powerfully will they determine future actions. Thus an action followed by a small but immediate gratification will tend to be repeated, even though it is followed by a large but delayed painful consequence."
"Thus the negative effects of punishment are very much attenuated by the long period of time elapsing between crime and retribution. Furthermore, while the positive consequences of crime are fairly certain, the negative ones are very much less so" (Eysenck 1965, p.259)After all, as Eysenck points out, only a small proportion of crimes are cleared up and the chances of avoiding detection are often considerable. Man is seen here as a short-term hedonist; live today and enjoy yourself for you never know what tomorrow will bring.
What, then, can the positivist offer as a reasonable alternative in the control of crime ? For punishment, because of its distance from the criminal deed and its probabilistic nature, has been manifestly ineffective.
Eysenck (1969, pp. 260-1) turns to a concept of a distinctly non- utilitarian kind: the conscience. But he defuses it of any connotation of a striving towards values which are pursued for their own sake. Rather:
" How does conscience originate ? Our contention will be that conscience is simply a conditioned reflex. ... What happens is that the young child, as he grows up, is required to learn a number of actions which are not, in themselves, pleasant or pleasurable and which in fact go counter to his desires and wishes. He has to learn to be clean and not to defecate and urinate whenever and wherever he pleases; he has to suppress the overt expression of his sexual and aggressive urges; he must not beat other children when they do things he does not like; he must learn not to take things which do not belong to him. In every society there is a long list of prohibitions of acts which are declared to be bad, naughty, and immoral, and which, although they are attractive to him and are self-rewarding, he must nevertheless desist from carrying out. As we have pointed out before, this is not likely to be achieved by any formal process of long-delayed punishment, because what is required to offset the immediate pleasure derived from the activity must be an immediate punishment which is greater than the pleasure and, if possible, occurs in closer proximity to the crime. In childhood it is possible for parents, teachers and other children to administer such punishment at the right moment of time; the child who does something wrong is immediately slapped, told off, sent upstairs, or whatever the punishment may be. Thus we may regard the evil act itself as the conditioned stimulus and we may regard the punishment_the slap, the moral shaming, or whatever the punishment may be_as the unconditioned stimulus which produces pain or, at any rate, some form of suffering and, therefore, of sympathetic response. On the principle of conditioning, we would now expect that after a number of repetitions of this kind, the act itself would produce the conditioned response; in other words, when the child is going to carry out one of the many activities which have been prohibited and punished in the past, then the conditioned autonomic response would immediately occur and produce a strong deterrent, being, as it were, unpleasant in itself. Thus the child would be faced with a choice between carrying on, obtaining the desired object but, at the same time (and perhaps even earlier), suffering from the unpleasant punishment administered by its conditioned autonomic system, or desisting from carrying out the act and thus avoiding this punishment. Provided that the conditioning process had been carried out efficiently and well, it is predictable, on psychological principles, that the choice would lie in the direction of desisting rather than carrying out the act. Thus the child acquires, as it were, an 'inner policeman' to help in controlling his atavistic impulses and to supplement the ordinary police force which is likely to be much less efficient and much less omnipresent."
This conception of conscience allows for the inbuilt punishments of the autonomic nervous system: anxiety and alarm, of which the classicists and criminologists were unaware. Thus behaviour is seen to be acquired in two ways:
a learning which is based on simple hedonism and involves the central nervous system. Problems are solved rationally through reinforcement: that which leads to pleasure is positively reinforced and those activities which give rise to pain are reinforced negatively. (This corresponds to instrumental or operant conditioning.) As we have seen the propinquity of pleasure is a major determinant of positive reinforcement.
b conditioning. Classical conditioning operates not by direct reinforcement but by contiguity, and involves the autonomic nervous system. As we see from the last quotation, activities pleasurable in themselves are associated in a reflex fashion with unpleasurable autonomic experience.
Therefore man's voluntary, rational activity comes to be seen as being solely concerned with the satisfaction of his individual and pre-social desires. The implementation of such impulses is learnt in a trial and error fashion, success bringing forth the positive reinforcement of the behaviour, and failure the negative (the so-called 'law of effect'). The model of learning is Darwinian in its mindless-ness. The reason is the seat of striving for pleasure, as it were, a cunning which schemes to maximize its immediate satisfactions and minimize its pains. The conscience is a passive reflex which unthinkingly checks these hedonistic impulses by virtue of autonomic distress.