B
Behavior, Overview
Laurence D. Smith
Department of Psychology, University of Maine,
Orono, ME, USA
Introduction
In mainstream Western psychology, behavior is
considered the “neutral stuff” of psychology – its
most basic subject matter, the raw material out of
which more complex behavioral or mental
phenomena are composed or inferred. In
traditional epistemological terms, behavior is
that which is described in the data language,
whereas the molar concepts of psychology are
described in the theoretical language. It is often
said that the molar concepts are based on
inferences drawn from the raw behavioral data
base, a commonsense notion captured in the
nineteenth-century belief that behaviors serve
as the “ambassadors” of mental states. In the
formulation of many behaviorists, however,
behavior stands as its own subject matter,
exhibiting lawful patterns that render mentalistic
inferences unnecessary and fruitless. The former
view that behavior signifies mental phenomena is
sometimes referred to as methodological
behaviorism; the latter view that behavior is its
own domain is called radical behaviorism.
Widespread acceptance of methodological
behaviorism among Western psychologists has
led some commentators to assert that “we are all
T. Teo (ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7,
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
behaviorists now,” although the stricter radical
behaviorism represents a much smaller subset of
psychologists.
Definition
Broadly speaking, behavior can be defined as any
observable activity of an organism in response to
a stimulus situation. Such definitions are nearly
useless, however, given that everything depends
on how such terms as “activity” and “stimulus” –
or even “observable” – are defined. Indeed, entire
schools of behaviorism have been pursued based
on varying and highly contested construals of
such key terms (Kitchener, 1977; O’Donohue &
Kitchener, 1999). For that reason, the term
“behavior,” like the analogous term “matter” in
the physical sciences, often assumes the role of
a definitional primitive, to be used in defining
other terms without itself admitting of definition;
indeed, many dictionaries of psychology contain
no entry for the term “behavior.”
Like other definitional primitives, such as
“matter,” behavior is presumed to possess
a kind of conceptual neutrality, to be an objective,
empirical given that is observable, measurable,
and independent of the observer’s theoretical ori-
entation. Such neutrality was apparently intended
by behaviorism’s founder John B. Watson, whose
inclusive conception of behavior encompassed
activities ranging from discrete muscle contrac-
tions and glandular secretions to gestures and
verbal behavior.
B 146
But the notion of behavior as a raw given or
neutral subject matter is misleading. Just as the
term “matter” inevitably connotes the priority of
materialist interpretations of nature as well as
particular ways of proceeding to analyze material
nature, the term “behavior” carries assumptions
that belie its apparent status as uninterpreted raw
data. For starters, the view that behavior is
fundamental to psychology, either as its primal
subject matter or as a data base for inferences,
suggests that humans can be objectified and
understood in terms of physical movements.
The conception further implies modes of
analyzing physical activity into its component
subparts, of seeking its antecedent causes and
consequences, and of manipulating it to exploit
its presumed malleability.
Far from serving as a self-evident neutral stuff
of psychology, behavior thus carries an array of
scientific, ideological, and ontological meanings.
Although the same point is true of other psycho-
logical concepts (such as ego, self, experience,
memory), the concept of behavior is especially
prone to being regarded as free, or relatively
free, of such underlying assumptions. But this
perilously naı̈ve view of behavior is due more to
the rhetorical achievements of behaviorism’s
advocates (and the social conditions supporting
those achievements) than to any actual status of
behavior as a neutral substance or an uncontested
substrate offered up by nature.
Keywords
Behavior; behaviorism; scientism; learning;
stimulus; response; operant; reflex; social
control; behavioral technology; variables
History
Early uses of the term “behavior,” including in
Shakespeare, carried the meaning of good or
honorable conduct, typically as applied to
members of the aristocracy (Leahey, 1993).
Although such meanings persist today (as when
children are on their “good behavior”), a second,
Behavior, Overview
more value-neutral meaning emerged by the late
nineteenth century, that of the activity or manner
of operation of a person, machine, or system.
Charles Darwin had referred to organismic
behavior in this general sense, and a number of
psychologists had picked up the usage by 1910.
Following Watson’s formal proclamation of
behaviorism in 1913, the term gained widespread
use in psychology, largely replacing the earlier
ethically charged term “conduct” (Leary, 2004)
and leading to the reduced use of mentalistic
language in the field (Benjafield, 2012).
The notion of behavior, in contrast to mental
activity, took on special importance as evolution-
ary theory was incorporated into psychology.
If organismic activity has adaptation to an environ-
ment as its functional end, it is behavior, not pas-
sive mentation, that actually effects that adaptation.
In the famous phrase of William James, thinking is
“first and last and always” for the sake of doing.
For the functionalist psychology from which
behaviorism emerged, behavior was deeply linked
to adaptation and to a pragmatist worldview in
which the consequences of activity, mental or
physical, mattered foremost.
As noted above, Watson defined behavior
broadly and proceeded to interpret a wide array
of psychological phenomena in behavioral terms.
Emotions were treated as conditioned responses
of the viscera, thinking as covert verbal reflexes,
and personality as a collection of enduring
habits – all could be treated objectively as behav-
ior, without reference to conscious experience or
need for introspection. But for all of Watson’s
expansive rhetoric, he never developed any clear
theory of behavior, relying instead on crude
accounts of associative conditioning and an
outmoded theory of reinforcement based on
frequency and recency. Behaviors were merely
to be enumerated and classified in relation to the
particular punctate stimuli that evoked them, an
unproductive approach derogated by subsequent
behaviorists as the “botanizing” of reflexes.
It fell to the neobehaviorists during the middle
third of the twentieth century to develop the con-
cept of behavior, especially learned behavior, in
more fruitful directions. In contrast to Watson’s
formulations, the response units were conceived
Behavior, Overview
by them as molar behaviors more akin to acts than
to discrete muscle movements; serious attention
was devoted to the nature of reinforcement; and
more emphasis was placed on the consequences of
behavior than on its antecedent stimuli (Kitchener,
1977). The more molar approach was especially
evident in the work of Edward Tolman, whose
response unit became the holistic “sign-Gestalt,”
and B. F. Skinner, who developed the notion of the
operant as a three-term contingency. In the latter
formulation, an operant was a class of movements
that shared certain initiating conditions and, cru-
cially, similar effects on the environment. Thus,
the various ways of mailing a letter would consti-
tute a single operant if they all produced the same
effect of, say, getting return mail, despite the dif-
ferences in response topography between, say,
driving to the post office and walking to
a mailbox. For Skinner, operant behavior
transcended mere movement but still represented
an ontologically genuine unit of behavior that,
according to him, captured “the natural lines of
fracture along which behavior and environment
actually break” (1935/1961, p. 347).
Among the conceptions of behavior offered by
major behaviorists, Skinner’s was the version that
has survived intact to the present, albeit with
further extension and elaboration. Most who
identify themselves as behaviorists today endorse
something like the three-term contingency as the
essential unit of behavior. Because of its stress on
the functional effects of action, the operant con-
cept encompasses certain aspects of purposive
behavior while avoiding the mechanistic S-R
view of behavior favored by Watson and other
early behaviorists.
As the substantive developments of
neobehaviorism were proceeding, the broad lan-
guage of behaviorism gained currency across
North American psychology, even among psy-
chologists who did not embrace behaviorism as
a movement. These were the methodological
behaviorists who blandly accepted that behavior
is the data base of psychology and framed their
topics of interest in the language of stimulus and
response. One reason for this practice was that
journal editors and other gatekeepers were
enforcing the norms of behavior-talk in their
147 B
pages, as attested by veterans of that era. Another
was that behavior-talk could serve as a badge of
scientificity in a discipline whose scientific status
was less than assured. As Danziger (1997) noted,
use of the term “behavior” became “a battle cry to B
proclaim one’s own militant allegiance to the
cause of science and the value of objectivity
while denigrating one’s opponents” (p. 97).
The allures of scientism thus extended to those
whose honorific uses of “behavior” were largely
vacuous, even as those uses continued to carry
unacknowledged implications. In this environ-
ment, the claim that “we are all behaviorists
now” had the effect of ceding more credibility
to behaviorism than it actually enjoyed, and many
methodological behaviorists suffered no qualms
about aligning themselves with the cognitive
psychology that emerged during the 1960s
(Leahey, 1992).
Traditional Debates
Watson’s view of psychology as a science of
behavior received early critiques from prominent
intellectuals, including Arthur Lovejoy and C. D.
Broad, as well as mixed support from the likes of
Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. Anticipating
later critical debates, Russell worried that princi-
ples of behavioral control could be abused by
technocratic elites, and Dewey lamented the
lack of a social dimension in Watson’s concept
of behavior. More generally, and predictably,
behaviorism drew criticism for its demeaning
characterization of humans as machinelike
beings in the thrall of environments. William
McDougall, whose hormic psychology stressed
the purposiveness of organismic activity, drew on
the recently coined term “robot” to caricature the
view of behavior as a mechanistic process.
In the general intellectual sphere, debates
about a behavior-centered psychology revolved
around a constellation of traditional concepts
including purpose, intentionality, private con-
sciousness, agency, and free will. Led by human-
ists and phenomenologists, behaviorism’s critics
decried the ontological poverty of the concept of
behavior, its seeming inability to account for
B 148
phenomena considered unique to human experi-
ence. Mere physical activity, it was argued, lacks
the meaning that inner life and social context
impart to action. The movement of an arm
could, by itself, represent anything from the
effect of a wind gust to a poignant gesture of
communicated emotion; the intentions of human
agents must be considered. However, to an unan-
ticipated degree, subsequent developments in
behaviorist theorizing, including various “purpo-
sive behaviorisms,” yielded responses to these
challenges that have satisfied many philosophers
and other intellectuals.
Within the disciplinary confines of psychol-
ogy, early objections to behaviorism’s focus on
behavior were surprisingly mild, if only because
psychologists already had sympathies toward
determinism and skepticism about the value of
private consciousness in scientific accounts.
Critics like E. B. Titchener and Mary Calkins
grudgingly accepted the study of behavior as
a legitimate pursuit while denying that it could
cover the whole field of psychology or represent
more than its technological side. Similar grudg-
ing tolerance would characterize the later critical
responses of phenomenological psychologists
such as Carl Rogers and humanistic psycholo-
gists such as Abraham Maslow, both holding
that the study of behavior is incomplete but com-
plementary to their own approaches. In the 1950s,
a serious challenge to the adequacy of behavior as
a foundational concept for psychology came from
the linguist Noam Chomsky, who argued that any
analysis of language behavior that remained at
the observable level of stimulus and response
must be inadequate for explaining the
generativity of language, its practically unlimited
capacity for producing novel utterances. Along
with other developments, Chomsky’s work
served as an impetus to the cognitive psychology
of the 1960s that drew methodological behavior-
ists away from strict behaviorism.
Critical Debates
Critical theorists have challenged the concept of
behavior for its individualistic nature. As noted
Behavior, Overview
by Danziger (1997), behavior is routinely
assumed to be “an attribute of singular,
non-communicating individuals” (p. 99), a con-
ception that neglects behavior’s embeddedness in
social networks and minimizes the importance of
social roles. In discussing the reification of
behavioral phenomena, Prilleltensky (1994) has
similarly criticized “the treatment of human
behavior as if it were an ‘in-itself,’ an entity
abstracted from thesocioeconomic conditions
where it developed” (p. 39). Carrying connota-
tions of socioeconomic insularity, the concept of
behavior reinforces the dominant social ideology
of individualism and impairs the ability of psy-
chologists to recognize and address power differ-
entials in society. The insularity of behavior
likewise gives it an ahistorical character, making
it seem independent of shifts across different eras
in the prevailing determiners of human activity.
The insular character of the concept of behav-
ior is enhanced by psychologists’ near-ubiquitous
framing of their subject in terms of independent
and dependent variables. They routinely speak of
manipulating independent variables (which are
unreflectively assumed to represent “causes”)
and recording changes in dependent variables
(assumed to represent causal “effects” on behav-
ior). As observed by Danziger (1997), the lan-
guage of variables, which originated in
mathematics, serves various ends in behavioral
science. First, its mathematical provenance ful-
fills a rhetorical function by conferring on
psychology a measure of the prestige associated
with mathematics, as well as its seeming objec-
tivity and epistemological neutrality. Second,
through a process of abstraction, the language of
variables serves to strip away the inconvenient,
less tractable aspects of behavior, including not
only its distal cultural and economic determiners
but also its phenomenal concomitants. Third, the
language of variables entails a simplified view of
manipulation and causation, implying that causal
investigation is akin to plugging a value into one
variable of an equation to determine its “effect”
on another variable. Yet changing one variable in
a complex organic system produces many
correlated changes, some of which have no
straightforward causal relation to the
Behavior, Overview
manipulated variable (Willems, 1974). Finally,
the methodological behaviorists’ use of so-called
intervening variables to represent mental states or
processes – although a retreat from the radical
behaviorist rejection of mental “way stations” –
serves the end of abstraction by displacing the
richness of mental life in favor of abstract, quasi-
mathematical entities. The intervening variables
join the independent and dependent variables in
serving a merely instrumental role.
As a result of the insularity and abstraction
imposed by variables-talk, behavior is often
viewed as a kind of undifferentiated raw material,
something practically independent of the person
displaying it. As raw material, behavior is the sort
of stuff that can be “shaped” – worked and
reworked – by skilled technologists. However
deflationary such a description may sound, the
ideology of behavioral engineering makes the
metaphor of “shaping behavior” seem entirely
natural; indeed, Skinner was explicit in likening
the shaping of behavior to the molding of clay by
an artisan (Smith, 1992).
The alleged malleability of behavior is, of
course, key to the ideals of social control in
modernist societies, including the shaping of con-
sumer behavior in market economies. Such ideals
have been embraced by behaviorists from Wat-
son on down, often being embedded in rhetorical
appeals for a behavior-based science of psychol-
ogy (Buckley, 1989; Mills, 1998). However,
recent challenges to this ideology of “prediction
and control” have come from several directions.
First, even on the behaviorists’ favored ground of
controlled laboratory studies, the limits of behav-
ioral malleability have become evident in the
form of instinctive drift and other forms of
“misbehavior of organisms.” Second, critics
have charged that controlling behavior through
behavioral engineering runs the risk of producing
unintended consequences of the sort known to
afflict other forms of technology. Among the
untoward side effects of behavioral technology
that have been investigated are reinforcement-
induced behavioral stereotypy and reductions of
intrinsic motivation for behaviors under control
of reinforcement schedules. Third, the careful
experimental control needed to demonstrate
149 B
conditioning in laboratories has led to questions
about whether operant behavior actually occurs
in natural environments, at least beyond those
deliberately contrived to mimic laboratory situa-
tions. In other words, the very conditions that B
permit experimental displays of behavioral con-
trol may limit the ecological validity of behav-
ioral principles in messier extra-laboratory
settings. Fourth and relatedly, some critics have
argued based on historiocritical analyses that
human operant behavior, far from being
a naturally occurring form of activity, emerged
during the industrial revolution as a product of
“factory psychology,” wherein work first came to
be rewarded under schedule-like contingencies
(Schwartz & Lacey, 1982; see further discussion
under BEHAVIORISM).
Proponents of behaviorism have responded,
with varying degrees of effectiveness, to all of
the foregoing criticisms of the concept of behav-
ior. For example, issues of ecological validity
have been addressed through studies of reinforce-
ment schedules in quasi-naturalistic environ-
ments. In regard to the core concern about
behavior’s seemingly intrinsic insularity, there
have been efforts, as Prilleltensky (1994)
acknowledges, “to regain the ‘lost’ social con-
text” (p. 76). These include the emergence of
behavioral community psychology, calls for cul-
tural analysis, Marxist interpretations of operant
behaviorism, and the establishment of the group
Behaviorists for Social Responsibility. Also rel-
evant are Skinner’s earlier discussions of
countercontrol, which offer conceptual analyses
of how people controlled by contingencies of
reinforcement can exert reciprocal control over
the controllers. Even when such reciprocal
control is effective, however, it is likely to be
more palliative for individuals than curative of
the socioeconomic conditions, still largely
unaddressed, that might necessitate reciprocal
control in the first place.
International Relevance
Until World War II, the psychology being
exported to various countries from research
B 150
centers was a blend of European approaches,
which were moderated by traditional associations
with philosophy and the humanities, and Ameri-
can approaches, which embodied allegiances to
natural-science models and their applications.
American psychology’s focus on behavior often
made it subject to bemused disregard by Euro-
pean psychologists, and it served to limit
the influence of European psychologists in the
USA, even those who, like Karl Buehler and the
Gestaltists, eventually emigrated to America. But
wartime setbacks to European psychology
allowed American psychology’s lead in world
production of psychological knowledge to grow
rapidly, and it was during this postwar period that
its scientistic stress on behavior was in its
neobehaviorist heyday. International graduate
students trained in this environment returned to
their countries well versed in behavior-talk and,
in some cases, received funding from American
foundations to establish relevant American-style
instruction and research.
Behavior as a vague but inclusive concept has
always been well suited to the universalizing
rhetoric of behaviorism, and its pliability gives
it plausible applicability across many national
contexts (no less so in its revised form of
cognitivist methodological behaviorism). How-
ever, the concept’s accompanying ideology of
positivist natural science does not sit well with
indigenous psychologies whose central concepts
involve ethical, spiritual, and phenomenological
dimensions of human life. Among the indige-
nous traditions that resist formulation in behav-
ioral language are Asian views regarding levels
of consciousness, views of personhood as con-
stituted by communal social roles, and the tradi-
tion of social knowledge as carried by shared
narratives. The universalizing prejudices and
oppressive uniformity of the natural-science
model of psychology are increasingly recog-
nized as impediments to true reciprocal global-
ization of the field. As one commentator put it,
“the positivist notion that all science must speak
with one voice tends to militate against the dif-
fering perspectives warranted by indigenous
psychologies from around the world” (Paranjpe,
2006, p. 71).
Behavior, Overview
Practice Relevance
The concept of behavior has become central to
many areas of applied psychology, where behav-
ior change is often seen as a goal in its own right,
especially when such change can lead to concom-
itant improvements in emotional and attitudinal
status. Proponents of a psychodynamic orienta-
tion have held that behavior change alone is
insufficient for therapeutic benefits, arguing that
new behavioral symptoms emerge in place of old
ones when underlying problems go unaddressed.
Regardless of the specific merits of this view,
a more enduring problem is that behavior change
is often designed to bring people into adjustment
to prevailing social circumstances, even when
such conditions are pathological and pathogenic
in their own right. The diagnosis of undesirable
behavior thus often amounts to victim-blaming
(Prilleltensky, 1994). This problem, though not
unique to behavioral approaches, is exacerbated
by a focus on individual behavior rather than on
larger social systems. Finally, as noted earlier,
behavioral engineering that focuses interventions
on specific target behaviors can lead to
unintended consequences. In one classic case,
behavioral contingencies designed to increase
the wearing of seatbelts by teenage drivers
succeeded in doing so but also increased the rate
of injuries from collisions, presumably because
of unforeseen increases in risk-taking by belted
drivers. The possible side effects of targeted
interventions in behavior modification, including
behavior therapies, would seem to merit careful
investigation.
Future Directions
Given the entrenchment of behavior as a key term
in Western psychology, it is likely to retain its
status as a generic concept that carries
unacknowledged implications for the human
self-concept and for prevailing social orders.
For this reason, critical psychologists would do
well to continue problematizing the concept in
order to unmask its metaphysical and moral
dimensions and thus challenge commonly held
Behavioral Genetics 151 B
assumptions about its neutral, objective status. Willems, E. P. (1974). Behavioral technology and
Meanwhile, the concept of behavior within the behavioral ecology. Journal of Applied Behavior
Analysis, 7, 151–165.
behaviorist tradition will no doubt continue to
undergo technical refinements, along with further
Online Resources
applications to problems of social control. In Association for Behavior Analysis International. www. B
either case, the largely unexamined bias to regard abainternational.org/
behavior as an attribute of individuals, particu- Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. www.behavior.
larly as they seek reinforcing “goods” in a market org
Journal Behavior and Philosophy. www.behavior.org/
economy, will likely remain an impediment to scholarship.php?tab ¼ Journal
effective social action and thus stand in need of Behaviorists for Social Responsibility. www.bfsr.org/
continued critical analysis. Journal Behavior and Social Issues. www.behaviorandso-
cialissues.org

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are family, twin, and adoption studies, with twin
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ism to globalization: Reflections on the history of results of this body of research, the leaders of the
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the twenty-first century, behavioral genetic
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B 152
psychological literature, as well as the literature
of other behavioral science fields. Behavioral
genetics and psychometric psychology share an
emphasis on magnifying individual differences
and de-emphasizing the common features that
most people share, and both assume that most
human behavioral characteristics and psychologi-
cal traits are valid constructs that can be measured
and quantified. Since the 1990s, behavioral genet-
icists have attempted to identify at the molecular
level the genes (genetic variants) that they believe
underlie personality traits, IQ, and psychiatric
disorders, without success as we will see.
Keywords
Adoption study; behavioral genetics; eugenics;
IQ; molecular genetics; personality; twin study
History
Although behavioral geneticists frequently date
the founding of their field to the publication of
Fuller and Thompson’s (1960) Behavior Genetics
(Fuller & Thompson), most also recognize the
British statistician Francis Galton as the Father
of the discipline (Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, &
McGuffin, 2008, p. 151). According to behavioral
geneticists Rowe and Jacobson, their field “was
founded by Francis Galton in the second half of
the nineteenth century” (Rowe & Jacobson, 1999,
p. 13). Galton was also the founder of the eugenics
movement, which holds that the human race can
be improved by policies that promote selective
breeding for “desirable” hereditary traits and that
prevent the reproduction of people and groups
seen as harboring “undesirable” hereditary traits.
According to Galton, in words that helped inspire
subsequent eugenic policies such as compulsory
sterilization in the United States, Germany, and
elsewhere and in the case of Germany, genocide,
“There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite
unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an
inferior race” (Galton, 1883, p. 200).
Most contemporary behavioral geneticists do
not advocate eugenic ideas and policies,
Behavioral Genetics
including those ideas and policies that were
popular prior to the crimes committed by the
Nazis in the name of eugenics. Nevertheless, the
discipline has its roots in eugenics and uses some
eugenic methods and concepts (such as twin
studies) while arriving at different conclusions.
As founding American behavioral geneticists
McClearn and DeFries wrote in their 1973 Intro-
duction to Behavioral Genetics, the “basic prob-
lems that aroused the early eugenicists have not
gone away.” The authors clearly located behav-
ioral genetics as a “new label” for the “academic
pursuit” of eugenic policies:
From the preceding sections, it is clear that the
basic problems that aroused the early eugenicists
have not gone away; nor have they been
ignored. . . .The opprobrium attached to eugenic
action programs, particularly the deformed version
of the Nazis, has prompted a desire for a new label
to describe the academic pursuit of these issues.
. . .It appears that the term “social biology,” or
some variant thereof, is emerging as an appropriate
label to describe this interdisciplinary effort. As
indicated below, behavioral genetics constitutes
a central core of this new social biology.
(McClearn & DeFries, 1973, p. 305)
This 1973 book, in which McClearn and
DeFries wrote favorably of the need for eugenic
selection programs (pp. 305–313), was the fore-
runner of the widely cited textbook Behavioral
Genetics (Fifth Edition; Plomin et al., 2008). The
subsequent editions with Plomin as the lead
author lacked positive references to eugenics. In
the words of behavioral genetic researcher Matt
McGue, “Behavioral genetics was nearly
completely discredited by its early association
with the eugenics movement. Few intellectuals
wanted to be associated with a scientific endeav-
our perceived to have contributed to the Nazi’s
repressive policies, no matter how indirectly”
(McGue, 2010, p. 285).
The first academic center for research in behav-
ioral genetics, the Institute for Behavioral Genet-
ics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was
founded in 1967. The Behavior Genetics Associa-
tion (BGA) was established in the USA in 1972,
and 1970 saw the first publication of what in 1974
became the BGA’s official journal, Behavior
Genetics. The founding editors were DeFries and
Behavioral Genetics
Steven Vandenberg. The BGA had 69 paid mem-
bers at the time of its first conference in 1971
(Loehlin, 2009), growing worldwide to 468 mem-
bers and associate members by 2012 (Agrawal,
2012).
Having weathered the storm created by Arthur
Jensen (1969) and others in the late 1960s, who
attempted to revive the old eugenic argument that
African-Americans are genetically less intelli-
gent than Caucasians, the behavioral genetic
field increased its influence in the 1980s. Not
coincidentally, this growth paralleled a political
shift to the right in the USA with the election of
Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. Towards the
end of the decade, the newly elected head of the
BGA, Sandra Scarr, proclaimed that “we have
largely won the war” and worried that her disci-
pline would lose its identity as its ideas continued
to be integrated into mainstream psychology
(Scarr, 1987, p. 228). Scarr concluded that
although the evidence did not support the position
that racial differences in IQ were caused by
genetic factors, IQ differences among social
classes were rooted in hereditary factors, thus
providing a “scientific” seal of approval for social
inequality and the wealth and privileges of the
upper classes.
At the approach of the twenty-first century, the
field continued to consolidate its position “in the
mainstream” (Rowe & Jacobson, 1999), and in
2000 behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer
described what he called the “Three laws of
behavior genetics.” The first “law” held that
“All human behavioral traits are heritable”
(Turkheimer, 2000, p. 160). Behavioral genetic
methods such as twin and adoption studies con-
tinued to be widely accepted, in addition to the
omnipresent heritability statistics found in count-
less textbooks and journal articles. Another major
“discovery” the field put forward was that most
environmental influences on psychological traits,
rather than making children in the same family
more similar, are “non-shared” influences and
events that make members of the same family
different (see Plomin et al., 2008). As discussed
briefly below and in detail elsewhere (Joseph,
2004, 2006, 2010), however, most behavioral
genetic assumptions, models, “laws,” and
153 B
“discoveries” do not hold up to critical examina-
tion and often fly in the face of common sense.
In the early 1990s, leading behavioral genetic
researchers such as Robert Plomin attempted to
shift the field’s focus in the direction of gene B
finding efforts, reasoning that “quantitative
genetic” studies of families, twins, and adoptees
had definitively established that variation in
“normally distributed” psychological traits such
as personality and IQ had an important genetic
component. They believed that the sequencing of
the human genome would lead to the rapid dis-
covery of the genes they believed underlie
psychological traits and psychiatric disorders
(Joseph, 2011, 2012; Turkheimer, 2000).
Traditional Debates
The Twin Method
Although most leading behavioral geneticists
recognize that a trait can “run in the family” for
nongenetic reasons (Plomin et al., 2008), critics
have argued that the field’s core research methods
contain glaring invalidating flaws. In particular,
they have argued that the most important theoret-
ical assumption underlying twin research is not
supported by the evidence.
The twin method compares the trait resem-
blance of reared-together MZ twin pairs (mono-
zygotic, identical) versus the trait resemblance of
reared-together same-sex DZ twin pairs (dizy-
gotic, fraternal). Because MZ pairs share
a 100 % genetic similarity, versus the average
50 % similarity of DZ pairs, behavioral geneti-
cists argue that the usual finding that MZs corre-
late higher than DZs for traits such as IQ and
personality indicates a major role for genetic
factors. However, this conclusion is based on
the assumption that both types of twins experi-
ence equal environments, which, as most twin
researchers now recognize, is not true. The evi-
dence clearly shows that MZ twin pairs experi-
ence much more similar environments than those
experienced by DZ pairs (Joseph, 2004, 2006,
2010). Nonetheless, most contemporary twin
researchers and behavioral geneticists continue
to uphold the validity of the twin method by
B 154
arguing that MZ twin pairs create more similar
environments for themselves because they are
more similar genetically (see Joseph, 2012;
Plomin et al., 2008). However, circular argu-
ments of this type do nothing to alter the critics’
contention that the twin method, like a family
study, is unable to disentangle the potential
roles of genes and environment (Joseph, 2010,
2012). Thus, many critics argue that the results
of both family studies and twin method MZ-DZ
comparisons can be easily explained on environ-
mental (nongenetic) grounds and therefore
provide no evidence in support of genetics.
Reared-Apart Twin Studies
Although studies of purportedly reared-apart MZ
twin pairs (MZAs) have had a great deal of
impact and have been widely reported in the
popular press, these studies are subject to several
potentially invalidating flaws and biases (see
Joseph, 2004, 2010). These include (a) that
many MZAs were reared-together, or had regular
contact, for significant portions of their formative
years; (b) that the researchers were unable to
control for the confounding influences of
common age, common sex, and many other
environmental influences, which increase MZA
resemblance for nongenetic reasons; (c) that there
were biases favoring the recruitment of MZA
pairs who resembled each other more for
behavioral traits than other MZA pairs; (d) that
it is questionable whether “intelligence” and
“personality” are valid and quantifiable
constructs; (e) that in the famous Minnesota
studies, which are nearly impossible to replicate,
the researchers denied independent researchers
access to their data and published only incom-
plete and selected life history information for the
twins under study; and (f) that there was clear
researcher bias in favor of genetic explanations of
the data.
Adoption Studies
In theory, an adoption study is able to make
a clean separation between genetic and environ-
mental influences on traits, since adoptees inherit
the genes of their biological (birth) parents but
are reared in the environment of another
Behavioral Genetics
(adoptive) family with whom they share no
genetic relationship. Like family and twin stud-
ies, however, behavioral genetic adoption studies
are subject to their own set of environmental
confounds and biases which cast doubt on their
ability to separate the potential influences of
genes and environment (Joseph, 2004, 2006,
2010). Biases that critics have highlighted
include late separation from the birthparent (and
accompanying attachment disturbance), the
restricted range of adoptive families, and the
selective placement of adoptees.
Heritability
A key behavioral genetic concept is heritability,
which was developed in agriculture to predict
the results of selective breeding programs.
These estimates, which range from 0.0 to 1.0,
are usually calculated from twin data by dou-
bling MZ-DZ correlation differences or are
derived from more complex biometrical ana-
lyses (Plomin et al., 2008). Using basic twin
method data, if MZ pairs correlate at .8 on an
IQ test, and DZ pairs correlate at .5, behavioral
geneticists would estimate the heritability of IQ
as .6 (60 %). However, critics have argued that
heritability estimates do not indicate the relative
weight of genetic and environmental influences,
are misleading and potentially harmful, and are
based on the environmentally confounded and
methodologically flawed research methods
described above.
The Search for Genes
Based on the field’s conclusion that quantitative
genetic family, twin, and adoption studies have
established beyond question that variation in
“normally distributed” psychological traits such
as personality and IQ have an important genetic
component (are “moderately to highly herita-
ble”), we have seen that behavioral genetic
focus shifted in the direction of attempting to
identify postulated genes at the molecular level.
However, this venture has turned out to be
a spectacular failure as sustained worldwide
research, carried out during the past three
decades, has failed to uncover the genes that
behavioral genetic researchers believe underlie
Behavioral Genetics
IQ, personality, and the major psychiatric disor-
ders (Joseph, 2011, 2012; Plomin, 2013;
Wahlsten, 2012).
Rather than entertain the possibility that these
presumed genes do not exist, which would neces-
sitate a hard second look at the methodology and
questionable theoretical assumptions of family,
twin, and adoption studies, several behavioral
genetic researchers have adopted the “missing
heritability” position (Joseph, 2012; Plomin,
2013). Supporters of this position argue that,
despite the lack of gene discoveries, currently
“missing” genes exist and await discovery once
genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are
improved and sample sizes are increased.
A more plausible explanation, however, which
critics of behavioral genetics have put forward
for decades, is that the field’s mistaken reliance
on environmentally confounded and methodo-
logically flawed family, twin, and adoption stud-
ies has created the illusion that genes play a major
role in human behavioral variation (Joseph, 2004,
2011). Thus, as the behavioral genetic field
attempts to come to grips with the stunning fail-
ure to discover genes, it appears to be
approaching a crisis stage.
Critical Debates
Behavioral genetics can be seen in the context of
other academic fields that produce dubious
“scientific evidence” in support of the social
and political status quo, which supports the dom-
inance of corporate interests and the economi-
cally and politically powerful sections of
society. The politically and economically pow-
erful have an interest in blinding society to the
psychological and physical damage caused by
poverty, racism, sexism, war, and other forms
of trauma and oppression. A major objective role
of human behavioral genetics and other fields is
to locate the results of trauma, inequality, and
social and political oppression within the brains,
bodies, and genes of affected individuals. In the
process, some researchers and popularizers of
their work are rewarded with contracts, grants,
tenure, titles, prizes, publicity, and easy
155 B
publication access by groups whose interests
they promote. According to Phil Gasper,
The attempt to explain important features of soci-
ety in evolutionary or genetic terms – biological
determinism – has two goals. First, it tries to con- B
vince us that the social order is a consequence of
unchanging human biology, so that inequality and
injustice cannot be eliminated. Second, in the case
of problems that are impossible to ignore, it tells us
to look for the solution at the level of the individual
and not at the level of social institutions. The prob-
lems lie not in the structure of society, but in some
of the individuals who make up society. The solu-
tion is thus to change – or even eliminate – the
individuals, not to challenge existing social struc-
tures (Gasper, 2004).
Not surprisingly, critics have argued that the
production of false worldviews of this type is
aided not by science, but by pseudoscientific the-
ories and research methods, such as those pro-
duced by behavioral genetics and the allied and
overlapping field of psychiatric genetics. How-
ever, pseudoscience cannot produce genes that do
not exist, and these fields appear to have painted
themselves into a corner by going “all in” with
molecular genetic research that has failed to pro-
duce causative genetic variants. As they attempt
to extricate themselves from this corner, the glar-
ing problems and environmental confounds of
family, twin, and adoption studies will be further
illuminated, and the concept of heritability will
be exposed as the meaningless and misleading
concept that it is in the human behavior context,
whose only real application for humans is to
predict the results of a selective breeding pro-
gram (Wahlsten, 1990).
International Relevance
Behavioral geneticists and their supporters
around the world frequently complain that,
while they are only “scientists” without social
and political agendas, their critics contaminate
science with their political (“ideological”) posi-
tions. However, the real issue is not that critics
have strong beliefs about the world and that
genetic researchers do not, but rather that their
beliefs differ. It is a myth that science is “above
B 156
politics.” In fact, science is permeated with poli-
tics, even more so in fields such as behavioral
genetics, whose positions and “findings” bear
directly on social policy decisions and some
aspects of international relations.
Future Directions
It is likely that the upcoming period will witness
increased critical analysis of behavioral genetic
methods and theories, as ongoing gene finding
efforts continue to come up empty. At the same
time, critical theorists should continue to elabo-
rate on the political and social policy implications
of theories put forward by the field.
References
Agrawal, A. (2012). Minutes of the annual business meet-
ing of the members of the behavior genetics associa-
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Fuller, J. L., & Thompson, W. R. (1960). Behavior genet-
ics. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into human faculty and its
development. London: Macmillan.
Gasper, P. (2004). Is biology destiny? International Socialist
Review, 38. Retrieved from November-December, http://
www.isreview.org/issues/38/genes.shtml
Jensen, A. R. (1969). How much can we boost IQ and
scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational
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Joseph, J. (2004). The gene illusion: Genetic research in
psychiatry and psychology under the microscope. New
York: Algora. (2003 United Kingdom Edition by
PCCS Books).
Joseph, J. (2006). The missing gene: Psychiatry, heredity,
and the fruitless search for genes. New York: Algora.
Joseph, J. (2010). Genetic research in psychiatry and
psychology: A critical overview. In K. Hood, C.
Tucker Halpern, G. Greenberg, & R. Lerner (Eds.),
Handbook of developmental science, behavior, and
genetics (pp. 557–625). Malden, MA: Wiley-
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Joseph, J. (2011). The crumbling pillars of behavioral
genetics. GeneWatch, 24(6), 4–7.
Joseph, J. (2012). The “missing heritability” of psychiatric
disorders: Elusive genes or non-existent genes?
Applied Developmental Science, 16, 65–83.
Loehlin, J. C. (2009). History of behavior genetics. In
Y. Kim (Ed.), Handbook of behavior genetics
(pp. 3–11). New York: Springer.
McClearn, G. E., & DeFries, J. C. (1973). Introduction to
behavioral genetics. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Behaviorism, Overview
McGue, M. (2010). The end of behavioral genetics?
Behavior Genetics, 40, 284–296.
Plomin, R. (2013). Child development and molecular
genetics: 14 years later. Child Development, 84,
104–120.
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P. (2008). Behavioral genetics (5th ed.). New York:
Worth Publishers.
Rowe, D. C., & Jacobson, K. C. (1999). In the mainstream.
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Scarr, S. (1987). Three cheers for behavior genetics:
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and what they mean. Current Directions in Psycholog-
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Behaviorism, Overview
Laurence D. Smith
Department of Psychology, University of Maine,
Orono, ME, USA
Introduction
Behaviorism shares with psychoanalysis the rare
status of being a major tradition of psychologi-
cal thought with a long history of critical expo-
sure, fluctuating fortunes, and unprecedented
diffusion into the larger culture. Like psycho-
analysis, it emerged from a conducive backdrop
of social and intellectual trends to pose chal-
lenges to orthodox cultural beliefs. But unlike
the psychoanalytic tradition, behaviorism has
sought to understand psychology by external
Behaviorism, Overview
manifestations rather than inner depths, and it
represents a particularly American expression of
the psychological enterprise. In that role, behav-
iorism has been afflicted with paradoxes, not
least of which is its focus on the behavior of
infrahuman subjects in narrow experimental set-
tings while claiming to offer solutions to human
problems in the wider world. Those solutions are
often framed in terms of a behavioral technology
to be applied to problems of social control and
self-management.
Definition
Behaviorism is a family of theoretical approaches
to psychology that treat the observable physical
activity of organisms as psychology’s subject
matter (or at least as its basis for postulating
inferred entities) and hold characteristic assump-
tions about the environmental determination and
malleability of behavior (O’Donohue & Kitche-
ner, 1999). Beyond that general characterization,
the behaviorist approaches share little beyond a
family resemblance, in part because they vary
considerably in what counts as “behavior”
(see discussion under Behavior). Among
the varieties of behaviorism recorded in the
psychological literature, one finds social
behaviorism, purposive behaviorism, cognitive
behaviorism, and even phenomenological
behaviorism. Nonetheless, behaviorism in any of
its guises claims for itself a scientific rigor and
objectivity that differentiate it from competing
traditions, thus giving the behaviorisms
a degree of rhetorical unity and a recognizably
scientistic bent.
A useful distinction can be made between
strong and weak behaviorisms. In radical behav-
iorism, behavior itself is regarded as
psychology’s subject matter, complete with its
own law-like regularities that require no explan-
atory appeal to other levels of analysis (such as
physiology or inferred mental processes). In the
weak version, often called methodological
behaviorism, behavior is the objective database
of psychology, the basis for investigating inferred
processes such as cognitions and motives that
157 B
serve to explain the behavioral facts. Radical
behaviorism, closely identified with B. F. Skinner
and his followers in the so-called field of behavior
analysis, survives to the present as the most active
school of self-identified behaviorists. Methodo- B
logical behaviorism arose in the 1930s as the
neobehaviorisms of E. C. Tolman and Clark
Hull, morphed into the mediational S-O-R behav-
iorism of mid-century, then was largely absorbed
into the cognitive psychology that emerged in the
1960s (Leahey, 1992). Most Western
psychologists today embrace some version of
methodological behaviorism while rejecting
radical behaviorism as needlessly restrictive.
Keywords
Behaviorism; scientism; rhetoric; stimulus;
response; operant; reflex; social control; behav-
ioral technology; self-control; Buddhism; locus
of variables; positivism; natural law; universal-
ism; capitalism; ideology
History
Although formally proclaimed in a 1913 article
by John B. Watson, behaviorism can be traced to
such early sources as Descartes’s seventeenth-
century reflexology and the general mechanistic
tenor of the Scientific Revolution. More proxi-
mally, its emergence was shaped in the nine-
teenth century by the pragmatist philosophy and
Baconian style of American science as well as by
Darwinian notions that inspired comparative psy-
chology and the functionalist psychology of
adaptation. At the turn of the twentieth century,
the work of Ivan Pavlov in Russia and Edward L.
Thorndike in America provided experimental
models for the central paradigms of classical
and instrumental conditioning.
Behaviorism arose at a time when the social
dislocation caused by rapid urbanization in
American society had led to calls for new, scien-
tific means of social control to replace the Victo-
rian mores of small-town life. American
psychology, newly established as an independent
B 158
discipline and eager to demonstrate its social
utility, responded with the promise of behavioral
control that could be exercised for purposes of
social organization, self-improvement, industrial
efficiency, and scientific management. Behavior-
ism’s fit with American culture was auspicious,
conforming to the nation’s meliorist ethos and
strains of Calvinist determinism. As
a movement, it drew strength and credibility
from its contemporaneous sibling movements of
progressivism and Taylorism. Capitalizing on
these circumstances, Watson defined the aim of
behaviorist psychology as the “prediction and
control” of behavior, a phrase eagerly echoed by
most of his successors. Behaviorist techniques of
control have typically focused on individuals
rather than social systems, most often in the ser-
vice of adjusting individuals to prevailing
conditions and often with little regard for the
justness of those conditions (Mills, 1998).
From Watson on down, behaviorists have
trumpeted their approach as adhering to
a natural-science model. In doing so, they drew
on Machian positivism and the ensuing logical
positivism that influenced psychology beginning
in the 1930s, resulting in their belief that the laws
of behavior represent full-fledged natural laws
with universal reach. This universalizing ten-
dency was epitomized in the theorizing of Clark
Hull, who ambitiously sought mathematical laws
arranged as postulates and theorems in the
manner of Newtonian science.
Traditional Debates
Despite endorsements of behaviorism from nota-
bles like John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, its
advent triggered heated debates among psychol-
ogists, philosophers, and public intellectuals. Its
dismissal of consciousness as irrelevant to psy-
chology struck many as a violation of common
sense, a violation that threatened a loss of mean-
ing in the phenomenology of human life. To
many, its mechanistic overtones made it demean-
ing to the human self-concept (the Gestaltist
Wolfgang Koehler warned that it cast the
human as “a kind of slot machine”), and its
Behaviorism, Overview
deterministic challenge to the concept of free
will and personal autonomy not only offended
humanist sentiment but also posed concrete
threats to legal and political systems (a theme
well explored by Daniel N. Robinson). Psychol-
ogist E. B. Titchener accused behaviorism of
trading a science for a technology – a well-
justified charge given the proliferation of
behavioral techniques that ensued. Testifying to
behaviorism’s cultural resonance, such tech-
niques for the control of humans became the
subject of dystopian fiction, notably in the
popular novella Clockwork Orange. But behav-
iorism’s radical view of humans as thralls of their
environments had a kind of esthetic of its own.
Skinner conceived of a person as an egoless
“locus of variables” in which the person is
embedded in a flow of causal forces exerted by
a world of contingencies while acting on the
environment in an ongoing process of
adjustment. Skinner’s concept of the person
bore a real affinity, as he explicitly recognized,
with Eastern concepts such as the Buddhist doc-
trine of no-self.
Within the behaviorist tradition itself, debate
unfolded along several lines. (1) Debate over the
definitions of “stimulus” and “response”
proceeded without clear resolution, leading
critics like Sigmund Koch to condemn behavior-
ism for its lack of convergence on the sort of
consensual definitions required by logical
positivist precepts. (2) The early behaviorist
tendency to conceive behavior in small units led
to debates about how behavior is aggregated into
larger meaningful units. Response chaining was
one popular attempt at solving the problem,
especially among the followers of Hull, who
also proposed the habit-family hierarchy as
a pattern of organization for behavior. Near
mid-century, Watson’s former student Karl
Lashley published a landmark paper on the prob-
lem of serial order in behavior, holding that S-R
chains were inadequate for explaining larger
behavioral units and that appeals to central medi-
ation would be required instead. That paper
helped spur the reemergence of cognitive psy-
chology and prefigured Noam Chomsky’s claim
that S-R analysis of language could not account
Behaviorism, Overview
for the generativity of language. (3) Much
methodological debate revolved around the
admissability of unobservable constructs in
behavioral theories. Skinner resisted the use of
such inferred entities (though without denying
the reality of private events), while others
embraced intervening variables and hypothetical
constructs. Mediational variables of this sort
came to include symbols, representations, and
cognitive maps, thus providing a bridge from
liberalized neobehaviorism to the new cognitive
psychology. (4) As part of their shared rhetoric,
behaviorists agreed that behavior could be mea-
sured, but debates ensued about how behavior is
properly quantified. Some embraced response
rate or probability as the proper measure of
behavior (Skinner), while others preferred choice
(Tolman) or time spent in an activity as a measure
of response strength. (5) An important theme of
behaviorists’ shared rhetoric was the malleability
of behavior, often believed, from Watson on
down, to be practically unlimited. But this
presumed modifiability underwent sustained crit-
ical scrutiny, especially when the “misbehavior
of organisms” was studied experimentally in the
1960s as evidence of biological constraints on
learning.
These internal debates show that behaviorism,
for all its sway over American psychology in the
twentieth century, was far from monolithic. More
pointedly, the debates over fundamental issues –
such as how to define and measure stimuli and
responses – served to undermine positivist faith
in scientific method as a means to produce con-
sensual agreement and arrive at truths about
human nature. Without agreement on founda-
tional issues, the road to intersubjective theoreti-
cal truths, supposedly opened by behaviorism’s
adoption of a natural-science model for
psychology, was blocked.
Although the unorthodox implications of
behaviorism always evoked critical responses,
the utopianism of Watson and Skinner served
especially to invite critical analysis of its socio-
political dimensions, an effect that was amplified
by Skinner’s publication of Beyond Freedom
and Dignity in 1971. In the wake of that book,
Chomsky portrayed Skinner’s views as leading to
159 B
a totalitarian state with “gas ovens smoking in the
distance,” while the philosopher Karl Popper
described him as an “enemy of freedom” who
defends a “behaviorist dictatorship” (Smith,
1996, p. 295). Although these blunt-edged criti- B
cisms raised issues of political power that behav-
iorists had largely dismissed in deference to
technocratic expertise, they reflected Skinner’s
provocative language more than his actual
proposals. For the most part, his proposals stayed
safely within the tradition of American utopian-
ism (one critic saw them as calling for a return to
the ethos of small-town American life), and the
actual communities inspired by Walden Two
proved to be benign, reasonably productive social
arrangements (Rutherford, 2009, Chap. 6).
Whether the same can be said of the incursions
of other behaviorist practices into larger social
arrangements is less clear.
Critical Debates
Critical debates surrounding behaviorism have
often reiterated themes broached in the tradi-
tional debates while amplifying the critique of
behaviorism’s universalizing rhetoric and its
treatment of behavior as isolated from cultural
contexts. From a phenomenological perspective,
Charles Tolman’s 1994 book Psychology,
Society, and Subjectivity challenges Skinner’s
dismissive treatment of subjectivity through his
behaviorist analysis of private events and attacks
Skinner’s abstracted conception of behavior and
his generalizing from simple laboratory settings
to rich cultural contexts involving human agency.
Similarly, Klaus Holzkamp’s (1993) book on
learning brings a critical phenomenological per-
spective to bear on the behaviorist assumption
that narrow experimental studies of learning are
relevant to culturally situated human action, and
it offers a detailed critique of behaviorists’ use of
language to project an image of scientific
objectivity.
The universalizing rhetoric of behaviorism
also comes under critical scrutiny in Kurt
Danziger’s (1997) analysis of behaviorist
language, especially the elaborate vocabulary of
B 160
variables (independent, dependent, and interven-
ing) that serves simultaneously to abstract
behavior from its historio-cultural context and
to impart an aura of quasi-mathematical respect-
ability (see discussion under “Behavior”).
Similar themes are developed by Prilleltensky
(1994), who stresses the poverty of such
abstracted concepts for addressing the aims of
social reform in real-world social settings, espe-
cially when such concepts reinforce the
prevailing individualism that can impede social
action. Mills (1998) situates these themes in the
context of behaviorists’ professed goal of social
control, with its attendant dangers and its realiza-
tion in settings antithetical to the well-being of
targeted populations.
As these critics have made clear, behavior-
ism’s universalizing rhetoric rests largely on its
insular concept of behavior and its language of
variables. The appearance of rigor is achieved by
isolating phenomena from their social and histor-
ical contexts in a process that amounts to the
social construction of behavioral artifacts in lab-
oratory settings – the phenomena of conditioning
depend, after all, on socially negotiated under-
standings, developed over decades, of optimal
choices of apparatus and control procedures for
isolating and quantifying reinforcement effects.
In considering this charge, behaviorists have
responded that, far from being social construc-
tions, behavioral phenomena embody universal
natural laws discovered through a natural-science
approach to psychology, and they point to
successful applications of behavioral technology
as evidence of the universality of those laws. But
an argument can be made that the applications
are, in fact, equally socially constructed.
Scholars in the field of science studies have
overturned the traditional notion that applied sci-
ence is simply a matter of using universal laws to
interpret and redirect preexisting phenomena that
occur in the natural world. On the contrary, they
have revealed a significant sense in which nature
must be remade in the image of the laboratory
before the laws of science can be “applied” –
arguing that applications succeed only to the
extent that the phenomena “out there in nature”
are socially constructed in their own right and
Behaviorism, Overview
only at the expense of considerable, time-
consuming effort. In his classic essay “Give Me
a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World” (1983),
Bruno Latour demonstrated that Pasteur’s cele-
brated success in applying laboratory research to
the eradication of livestock disease entailed
a laborious process of social construction involv-
ing farm sites (where exported laboratories were
literally constructed on-site), microbial patho-
gens (the development of new pure strains that
had never existed in nature), and social processes
(the persuasion of skeptical farmers and govern-
ment agricultural agents). Where such painstak-
ing steps were not taken (as in Italy for a time),
the “pasteurization” of farms through inoculation
of farm animals failed to work at all, leading to
suspicions of hoax and skepticism about the “uni-
versal” theory of microbial pathogenesis.
Similarly, the earliest extensions of Skinner-
ian control techniques from operant laboratories
to real-world settings involved people in environ-
ments that were carefully constructed (again lit-
erally) as scaled-up versions of the traditional
Skinner box, complete with human-sized rat
levers and food hoppers (Rutherford, 2009). To
aid the process of exporting the lab to the outer
world, such “applications” were typically
designed in settings where behavior was already
closely controlled (e.g., prisons, mental hospi-
tals), and hence were applied to humans who
represented vulnerable, readily manipulated
populations. In summarizing this work, Ruther-
ford observes that “applied behavior analysis has
ultimately experienced its most marked success
with the very same subjects who were originally
placed inside the human Skinner box: autistic and
developmentally delayed children, young school
kids, and psychiatric patients” (p. 176). What
Latour (1983) calls the “Pasteurization of
France” thus seems to have strong parallels with
what might be called the “Skinnerization of
America.” In both cases, the apparent success of
“applied” science relies on what Latour calls the
“staging” of lab-like environments that are out-
side the traditional lab setting but carefully
constructed so as to share crucial features of the
original research sites. In both cases, the effort
going into that construction process becomes
Behaviorism, Overview
relatively transparent, but the success of the
applications cannot be credited to any universal-
ity of scientific truths. As Latour puts it, “the cost
of making society conform to the inside of labo-
ratories so that the latter’s activity can be made
relevant to the society is constantly forgotten,
because people do not want to see that universal-
ity is a social construction too” (p. 167).
This challenge to behaviorism’s claims of
a historical universalism can be seen to under-
mine its claim to possess safe, reliable technolo-
gies for altering behavior. For one thing, such
technologies can no longer be viewed as licensed
by universal truths about human action, truths
that might otherwise ensure their efficacy and
safety. Moreover, from a Latourian perspective,
the establishment of behavioral interventions
necessarily requires “stagings” in the erstwhile
natural environment that could carry unforeseen
behavioral and ethical consequences. The
targeted behaviors themselves are likely to take
on some of the artifactual character of the staged
environment, introducing unpredictable side
effects into the larger behavioral ecology.
Such destabilizing consequences of behavioral
technologies are not unknown (see Willems,
1974), the most widely recognized being the det-
rimental effects of reinforcement contingencies
on intrinsic motivation.
If the claims of behaviorism to offer natural
laws that operate everywhere have been undercut
by critical analysis, much the same can be said of
its claims for ahistorical laws of behavior that
transcend time as well as place. Schwartz and
his colleagues (e.g., Schwartz, Schuldenfrei, &
Lacey, 1978) have argued that operant condition-
ing emerged as a phenomenon of human behavior
only a few centuries ago with the advent of early
capitalism, when piecework payment in
exchange for units of labor was originally insti-
tuted in factory settings. Before that time, for
example under medieval feudal systems, human
behavior was commonly governed by feudal alle-
giances, social roles and obligations, and familial
and religious bonds. Schwartz and colleagues do
not deny that human behavior is now often
controlled by operant contingencies, but their
view that operant psychology is a “factory
161 B
psychology” that came into being at a specific
time and place leaves the laws of conditioning
with, at best, a highly situated, contingent status
rather than one of universality.
Regardless of the specific merits of the B
Schwartz thesis, it remains clear that behaviorist
ideology embodies many of the cultural themes
associated with capitalist ideology. In this shared
ideology, behavior is viewed uncritically as
a commodity to be traded for goods (rewards),
and reinforcement schedules represent schemes
for the distribution of goods in exchange for
work. This sort of conceptual overlap between
behaviorism and neoliberal economics has been
explored from a technical standpoint (and even
experimentally demonstrated) in the field of
behavioral economics (Bickel, Green, &
Vuchinich, 1995). In this research, economic
notions dealing with the allocation of behavior
under systems of constraint – notions such as
demand elasticity, substitutability, and demand
curves – have been found to apply neatly to
animal conditioning experiments. Behavior is
thus seen to take its place among the many
phenomena of life now subjected to the growing
trend of “economics imperialism,” that is, the
subsumption of all aspects of life under the
realm of economics.
International Relevance
Behaviorism has long been regarded as
a parochial American school of psychology, and
the circumscribed appeal that came with its
American identity has been cited as grounds for
denying that psychology as a whole ever
underwent a behaviorist revolution in the
Kuhnian sense. Behaviorism, though hailed as
a dominant approach during the mid-twentieth-
century decades, never achieved sufficient inter-
national sway to qualify as a Kuhnian paradigm.
Yet to a considerable extent, behaviorism has
now joined the ranks of American ideological
exports, having spread to many countries, espe-
cially in the form of Skinnerian operant technol-
ogy. For example, the Association for Behavior
Analysis International has thousands of members
B 162
in 30 countries, being particularly well
represented in Latin America. There are corpora-
tions with international reach (e.g., Applied
Behavior Consultants, Inc., with offices in ten
countries) that market treatments for behavior
problems. The parallel spread of capitalism to
Third World and developing countries, with its
ideology of persons as discrete but interacting
economic units, raises the possibility that local
cultures will become increasingly receptive, or at
least susceptible, to behavioral analysis and inter-
vention, further undermining indigenous tradi-
tions. Especially at risk, it would seem, are
societies where conduct is governed by tradi-
tional social roles and obligations rather than
by exchanges of behavioral and material
“commodities.”
Such an eventuality, though likely, does not
rule out the possibility of limited convergences of
behaviorism with indigenous psychologies. For
example, the psychologist Masaya Sato, who
pioneered Skinnerian behaviorism in Japan, saw
deep affinities between his native Buddhism and
the behaviorist worldview. For him, the Buddhist
doctrine of no-self was well captured by Skin-
ner’s construal of the person as an egoless locus
where causal forces converge; and the Buddhist
notion of En, the embeddedness of phenomena in
a causally interwoven world, was seen as tanta-
mount to the Skinnerian view of the environment
as a field of behavioral contingencies. Upon Skin-
ner’s death in 1991, Sato praised him as “the
Buddhist without self-awareness.” Whether
behaviorist approaches can be fruitfully indige-
nized in further ways throughout the globe
remains to be seen.
Practice Relevance
With its inherent technological bent, behaviorism
has long been a source of social engineering and
therapeutic practices – arguably to a degree
unmatched by any other theoretical tradition in
psychology – in part because of behaviorism’s
congruence with the technocratic ideology of
modernism (Woolfolk & Richardson, 1984).
Behavioral technologies have entered the realms
Behaviorism, Overview
of school and prison management, mental hospi-
tals, organizational behavior, military training,
parent training, and the implementation of com-
munity and environmental interventions. Thera-
peutic applications of behaviorism include
treatments for phobias, depression, obsessive-
compulsive disorder, stuttering, aphasia, and
autism.
Although many therapeutic applications
remain in widespread use, often in conjunction
with the now-prevalent “cognitive behavior”
therapies, various social engineering techniques
have come under legal and ethical challenge
(Mills, 1998; Rutherford, 2009). For example,
programs for prison management have been
halted by courts due to their questionable use of
deprivation in order to make reinforcers effec-
tive, while autism treatments involving the use
of aversive stimuli have been withdrawn from
government health services in many countries in
response to patients’ rights movements. The use
of other interventions, such as token economies
in mental hospitals, has also waned due both to
legal challenges and to their being cumbersome
and time consuming for administrators, violating
behavioral engineers’ own desideratum of effi-
ciency. From the standpoint of the larger history
of technology, such mixed outcomes are not
unexpected, but they demonstrate that behavioral
engineering is not immune to the cultural barriers
and intrinsic limitations that confront all technol-
ogies – limitations that have led to general fail-
ures of technological optimism over the last half-
century.
One further genre of behavioral technology
merits consideration because of its widespread
adoption and its peculiar ideological implica-
tions. This genre comprises various behavioral
technologies of self-control, including those for
impulse control, weight loss, emotional regula-
tion, and assertiveness enhancement (Rutherford,
2009, Chap. 5). Identified by the social theorist
Nikolas Rose (1990) as a distinctive feature of
life in advanced liberal democracies, these “tech-
nologies of the self” allow individuals to align
themselves with the “technologies of the mar-
ket,” thus rendering people increasingly govern-
able and capable of achieving the goals of
Behaviorism, Overview
material well-being that are instilled by
advertizing technologies. In North America,
these self-control practices build on the individ-
ualist tradition of self-help and self-improvement
as well as on the growing embrace of consumer
culture, thus likely serving to impede the sort of
collective action that would be required to chal-
lenge that culture. In this way, according to Rose,
neoliberal governments pass off the task of social
control to self-managed citizens who comply by
submitting to their prescribed role in capitalist
economies.
Future Directions
Recent debates about behaviorism, including its
social and political implications, have been
conducted largely in specialized behaviorist
journals, perhaps reflecting a paucity of interest
among critical theorists in further critiquing
a tradition that often appears outmoded anyway.
It is perhaps telling that one major text on crit-
ical psychology (Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997)
contains only two brief index entries for
“behaviorism.”
Nonetheless, critical theorists have offered
core criticisms regarding the behaviorist concep-
tion of behavior as individualistic, ahistorical,
and governed by universal laws. It may be, as
Prilleltensky (1994) suggests, that behaviorism
is intrinsically flawed and incapable of contribut-
ing to genuinely critical psychology. And it
remains unclear whether recent behaviorist con-
tributions to community psychology and efforts
at cultural analysis, as published in the specialist
journals, will eventually work to disarm such
criticism.
With its historical links to philosophical
pragmatism, some versions of behaviorism
have shown unexpected affinities with social
constructionism, postmodernism, and feminism,
affinities that warrant further critical appraisal.
Although clearly deflationary from a traditional
standpoint, the behaviorist view of the self as
a locus of variables has been increasingly linked
to the concept of no-self in Buddhist philosophy
and to clinical practice (Campos, 2002), and it
163 B
bears intriguing similarities to the postmodern
notion of the fragmented, decentered self.
Meanwhile, ongoing technical developments in
behavioral economics and the spread of
behavioral techniques for management and self- B
management should be accompanied by further
critical analysis of behaviorism’s conceptual and
historical relation to capitalism, its possible role
in maintaining class divides, and the part it may
play in maintaining neoliberal hegemonies
through the selective diffusion and application
of control technologies.
References
Bickel, W. K., Green, L., & Vuchinich, R. E. (1995).
Behavioral economics. Journal of the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior, 64, 257–262.
Campos, P. E. (Ed.). (2002). Introduction: Special series
integrating Buddhist philosophy with cognitive and
behavioral practice. Cognitive and Behavioral
Practice, 9, 38–40.
Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: How psychology
found its language. London: Sage.
Fox, D., & Prilleltensky, I. (Eds.). (1997). Critical psy-
chology: An introduction. London: Sage.
Holzkamp, K. (1993). Lernen: Subjektwissenschaftliche
Grundlegung. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus Verlag.
Latour, B. (1983). Give me a laboratory and I will raise the
world. In K. Knorr & M. Mulkay (Eds.), Science
observed (pp. 141–170). London: Sage.
Leahey, T. H. (1992). The mythical revolutions of Amer-
ican psychology. American Psychologist, 47,
308–318.
Mills, J. A. (1998). Control: A history of behavioral
psychology. New York: New York University Press.
O’Donohue, W. T., & Kitchener, R. F. (Eds.). (1999).
Handbook of behaviorism. San Diego: Academic
Press.
Prilleltensky, I. (1994). The morals and politics of
psychology: Psychological discourse and the status
quo. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Rose, N. S. (1990). Governing the soul: The shaping of the
private self (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Rutherford, A. (2009). Beyond the box: B. F. Skinner’s
technology of behavior from laboratory to life, 1950s-
1970s. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Schwartz, B., Schuldenfrei, R., & Lacey, H. (1978). Oper-
ant psychology as factory psychology. Behaviorism, 6,
229–254.
Smith, L. D. (1996). Situating B. F. Skinner and
behaviorism in American culture. In L. D. Smith &
W. R. Woodward (Eds.), B. F. Skinner and behavior-
ism in American culture (pp. 294–315). Bethlehem,
PA: Lehigh University Press.
B 164
Willems, E. P. (1974). Behavioral technology and behav-
ioral ecology. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 7,
151–165.
Woolfolk, R. L., & Richardson, F. C. (1984). Behavior
therapy and the ideology of modernism. American
Psychologist, 39, 777–786.
Online Resources
Association for Behavior Analysis International. www.
abainternational.org/
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. www.behavior.
org
Journal Behavior and Philosophy. www.behavior.org/
scholarship.php?tab¼Journal
Journal Behavior and Social Issues. www.behaviorandso-
cialissues.org
Watson & MacDougall, Battle of Behaviorism (1929).
Psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/Battle/
Biopolitics
Carlos Gómez Camarena
Literature Department, Universidad
Iberoamericana Ciudad de México / Red
Analı́tica Lacaniana, Mexico City, Distrito
Federal, Mexico
Introduction
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the
concept of biopolitics has almost totally monop-
olized philosophical debates about politics, thus
marking a new stage in political philosophy.
Giorgio Agamben has affirmed that the fact
that Foucault and Deleuze had written about
life just before their deaths proves that all phi-
losophy that prizes itself on being contemporary
must start from the concept of life. (Agamben,
1999).
It was the Swede Rudolf Kjellén who first used
the word biopolitics, a term that was later elabo-
rated upon by the Germans Friedrich Ratzel and
Karl Haushofer, to be read in a racist key
(Esposito, 2008, p. 16). Biopolitics was used as
a vitalist conception of the State. It is not merely
a matter of a metaphor of the body of the State –
a body with organs, systems, and other character-
istics of a living organism – but rather of
Biopolitics
a concrete relationship between politics and biol-
ogy, especially medicine. Thus, the purpose of
biopolitics is to recognize the organic risks that
threaten the political body, so as to be able to
repair the defense mechanisms necessary to face
said risks. As (Esposito, 2008) mentions, it is
therefore not possible to know whether books
on anatomy, pathology, or immunology are med-
ical texts with military metaphors or books on
military strategy written in medical language.
Definition
Biopolitics is the attempt to explain the history of
civilization through the laws of cellular life and
the most elementary biology (Starobinski, 1960).
It is for this reason that social Darwinism and
sociobiology are only two aspects of a wider phe-
nomenon, the mechanisms of which Foucault
worked to expose.
According to Foucault’s thought, biopolitics is
a way of thinking about governmental practice
through the categories of living beings constituted
in a population (health, hygiene, birthrate, longev-
ity, races). Biopolitics is a way of exercising power
by multiplying the disciplines (demographics, sta-
tistics, and the analysis of wealth) and institutions
(schools, headquarters, hospitals) that reorganize
learning, education, and order in society.
Roberto Esposito, (2008, p. 15) suggests that
the structure of biopolitics is so intricate that the
terms “life” and “politics” can be conjugated in
two ways: a politics that governs life (biopower,
politics over life) and a life that governs politics
(biopolitics, the politics of life). Thus, while
biopower exhibits a negative facet, biopolitics is
the positive face of the relationship between
power and life. Other authors such as
(Bazzicalupo, 2010) prefer the terms biopower
and affirmative biopolitics.
Keywords
Biopower; immunitary biopolitics; sovergnity;
bare life; homo sacer; Agamben; Foucault;
Esposito; Negri
Biopolitics
Traditional Debates
Everything begins when Michel Foucault takes
up the term biopolitics and brings it to his own
theoretical framework. Foucault basically points
out that around the seventeenth century, there is
a shift in the way of exercising power that
describes the passage from sovereignty to
governmentality that places the concept of life
in the center of the knowledge-power-
subjectivity complex and which is expressed in
the following way (Foucault, 2003, p. 247):
[Biopower] is the power to make live. Sovereignty
took life and let live. And now we have the emer-
gence of a power that I would call the power of
regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in mak-
ing live and letting die.
For more on biopolitics in Foucault, see the
entry on ▶ Biopower.
Giorgio Agamben was the first to use the Fou-
cauldian reflection on biopolitics to show how the
implication of life in politics radically modified the
West’s political categories. Using the Foucauldian
genealogical method, Agamben finds that the
“dark” figure of Roman law, the “homo sacer”, is
the “hidden cipher” of biopolitics (2004, p. 13). For
Agamben, sovereignty is still the exercise of
power, but for it to exist it is necessary that the
law institute an exclusion: when the human is
recognized as a citizen, the statute of his life is
qualified (Bı́os), however, the price is that his
“bare life” (Zoé) remains at the disposition of the
sovereign. Bare life is included in law in order to
exclude it, thus causing a schism between qualified
life and bare life. In this operation is founded the
sovereignty of the State, which, in fact, is the only
instance with the right to suspend the law by
declaring a state of exception.
Homo sacer, in Roman law, is she/he who the
people have judged to be a criminal, but whom it
is not licit to sacrifice; but whoever kills him will
not be condemned of homicide. Thus, in the
homo sacer a breach of indifference is opened
which allows for the suspension of the law on
the part of the sovereign (be it the democratic
State or the monarchical Prince).
The state of exception, homo sacer, and the split
between qualified life (Bı́os) and bare life (Zoé)
165 B
constitute the original character of political
structure and sovereign decision. Agamben
concludes that the concentration camp is the
biopolitical paradigm of modernity, a paradigm
that is disseminated throughout all contemporary B
juridical-political institutions: from the moment
that someone is intervened upon by sovereign
power, the subject is reduced to bare life (from
airports to prison facilities in Guantanamo to
Human Rights and Ethics committees in
hospitals).
Antonio Negri considers that Agamben’s dark
panorama takes into account neither the political-
economic dimension nor an affirmative and
emancipatory dimension of biopolitics (2008).
Negri distinguishes between biopower (technol-
ogies, structures, and functions with power over
life) and biopolitics (the complex of resistances,
experiences of subjectivation, and freedom).
Read from Foucault, Deleuze, Spinoza and
Marx, biopolitics must be understood as an exten-
sion of the class struggle in an era (the postmod-
ern era) in which a new nature of productive work
emerges. In effect, the new intellectual, linguis-
tic, and communicative character of post-Fordist
forms of labor clearly emphasizes the social and
relational dimension of labor, where affects are
produced and manipulated. But it is precisely
because of the capitalist need to exploit affects
and social relations that it is possible to reconquer
the forces that capitalism controls.
The economy’s process of abstraction (genet-
ics, information, copyrights, language, affects,
services, know-how) makes capitalism rest on
social relations, thus causing the mechanism of
control (individualization) to overflow, which is
shown clearly in the crisis of its mechanisms of
control (piracy, mainly). If what expands the life
force (life) of subjects are relations, and postmod-
ern capitalism bases the production of its wealth
on relations, then life, or life force, overflows its
own limits. This is what Negri calls “the politi-
cal” or biopolitical “monster” – before called “the
power of the multitude” or simply “constituent
power.” In a vitalist-Deleuzian-Spinozan inter-
pretation, Negri locates the emancipatory facet
of biopolitics through a life that deterritorializes,
a life that overflows and governs politics. In this
B 166
way, “biopolitical labor” is related not to the
exercise of power over bodies but rather with
economic production, ethical subjectivation, and
political action.
Critical Debates
Roberto Esposito, reading an interpretative
ambiguity of the use of biopolitics in Foucault
(2008, p. 32), proposes to think of political
modernity under the semantics or paradigm of
immunization. Thus, immunitary biopolitics
connects the sphere of life with that of the law
and biology, internally articulating both the neg-
ative effects (politics over life) as well as the
positive effects (politics of life), of conservation
and destruction.
There exist, then, two opposite though inter-
nally articulated movements: whereas
communitas is social circulation, exposition of
existence outside itself, debt to others, expansion
of life, and expropriation, immunitas is a sort of
internal limit of this expansion, an interruption of
social circulation, and the submission of life to
protection. The etymology of the term
communitas (cum ¼ common, munus ¼ debt) is
revealing, insofar as immunitas, its negation,
means not owing anyone anything (ingratitude),
in which the particle “im,” which is privative, is
excusing of all debt (munus). In this sense,
immunitary biopolitics explains the sense of the
right to property (that which is one’s property is
not common), juridical immunity (not owing
anyone anything), and the immunological logic
of medicine that permeates the language of actual
politics. Immunization is a mechanism internal to
communitary logic, since, as in medicine, the
vaccine protects life through its contrary: it inoc-
ulates, in the body of the patient, a part of the
disease itself (Esposito, 2011).
Immunization is a category that allows us to
think through the two different declensions of
biopolitics, and to transversally explain different,
far more ambiguous phenomena (computer
viruses, ethics committees, “humanitarian”
bombing, ethnic wars, political extraditions, and
the expansion of autoimmune diseases) than just
Biopolitics
the clear-cut distinction between biopolitics and
what he calls thanatopolitics (2008).
Discussions and research into biopolitics have so
multiplied that there are now authors who are study-
ing bioeconomics (Arrighi, 2010; Bazzicalupo,
2010; Lazzarato, 1997), biotechnopolitics (Camp-
bell, 2011; Sloterdijk and Sph€aren, 1999), or the
relation between biopolitics and feminism
(Haraway, 2002) without leaving aside the question
of subjectivity. It is also possible that the interest in
animal philosophy (Calarco, 2008) to decenter
human subjectivity is derived from the present
interest in biopolitics.
Other authors, such as Badiou (2009, p. 2),
consider that the subject of biopolitics and
bioethics is reduced to what he calls
“biomaterialism,” a logic that reproduces the
status quo and the extant part of capitalist
parliamentary democracies, the motto of which
is “there are only bodies and languages.” Against
them, Badiou affirms that there are truths whose
statute is that of an event or “incorporeal bodies”
(2009, p. 4), the same expression that Lacan uses
to theorize the drive through what he calls the
lamella (1998).
References
Agamben, G. (1999). “The absolute immanence” in
potentialities (pp. 220–241). Stanford, US: Stanford
University Press.
Agamben, G. (2004). “Entrevista” in Estado de
Excepción. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Adriana
Hidalgo.
Arrighi, G. (2010). The long twenieth century: money,
power and the origins of our times. London: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2009). Logics of worlds. Being and event, 2.
London: Continuum.
Bazzicalupo, L. (2010). Biopolitica. Una Mappa
Concettuale. Rome: Carocci.
Calarco, M. (2008). Zoographies. The question of the
animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Campbell, T. (2011). Improper life. Technology and
biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben. Minneapolis,
US: Minnesota University Press.
Esposito, R. (2008). Bı́os. Biopolitics and philosophy.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Esposito, R. (2011). Immunitas. The protection and nega-
tion of life. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended. New York:
Picador.
Biopower
Haraway, D. (2002). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and
technoscience. London: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1998). The four fundamental concepts of
psychoanalysis. London: W.W. Norton.
Lazzarato, M. (1997). Lavoro immaterial. Forme di vita
e produzione di soggettività. Verona, Italy: Ombre
corte.
Negri, A. (2008). The political monster: Power and naked
life. In C. Casarino & A. Negri (Eds.), Praise of the
common. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University
Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (1999). Sph€ aren. Makrosph€ arologie.
Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Starobinski, A. (1960). La biopolitique. Essai d’interpré
tation de l’historie de l’humanité et des civilisations.
Geneva, Switzerland: Salquin.
Online Resources
“Biopolitics/Bioeconomics” by Maurizio Lazzarato.
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fplazzarato2.htm
Biopolitics International Organisation. http://www.
biopolitics.gr/
Biopolitics Project at Chile. http://www.biopolitica.cl/
pags/portada.html
Giorgio Agamben on Biopolitics. http://www.generation-
online.org/p/fpagamben3.htm
Technobiopolitics as Human Enhacement. http://www.
geneticsandsociety.org/downloads/200703_worldw
atch_hayes.pdf
Biopower
Majia Holmer Nadesan
Division of Social and Behavioural Studies
Arizona State University West Campus,
Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, USA
Introduction
Studies of the manifolds of power reveal com-
plexities and historical heterogeneities. Power
may be centralized in a sovereign figure, or it
may be dispersed throughout daily life in the
form of laws, social norms, and personal habits.
Power may be overt and forceful, or it may
operate latently by shaping beliefs, expectations,
psyches, and daily practices. Power may be
resisted actively, or it may be perceived as natural
167 B
and/or inevitable. Biopower is a formulation of
power believed to be unique to the modern era in
that it emphasizes the government of life.
The study of biopower was formulated as an
analysis of the valuation and optimization of life B
under liberal, western, industrial capitalism.
The French theorist Michel Foucault was perhaps
the most important figure to articulate how power
operates through the elicitation and valuation of
life itself. Foucault’s work prompted specific his-
torical and contextual analyses across academic
disciplines (e.g., psychology, anthropology,
medicine, and political science). Biopower is
introduced using Foucault’s theoretical framing
before briefly addressing some of the analyses of,
and debates over, biopower’s historicized forms,
operations, and effects.
Definition
Power is often conceived of as a repressive
force that acts to prevent and contain. This
type of power is embodied in the (near) absolute
sovereign monarch under feudalism. However,
Foucault (1979) observed that sovereign power
was limited in time and space because it
depended upon the physical presence of a
sovereign entity (or delegates) capable of mon-
itoring subjects. Foucault was interested in how
power operated in ways that were simulta-
neously more ubiquitous and less repressive
than sovereign force.
In examining various manifestations of power,
Foucault (1979) noted that institutions exercise
a kind of anonymous force upon subjects through
regimented disciplines and role expectations.
He labeled this form of power “discipline.”
However, although learned disciplinary prac-
tices, such as raising one’s hand or standing in
line, can circulate outside of the institution’s
buildings and facilities (e.g., schools), their oper-
ations tend to remain constraining in nature (e.g.,
disciplining who can speak when) and often
entail the presence of a sovereign entity (e.g.,
teacher) or the internalization of the institutional
norms by subjects fearful of punishment in
a context of widespread surveillance.
B 168
Foucault found this internalization of norms
intriguing but sought to push forward the study of
power beyond the constraining disciplinarity of
institutional contexts. In The History of Sexuality
(1990), Foucault explained how knowledge and
ritualized practices were imbued with a kind of
productive power capable of engendering subjec-
tivities and modes of being in the world that
circulate throughout society. Foucault’s contribu-
tion to theorizing biopower was thus the recogni-
tion that power does not simply constrain; it also
produces, primarily by eliciting and governing
life forces. Power’s productive capacities can be
investigated by examining how knowledge and
norms actually elicit ways of being and forms of
subjectivity desiring, believing, and behaving
across social life.
According to Foucault (1990), biopower has
two distinct expressions under western liberal-
ism: (1) biopolitics operates at the level of the
entire populace and (2) anatomo-politics operates
at the level of the individual. Biopolitics are
expressed in the development of indices of
knowledge about populations by expert authori-
ties acting within both public (i.e., state) and
private institutions (e.g., hospitals). Biopolitics
takes the health and welfare of the population as
a political and scientific problem space.
Biopolitics in the modern era tends to operate
primarily through security mechanisms aimed at
protecting and optimizing life, rather than
through disciplinary ones (Foucault, 2008).
Biopolitics circulate productively as individuals
willingly adopt experts’ recommendations about
how to enhance their personal health, relation-
ships, parenting, career development, etc. Indi-
viduals thus participate in their own disciplining,
objectification, and subjectification in their pur-
suit of happiness and success. In sum, biopolitics
circulate within institutions and across individ-
uals’ self-cultivations. In contrast, anatomo-
politics are the technologies of power that act
upon individuals in order to discipline and/or
normalize their life energies and bodily comport-
ment toward the ends of state security and capital
accumulation (Foucault, 1979, 1990). Anatomo-
politics appropriates disciplinary power for the
purposes of micromanaging the life forces of
Biopower
populations, historically, within specific terri-
tories. By incorporating anatomo-politics within
his definition of biopower, Foucault acknowl-
edged that forms of knowledge and practices
that elicit energies and forces would necessarily
be supplemented by constraining disciplines
capable of operating as negative forces against
the productive ones.
Foucault (2008) located the historical
emergence of biopower under western state
mercantilism in England, France, and Germany
in police apparatuses aimed at improving the
health of the sovereign’s subjects and through
the development of expert vital knowledge of
the body politic. The development of political
statistics in England was a particularly powerful
biopolitical innovation because as statisticians
sought to represent the populace in terms of
the factors that impacted their productivity,
they simultaneously rendered the populace
a representable space that could be governed
through expert knowledge, government policy,
popularly disseminated hygienic protocols,
etc. (Foucault, 2007; e.g., see Donzelot, 1977).
In The Order of Things, Foucault (1994)
described how late nineteenth century academic
disciplines and professional practices of psychol-
ogy established biopolitical norms, which served
as the basis for new technologies of power that
operated upon the population in order to elicit and
channel its vital forces while reducing risks to
those forces. Institutional observations and case-
by-case analyses provided by doctors, psychia-
trists, and criminologists played important roles
in developing biopolitical norms. These norms
were then used to discipline individuals in
enclosed institutional spaces such as schools,
hospitals, and factories (Foucault, 1979).
Eventually, institutionally derived disciplines,
particularly those linked to health, would
circulate widely as personal “technologies of the
self” aimed at individual optimization. These
were willingly adopted by citizens hoping to
enhance personal well-being (Foucault, 1990).
The discourse and techniques of the new dis-
cipline of psychology operated in two important
ways to enhance the governability of populations.
First, they operated as “dividing practices,”
Biopower
dividing the individual internally or dividing him
or her from others (see Foucault, 1983, p. 208).
Second, they operated as a technique of “subjecti-
fication” by transforming individuals into partic-
ular kinds of subjects (Foucault, 1983, p. 208).
The effects of these developments of power was
the increased significance of the “action of the
norm” in contrast with law (1990, p. 144) as the
former was incorporated into a variety of regula-
tory of “apparatuses” (e.g., medical and adminis-
trative), which established and enforced
normative behavior (p. 144). Thus, biopower, or
the conjoined influence of anatomo and
biopolitics, operated by “distributing the living
in the domain of value and utility” and had the
power “to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierar-
chize,” ultimately effecting “distributions around
the norm” (p. 144). Foucault’s The Birth of Lib-
eral Biopolitics (2008) describes the evolution of
biopower across early western capitalism through
1980s era – neoliberalism.
Nikolas Rose’s (1990, 1992) works provide
insight as to how the newly developed discourse
of psychology helped regulate populations by
rendering individuals “inscribable” and thus
“scientifically calculable” though dividing
practices. Rose argued that psychology’s
effectiveness as a form of biopower lay in its
capacity to “systematize and lend coherence to
the ways in which authorities visualize, evaluate,
and diagnose the conduct of their human sub-
jects–render rational the grounds of decision
and action” (1992, p. 357). Systematization and
coherence were achieved by objectifying subjec-
tivity by rendering it visible, stable, and
amendable to technical evaluation and manipula-
tion (Rose). Subjectifying practices followed as
individuals claimed as their own those identities
proffered in expert discourses. Promises of
healthier bodies and minds encouraged individ-
uals to appropriate expert technologies as
personal habits and routines.
More recently, Derek Hook (2010) has
explicated the significance of Foucault’s analyt-
ics of power for the discipline of psychology.
Hook describes diverse ways how power
shapes psychology’s institutional and everyday
operations – therapy, counseling, research, and
169 B
prevention – in order to reveal the violence that
can at times be implicit in seemingly neutral and
independent knowledge. Hook specifically
focuses on how power infuses designations of
abnormality and how racialized politics infuse B
personalized biopolitical technologies of the
self. Hook’s documents the relevance of
biopower for the discipline of psychology while
disclosing our misplaced faith in the impartial
authority of science.
Keywords
Biopower; biopolitics; anatomo-politics;
discipline; subjectification; neoliberalism
Traditional Debates
Foucault’s insights on biopower explicate how
power operates at the most fundamental levels of
subject constitution. However, many critics argue
that his analysis implies that sovereign, repressive
forms of power are diminished under liberalism as
Foucault neglects discussion of contemporary
forms of repression (see Dean, 1999; Nadesan,
2008). Foucault’s (2007) examination of “letting
die” in Society Must Be Defended as a powerful
liberal expression of sovereignty can be regarded
as partial response to these criticisms. Sover-
eignty in the modern era is reformulated in rela-
tion to the designation of some populations as
outside of the domain of liberal rights and life-
promoting biopolitics. Accordingly, Giorgio
Agamben (1998) and Roberto Esposito (2008)
both explicate how specific populations are essen-
tially denied life by withdrawing its means. Sov-
ereignty is entailed both in the withdrawal and in
the rationalization of exclusion through the sym-
bolical designating populations as outside of, and
even threatening to, the body politic.
Critical Debates
Foucault’s efforts to distinguish his work from
the structural Marxists led him to de-emphasize
B 170
repressive sovereignty; yet, as resource scarcity
and inequality grow in the early twenty-first
century, so also does civil unrest, which is met
with the brute authoritarianism of pepper-
spraying police in the USA and secret prisons
complete with torture, abroad. Moreover,
the liberal market Foucault contemplated in
The Birth of Biopolitics has essentially swapped
the logic of competition for one of oligarchic
control. Biopower was premised on the liberal
state’s regard for the laboring power of its domes-
tic population; however, neoliberal globalization,
automation, and financialization have displaced
the importance of domestic labor and that dis-
placement is eroding the perceived import of the
proto-eugenic aspects of liberal biopolitics. Scar-
city, over-population, and environmental degra-
dation may further erode liberalism’s more
pastoral aspects. Liberal biopolitics may have
less strategic relevance within the hegemonic
forms of government now evolving under these
conditions.
References
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and
bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, CA:
Stanford University.
Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in
modern society. London: Sage.
Donzelot, J. (1977). c (R. Hurley, Trans.). Baltimore: John
Hopkins.
Esposito, R. (2008). Bios: Biopolitics and philosophy
(T. Campbell, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish (A. Sheridan,
Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1983). The subject and power. In H. L.
Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault:
Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics
(pp. 208–264). Chicago: University of Chicago.
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An intro-
duction (R. Hurley Trans.). New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1994). The order of things: An archeology
of the human sciences. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population
(M. Senellart, Ed., G. Burchell, Trans.). Houndsmills:
Palgrave.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at
the Collège de France 1978-1979. (G. Burchell, Trans.
M. Senellart, Ed.). Houndmills: Palgrave.
Hook, D. (2010). Foucault, psychology and the analytics
of power. New York: Palgrave.
Bisexuality
Nadesan, M. (2008). Biopower, governmentality and
everyday life. New York: Routledge.
Rose, N. (1990). Governing the soul: The shaping of the
private self. London: Routledge.
Rose, N. (1992). Engineering the human soul: Analyzing
psychological expertise. Science in Context, 5(2),
351–369.
Online Resources
Biopolitics. Generation online. Available (http://www.
generation-online.org/c/cbiopolitics.htm)
The biopolitics of security network. Available (http://
www.keele.ac.uk/bos/index.htm)
What is biopower. Utopia or Bust. Available
(http://utopiaorbust.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/what-
is-biopower/)
Bisexuality
Meg Barker
Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University,
Milton Keynes, UK
Introduction
Bisexuality has been an under-researched and
under-theorized topic in the psychology of sexu-
ality and in the study of human sexualities more
broadly. The main reason for this is that it
occupies a problematic position within the dom-
inant heteronormative understanding of human
sexuality which views people as dichotomously
attracted to either the “same gender” or the
“opposite gender” with no space for attraction
to more than one gender. Related to this, bisexu-
ality has often been regarded as problematic
within LGBT politics with its potential to disrupt
some of the foundations upon which lesbian and
gay rights have been fought for (essential and
dichotomous sexuality on the basis of gender of
attraction).
Up until very recently, traditional psycholo-
gists have attempted to disprove the existence of
bisexuality (e.g., Rieger, Chivers, & Bailey,
2005), and bisexuality has been excluded from
mainstream psychology textbooks or only briefly
mentioned and then dropped due to the problems
Bisexuality
it poses for conventional explanations of human
sexuality (Barker, 2007). There has been a risk of
a similar invisibility within critical psychological
work in a leap to a queer understanding of sexu-
ality which also risks exclusion of (some)
bisexual experience. However, a developing
movement of bisexual academics is working
internationally to increase the visibility of bisex-
uality within traditional and critical work, as well
as in policy and practice.
Definition
Bisexuality is a broad umbrella term. While it can
generally be understood as having attraction to
more than one gender, this definition can include
many different groups. A recent review (Barker,
Richards, & Bowes-Catton, 2012) identified
these as:
• People who see themselves as attracted to
“both men and women.”
• People who are mostly attracted to one gender
but recognize that this is not exclusive.
• People who experience their sexual identities
as fluid and changeable over time.
• People who see their attraction as “regardless
of gender” (other aspects of people are more
important in determining who they are
attracted to).
• People who dispute the idea that there are only
two genders and that people are attracted to
one, the other, or both.
Sometimes the word “bisexual” is understood
as implying the first of these definitions (“bi”
referring to “both” men and women); however,
it has been proposed that understanding the “bi”
to mean attraction to both “same gender” and
“other genders” opens up the term to include all
of these groups. This certainly fits the definitions
of members of bisexual communities better as
they generally emphasize attraction to “more
than one gender” or “regardless of gender.”
People who fit into the groups listed may not
identify themselves as bisexual for many
reasons, significantly those relating to bisexual
invisibility and biphobia and/or cultural under-
standings of sexuality which do not include such
171 B
a concept. A key issue for research in this area is
clarification of how bisexuality is being defined
in each study. This has implications for how
many people are encompassed within bisexual-
ity, depending on whether it is defined on the B
basis of attraction, behavior, or identity, for
example.
Some people, particularly those in the latter
groups listed above, prefer words like “queer”,
“omnisexual,” or “pansexual” to describe their
sexuality, especially if they feel that bisexuality
maintains gender as a defining feature of
sexuality. The word “biromantic” is used within
asexual communities for asexual people who are
romantically attracted to more than one gender.
“Bisexual allies” are people who are part of
bisexual communities or in relationships with
bisexual people and thus share experiences such
as biphobia without necessarily being bisexual
themselves.
A key concept in relation to bisexuality is
“biphobia.” This refers to negative attitudes,
emotions, behaviors, and structures relating to
bisexual people and others who are attracted to
more than one gender. Biphobia, like
transphobia, should not be encompassed within
“homophobia” as it refers to specific negativity
towards bisexual people rather than negativity on
the basis of “same-gender” attraction (which
many bisexual people also experience, of course).
Common examples of biphobia include distrust
of bisexual people on the basis of their sexuality,
assumptions of greed and promiscuity, and view-
ing them as confused or going through a phase on
the way to a “mature” gay or straight identity.
These latter assumptions relate to “bisexual
invisibility” or “bisexual erasure.” Rooted in
dichotomous understandings of human sexuality,
these refer to failure to represent bisexuality at all
or tokenistic mentions that are then dropped (e.g.,
in much “LGB” or “LGBT” policy and practice
which only really relates to lesbians and gay
men). Media depictions where characters go
from gay to straight (or vice versa) or public
figures with relationships with more than one
gender and called “gay” are examples of bisexual
invisibility. A related concept is that of
“monosexual privilege” which is the privilege
B 172
experienced by all who experience attraction to
only one gender (see Eisner’s monosexual privi-
lege checklist available through www.radicalbi.
wordpress.com).
Keywords
Biphobia; biromantic; bisexual allies; bisexual
erasure; bisexual invisibility; bisexuality;
heteronormativity; monosexual privilege;
omnisexual; pansexual; queer
History
Bisexuality was not used in its current meaning
until relatively recently. The sexology of the
nineteenth century “invented” homosexuality
and heterosexuality (as identity terms), and
Freud’s work refined understandings of sexual
subjects who could be identified according to
their attractions. Freud did not use the word
“bisexual” under its current meaning (his use of
this term referred to someone having both mas-
culine and feminine attributes) but rather he
referred to “polymorphous perversity” as the nat-
ural state for children before their sexuality had
been canalized towards a certain object and aim.
While heterosexuality and genital sex were
viewed as the normal object and aim outcome
by Freud, the former being the outcome of reso-
lution of the Oedipus complex, he argued that
these were rarely completely achieved. After
Freud, however, both psychoanalysis and psychi-
atry repudiated bisexuality as a scientific false-
hood (as well as pathologizing homosexuality)
(Angelides, 2001). The dichotomous – and hier-
archical – model of human sexuality took hold,
and biological models gradually replaced Freud-
ian models of canalization as a biopsychosocial
process.
One major challenge to this dichotomous
model of human sexuality in the twentieth cen-
tury was the work of Kinsey and colleagues
which conceptualized gender of attraction on
a continuum and found that many people fell
Bisexuality
somewhere between exclusively heterosexual or
homosexual. Some researchers have developed
Kinsey’s ideas, for example, Fritz Klein’s grid
which separates out attraction and behavior
and includes past and future sexuality and Lisa
Diamond’s (2009) work on sexual fluidity and
changes in sexual identity and desire over time.
However, the dichotomous view of sexuality
predominates in mainstream psychology.
Traditional Debates
While some mainstream psychology textbooks
make brief mention of Kinsey’s work, they fail
to address the challenges that non-dichotomous
understandings of sexuality pose for the over-
whelming bulk of psychological research in this
area which has conceptualized sexuality as
dichotomous and operated from this basis to
develop (usually biological) explanations of the
existence of homosexuality. Bisexual people are
not included in such research either because they
are explicitly excluded or because they are incor-
porated with either heterosexual or lesbian/gay
participants. Mainstream psychology also fails to
represent bisexual experience in other areas such
as the developmental psychology of identity and
the social psychology of relationships and preju-
dice (Barker, 2007).
Sexuality surveys have tended to conclude
that there are very low numbers of bisexual
people due to small proportions claiming that
identity term, without considering the issues of
biphobia and bisexual invisibility which are
likely to be in play, and the far greater numbers
who report sexual contact and/or attraction to
more than one gender (Barker et al., 2012).
Recently, the issue of the existence of bisexuality
was directly brought into question by a widely
popularized biological psychology study which
claimed to find that men had exclusively homo-
sexual or heterosexual attraction (Rieger et al.,
2005). Major doubts were raised about the meth-
odology of this study (Hutchins, 2005), and the
researchers have subsequently overturned their
original conclusions and found specifically
Bisexuality
bisexual patterns of arousal (Rosenthal, Sylva,
Safron, & Bailey, 2011).
Thanks to bodies like the American Institute
of Bisexuality and the Journal of Bisexuality,
recent years have seen trends in mainstream psy-
chology and sexology away from questions of the
existence and extent of bisexuality, although to
date such research has failed to trickle down to
mainstream psychology textbooks or curricula.
For example, recent years have seen increased
research into the mental health of bisexual people
(which is consistently found to be poorer that of
either heterosexual or lesbian and gay cohorts,
linked to experiences of biphobia) as well as the
operation of biphobia, development of bisexual
identity, experiences of specific groups of bisex-
ual people (Fox, 2004), and positive aspects of
bisexual identity (Rostosky, Riggle, Pascale-
Hague, & McCants, 2010).
Critical Debates
Critical psychology has tended to embrace more
social constructionist understandings of human
sexuality, drawing upon writers such as Foucault
and Butler, and the queer theorists who followed
them. Queer theory opens up the possibility for
dismantling heteronormativity and embracing the
diversity of LGBTQ experience, and for these
reasons most bisexual activism has shifted from
an identity politics agenda to a queer politics one
in the last two decades. However, in its challeng-
ing of all sexual identities, queer theory also risks
maintaining bisexual invisibility, and indeed
bisexuality is rarely mentioned in queer texts.
While queer theory stresses multiplicity and
intersectionality, such that bisexual practices are
recognized and valued in all their complexity,
bisexuality as a stable identity and a history is
problematized. Some authors have suggested that
bisexuality is never afforded a place in the pre-
sent tense since psychoanalysis relegates it to
a polymorphously perverse past and queer theory
and politics to a utopian future, thus potentially
silencing bisexuality before it has even found
a voice (Barker & Langdridge, 2008).
173 B
Turning to critical psychological research that
has addressed bisexual identities explicitly, this
has tended to focus on how bisexual people con-
struct their identities through language. Such
research has been polarized into that affirming B
the queer potentials of bisexual identities to resist
dichotomies of gay and straight, male and female,
and that critiquing the limitations of bisexuality,
particularly the way bisexual participants still
draw on dichotomies of gender (e.g., “both”
men and women) when discussing their identities
and attractions. It is easy, again, for the lived
experience of bisexual people to be lost in such
research: there has been a call for such research to
move beyond celebratory/critical polarization
and to study bisexual experience beyond the
focus on gender and language, mirroring the
recent turns in critical psychology towards
embodiment, affect, experience, and materiality
(Barker et al., 2012).
Outside of psychology there have been a number
of more critical engagements with bisexuality
including Angelides’s history of bisexuality,
Marjorie Garber’s writings on bisexuality and
everyday life, Maria Pramaggiore’s epistemologies
of the fence, and Clare Hemmings’s geographical
work on bisexual spaces (see Storr, 1999).
International Relevance
Mainstream bisexuality research has been dom-
inated by the United States due to the existence
of a funded institute (the American Institute of
Bisexuality), there focused on quantitative
social psychological and biological psychologi-
cal research, and a related journal (the Journal of
Bisexuality). However, the Journal of Bisexual-
ity is welcoming of articles from a range of
disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical
positions as well as from diverse cultural
contexts.
In recent years, a group of bisexual academics
has developed in the UK including several criti-
cal psychologists (BiUK). This group has mostly
come from within the UK bisexual communities
themselves and retains an explicitly political
B 174
stance and a commitment to research that is
directly relevant to bisexual people themselves
(with questions coming from the communities,
and research being disseminated directly back to
them, and informing activism).
In 2010, BiUK put on the first international
academic conference on bisexuality (BiReCon)
which attracted attendees from many countries
including Canada, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, Hol-
land, Spain, and Israel, as well as the UK and
USA. There is also an active academic-bi email
list which has members from many countries
around the globe. There is another hub of bisex-
ual scholarship in Australia (with the work of
Steven Angelides and Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli,
among others) and exciting work coming out of
Israel and Spain in particular.
Practice Relevance
Bisexuality research is particularly strongly
related to practice, perhaps due to the fact that
many researchers and academics in this field are
also activists and practitioners themselves.
Already bisexual academics and psychologists
have been involved in putting together two key
reports (the 2010 San Francisco bisexuality invis-
ibility report and Barker et al., 2012, Bisexuality
Report). These bring together international
research to inform recommendations on policy
and practice and are being taken up by govern-
ment and key LGBTQ organizations.
Events such as BiReCon are explicitly tied to
bisexual communities and to practice as they tend
to take place on the day before the bisexual com-
munity conference and invite practitioners, pol-
icy makers, and organizational representatives to
discuss applied implications of the research
presented.
Key practice areas in relation to bisexuality
include the workplace, education (particularly
biphobic bullying), criminal justice (notably
hate crimes and asylum seeking), sport, and
media representation. Perhaps the most vital
practice area is health due to the mental health
findings on bisexual people. Research suggests
Bisexuality
that practitioners are poorly educated around
bisexuality and frequently perpetuate biphobia
and bisexual exclusion. This also has implica-
tions for the areas of physical and sexual health
(see Barker et al., 2012). Authors such as Beth
Firestein and Ron Fox have published collections
for counselors and psychotherapists working with
bisexual clients.
Future Directions
Hopefully the future will see further expansion of
bisexual psychology and research worldwide,
including further international conference and
collaborations to influence policy and practice
in these areas. After a lull in critical bisexual
theory since the late 1990s, at least two signifi-
cant texts will be appearing in the near future,
Surya Monro’s book “Bisexuality, Sociology and
Political theory” (Palgrave Macmillan) and Shiri
Eisner’s “notes for a bisexual revolution” (pub-
lisher to be confirmed) which move forward crit-
ical theory in this field as well as paying close
attention to intersectionality, bisexual move-
ments globally, and implications beyond gender
and sexuality.
There has also been a recent dissemination of
research guidelines, designed to address the prob-
lems of past research in this area. A set of guide-
lines has been published on the BiUK website
(soon also to be published in the Journal of
Bisexuality) and is also being adapted for specific
groups (such as laboratory researchers and
humanities scholars).
Critical psychological research in this area
will necessarily draw on interdisciplinary work
and activism, since much of the critical theory on
bisexuality has taken place within other disci-
plines and/or emerged from grassroots politics.
Key areas for future research are the lived expe-
rience of diverse bisexual people; the operations
of biphobia and bisexual invisibility; intersec-
tions with race, gender, and age in particular;
and a fuller understanding of the dynamics and
oppressions underlying the quantitative mental
health findings.
Blackness 175 B
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awareness of the ways they are observed from
Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press.
Hutchins, L. (2005). Sexual prejudice: The erasure of the outside (Lorde, 2007). Because the “double-
bisexuals in academia and the media. American ness” of DuBois’s idea refers not to blackness and
Sexuality Magazine, 3(4). Accessed March 20, 2012, whiteness, but to blackness and nationality, it is
from http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bai-
urgently important that critical theorists regard
ley/Bisexuality/American%20Sexuality/American%
20Sexuality%20magazine%20-%20The%20erasure% the differences between identities, experiences,
20of%20bisexuals.htm on and populations separated by oceans and national
Rieger, G., Chivers, M. L., & Bailey, J. M. (2005). Sexual boundaries that nonetheless inform dominant
arousal patterns of bisexual men. Psychological Sci-
conceptions of blackness. Because of pioneering
ence, 16(8), 579–584.
Rosenthal, A. M., Sylva, D., Safron, A., & Bailey, J. M. work on intersectionality by figures like
(2011). Sexual arousal patterns of bisexual men Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) and Patricia Hill
revisited. Biological Psychology, 88(1), 112–5. Collins (2008), it is also necessary to consider the
Rostosky, S. S., Riggle, E. D. B., Pascale-Hague, D. P., &
ways that race is lived within circumstances con-
McCants, L. E. (2010). The positive aspects of
bisexual self-identification. Psychology & Sexuality, tiguous to gender, class, ableness, and sexuality.
1(2), 131–144.
Storr, M. (Ed.). (1999). Bisexuality: A critical reader.
London: Routledge.
Definition

Online Resources The term blackness invites a variety of interpre-

BiUK: www.biuk.org
Shiri Eisner’s website: www.radicalbi.wordpress.com
American Institute of Bisexuality: www.bisexual.org
Journal of Bisexuality: www.tandfonline.com/toc/wjbi20/
current
Academic-bi: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/academic_bi
tations. As Malcolm X discovered in the dictio-
nary in a prison library, it has been imagined as
having prescriptive moral and aesthetic meanings
(Malcolm and Haley, 2008). It is regarded as
heritable, but its effects reach far beyond the
B 176
biological body. Enslaved by a doctor in Georgia,
John “Fed” Brown was subject to experiments
that stripped his skin to locate the source of
blackness (1971). Playground bullies ask the nar-
rator, in Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama
(2009), if his pigment rubs off. Like the soul
and metaphysical heart, the meaning of blackness
has nonetheless been, in constructions both glo-
rious and injurious, imagined as boundless.
The word itself is expansive, invoking
negritude – the concept that midcentury
Francophone African intellectuals offered as
grounds to reframe and revalue colonized
Africans – but also complicating it, because of
the locations of black people far outside of the
African continent. Blackness cannot encapsulate
the conditions of African-Americans, Afro-Brits,
Africans, or Caribbeans. It is, thus, an umbrella
term referring to a potentially infinite number of
experiences and lives – of Jamaica Kincaid,
Muhammad Ali, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James,
Naomi Campbell, Bayard Rustin, Mos Def, and
millions of others – emerging from displacements
and upheavals of the African diaspora.
Keywords
Race; racism; essentialism; constructivism;
inequality
History
The influential five-volume series, The Image of
the Black in Western Art, has done much to
contest narratives of first contact or discovery
between Europeans and Africans, demonstrating
that cultural exchange between the two
continents – separated by a thin margin of fewer
than 20 km at Gibraltar – has been the norm,
rather than the exception, since antiquity
(Bindman et al., 2010). These ancient images do
not represent blackness as evil, but as half of
a necessary duality. Double-sided sculptures
of black and white faces were, after all, a genre
of Western sculpture. A rapidly Christianizing
and Crusading Europe seems to have shifted
Blackness
this definition, narratives of racial difference
as environmental, cultural, and sometimes
pathological. In the medieval romance The King
of Tars, a Saracen loses his pigment upon being
baptized: “his colour that lodlich and blak
was,/Hit becom feir thorw Godes gras/And cler
without blame” (Burnley & Wiggins, 2003).
The slave trade seems to have exacerbated and
dramatized the ideology of race, rather than cre-
ate it. Indeed, the story of the so-called New
World was always a story of blackness. “Up to
the year 1820,” Walter Johnson (2001) writes,
“five times as many Africans traveled across the
Atlantic as did Europeans. And those numbers do
not include the dead – the 5 % of the human cargo
who died in crossings that took 3 weeks and the
quarter who died in crossings that took
3 months.”
Slavery was certainly ballasted by the ideol-
ogy of race as an ineradicable biological differ-
ence. Both Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State
of Virginia (1785) and Samuel Cartwright’s
Reports on the Diseases and Peculiarities of the
Negro Race (1851) – influential texts that
inscribed racial alterity in the United States –
posit servitude as inherent to blackness. But, as
historian Mark M. Smith (2008) has shown, these
theorizations were profoundly unstable. Planters
like Jefferson saw that populations of enslaved
were lightening and whitening; under conditions
of forced sex and reproduction on the plantation,
discerning racial difference with the eye alone
became unstable. Science of the vernacular and
institutional varieties began to insist that the eye
was a flawed empirical tool: the smell of black
bodies, the sound of black voices, and the texture
of black flesh were posited as more reliable repos-
itories of difference. The unreliability of the eye
and the persistence of racial exogamy necessi-
tated, in the minds of many whites, the creation
of a racial science that stabilized boundaries.
Critical Debates
Even in the midst of dramatic inequality and
chattel slavery in the United States, there was,
as Eric Lott (1995) has argued, love of and theft
Blackness
from black communities by a dominant culture
that regarded them as peculiarly immune to
Victorian sexual and corporeal repressions.
Imitation – first in anti-mimetic blackface, and
eventually in more figurative forms of mimicry –
was the expression of this emotional attachment
to blackness. Contemporary figurations of black-
ness exist in curious continuity with this love and
theft. Even the rarefied discourse of postmodern
critical theory has, as bell Hooks (1999) argues,
“appropriate[d] the experience of ‘Otherness’ to
enhance the discourse or to be radically chic,”
trafficking in subversion while ignoring the
struggle for social justice.
But critical theory is not without utility for
antiracist politics. Critical race theorists have
demonstrated that an illusory color blindness
serves as the privileged response to ongoing
racial inequality, providing a rhetorical cover by
which poverty and vulnerability to violence are
explained away as evidence of moral failings on
the part of the oppressed. Privileged subjects, on
the other hand, inoculate contemporary culture
against critique by imagining racism as
a personal failing of particular individuals, rather
than a structural feature of exclusionary social
formations (Bonilla-Silva, 2009; Crenshaw,
Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995).
International Relevance
In The Four Migrations, historian Ira Berlin
(2010) argues that four essential movements –
from Africa to the Americas, from the eastern
seaboard of the United States to its cotton-
producing plantations, from agrarian sites to
urban ones, and, in the twenty-first century,
between the sites of the African diaspora in
new patterns of immigration – have created
a transnational blackness defined by motion.
Within various sites of the diaspora, Berlin
argues, this will create communities and coali-
tions no longer chiefly defined by a shared legacy
of slavery or migration, but by heterogeneity.
These circuits of exchange demonstrate the
ways black cosmopolitanism is not an exception
or aberration, but the norm.
177 B
Practical Relevance
Though this brief introduction has been chiefly
attentive to critical and social theory, practi-
tioners of psychiatry and psychology can benefit B
from considering theoretical conversations
among and between humanists and social scien-
tists. Jonathan Metzl, a writer who straddles
both worlds as a practicing psychiatrist and
scholar of American Studies, authored a case
study of the evolution of the schizophrenia diag-
nosis that illustrates productive grounds of
exchange. In The Protest Psychosis (2010), he
demonstrates that schizophrenia, like hysteria or
neurasthenia, was once regarded as a disease of
white women; its diagnostic criteria were there-
fore characterized by passivity and weakness.
But in the 1960s, in the wake of civil rights and
urban unrest, schizophrenia evolved into
a “protest psychosis” – the product of racism,
even, as some psychologists argued, the logical
extension of DuBoisian double consciousness –
that had the political effect of stigmatizing and
institutionalizing African-Americans, of
cementing an association between schizophre-
nia and violence in clinical and popular concep-
tions, and of ensuring that four times as many
African-Americans as whites were diagnosed
with schizophrenia.
Though her concern is less with psychology
than with the history of medical experimentation,
Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid
(2008) also has utility for mental health profes-
sionals, as she offers a powerful narrative about
the development of iatrophobia – the fear of
doctors and institutionalized medicine – within
communities that have not only been systemati-
cally barred from the benefits of medicine but
have also been regarded as fertile fields for doc-
tors’ use. From James Marion Sims’s develop-
ment of the speculum through repeated surgeries
on enslaved women to Alfred Kligman’s use of
prisoners at Holmesburg Prison as “acres of skin”
on whose bodies the ingredients of detergents
and perfumes could be tested, abuse has been
a constant. Iatrophobia is therefore not irrational,
but the consequence of particular histories and
social traumas.
B 178
These experiments were, as Dorothy Roberts
demonstrates in Killing the Black Body
(1998), often specifically targeted to control
the reproductivity of women of color. Post-
Emancipation cultures no longer valued black
people for their labor; exterminationist impulses
were therefore exercised on black women’s bod-
ies and were exported from the US mainland to
the rest of the Americas (Briggs, 2003).
Future Directions
Within American political debates about same-sex
marriage and broader civil rights for sexual minor-
ities, pundits of various races have demonstrated
an obsession with the relationship between “blacks
and gays,” a phrase – as Elizabeth Spelman (1990)
argued of gender and race – that erroneously sug-
gests that there is no overlap between these com-
munities. From liberal journalist Toure’s (2012)
concern that black voters might “punish Obama
for his support of gay rights” to the conservative
National Organization for Marriage’s stated desire
to drive “a wedge between gays and blacks”
(Desmond-Harris, 2012) to protest signs and
bumper-sticker suggestions that “gay is the new
black” (Associated Press, 2008), these fixations
suggest the continuing necessity of intersectional
approaches that resist displacements of complex
identities. Samuel R. Delany’s powerful essay,
“Some Queer Notions About Race” (2003), argues
for theorizations that broaden out from the
biological question of whether identities are born
or made to affirmative defenses of institutions and
communities that enable nonnormative cultural
expressions.
A decade before postmodern critical theorists
began to argue for more expansive definitions of
masculinity, black feminist theorists were partic-
ularly attentive to the lived experiences of black
men. From “Man Child” (2007), Audre Lorde’s
passionate essay on the upbringing of sons by
progressive mothers, to Hortense Spillers’
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), black
feminist critics have complicated conflictual and
binaristic conceptions of gender, as well as
Blackness
pathologizing narratives of black women’s
strength (Moynihan, 1965). This project is, as
demonstrated by Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister
Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women
n America (2011), an ongoing one in a world
where persistent inequalities demonstrate that,
among African diasporic people, “being strong
isn’t enough.” Strength can and often is aug-
mented by “knowledge, especially that which
enhances daily life and strengthens our capacity
to survive” (Hooks, 1999).
References
Berlin, I. (2010). The making of African America: The four
great migrations. New York: Viking Press.
Bindman, D., Gates, J. H., Dalton, K. C., Tanner, J.,
Vercoutter, J., Leclant, J., et al. (2010). The image of
the black in western art: From the Pharaohs to the fall
of the Roman Empire (Vol. I). Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Publishers of Harvard University Press.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2009). Racism without racists: Color-
blind racism and the persistence of inequality in
America. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Briggs, L. (2003). Reproducing empire: Race, sex, science,
and U.S. imperialism. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Brown, J. F. (1971). In L. A. Chamerovzow (Ed.), Slave
life in Georgia. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries
Press.
Collins, P. H. (2008). Black feminist thought: Knowledge,
consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New
York: Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Intersectionality, identity
politics, and violence against women of color.
Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Crenshaw, K. W., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K.
(1995). Critical race theory: The key writings that
formed the movement. New York: New Press.
Delany, S. R. (2003). Some queer notions about race.
In J. D’Emilio & C. Smyth (Eds.), Queer cultures.
New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
DuBois, W. E. B. (1987). Writings: The suppression of the
African slave-trade/The souls of black folk/dusk of
dawn/essays and articles. New York: Library of
America.
Harris-Perry, M. (2011). Sister citizen: Shame, stereo-
types, and black women in America. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Hooks, B. (1999). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural
politics. Boston: South End Press.
Hughes, L. (2009). Ask your mama: 12 moods for jazz.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Body Image, Overview
Johnson, W. (2001). Soul by soul: Life inside the antebel-
lum slave market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider. New York: Crossing
Press Feminist Series.
Lott, E. (1995). Love and theft: Blackface minstrelsy and
the American working class. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Malcolm, X., & Haley, A. (2008). The autobiography of
Malcolm X. New York: Penguin Modern Classics.
Metzl, J. (2010). The protest psychosis: How schizophre-
nia became a black disease. Boston: Beacon Press.
Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family: The case for
national action. Washington, DC: United States
Department of Labor Office of Policy Planning and
Research.
Roberts, D. (1998). Killing the black body: Race,
reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. New York:
Vintage Press.
Smith, M. M. (2008). How race is made: Slavery,
segregation, and the senses. Chapel Hill, NC:
The University of North Carolina Press.
Spelman, E. (1990). Inessential woman: Problems of
exclusion in feminist thought. Boston: Beacon Press.
Spillers, H. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s maybe: An
American grammar book. Diacritics, 17(2), 64–81.
Washington, H. (2008). Medical apartheid: The dark
history of medical experimentation on black
Americans from colonial times to the present.
New York: Anchor Books.
Online Resources
Associated Press. (2008). “Is gay the new black?”
MSNBC. Retrieved June 4, 2012, from http://www.
msnbc.msn.com/id/27983598/ns/us_news-life/t/gay-
new-black-debate-marriage-ban
Burnley, D., & Wiggins, A. (Eds.). (2003). The
king of tars. Retrieved June 4, 2012, from
Auchinleck Manuscript http://auchinleck.nls.uk/mss/
tars.html
Cartwright, S. (1851). Diseases and peculiarities of the
Negro Race. Retrieved June 4, 2012, from Public
Broadcasting Service http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
part4/4h3106t.html
Desmond-Harris, J. (2012). “Who’s trying to divide
gays and blacks?” Retrieved June 4, 2012, from
the root http://www.theroot.com/buzz/whos-trying-
divide-blacks-and-gays
Jefferson, T. (1785). Notes on the state of Virginia.
Retrieved June 4, 2012, from Electronic Text Center
of the University of Virginia Library http://etext.vir-
ginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html
Toure. (2012). “Will Black voters punish Obama for his
support of gay marriage?” Retrieved June 4, 2012,
from Time Ideas http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/09/
will-black-voters-punish-obama-for-his-support-of-
gay-rights/
179 B
Body Image, Overview
Kaley M. Roosen and Jennifer S. Mills
Department of Psychology, York University, B
Toronto, ON, Canada
Introduction
First described nearly a century ago, “body
image” can be loosely defined as the mental
representation of our bodies that we hold in our
minds. Originally, it was believed that body
image is a mirror image of what objectively exists
in the world, but that certain pathologies could
interfere with this perceptual process (e.g., phan-
tom limb pain or anorexia nervosa). However,
more recent literature suggests that body image
is strongly influenced by a variety of factors,
including, but not limited to, psychological,
social, cultural, biological, historical, and
individual factors (Cash & Smolak, 2011).
In clinical psychology, body image is
a construct that is implicated in both eating
disorders and body dysmorphic disorder. Many
individuals with these conditions experience an
inability to objectively perceive their body’s
appearance, size, or shape. Body dissatisfaction,
or a negative evaluation of the size, shape, or
appearance of one’s body, has been linked to
numerous problematic behaviors, including
binge eating, self-induced purging, excessive
exercise, caloric restriction, and smoking
(Cash, 2004). Body dissatisfaction has been
cited as one of the strongest risk factors for the
development of an eating disorder (Jacobi, Hay-
ward, de Zwaan, Kraemer, & Agras, 2004). Much
of the body image research conducted to date has
focused on women who struggle with eating dis-
orders and/or body dissatisfaction.
Recent trends in body image research include
the study of the sociocultural factors that impact
body image. Media images, social comparisons,
and weight-related feedback have all been found
to be important influences on body image among
women (Mills, Roosen, & Vella-Zarb, 2011).
B 180
Definition
Body image was described early on as the picture
we form in our mind of our body (Schilder, 1950).
A more recent definition describes body image as
“the picture we have in our minds of the size,
shape, and form of our bodies; and our feelings
concerning these characteristics and our constit-
uent body parts” (Slade, 1988, p. 20). This newer
definition highlights our current understanding of
body image as being both perceptual and evalua-
tive in nature. The perceptual component refers to
how we see our body size, shape, weight, physi-
cal characteristics, performance, and movement,
whereas the evaluative component refers to how
we feel about these attributes and how those
feelings influence our behaviors. The term
“body schema” is a related psychological
construct with varying definitions but typically
refers to the hypothetical neural mechanisms
related to sensorimotor representations of the
body (i.e., changes in body position and
movement coordination).
Keywords
Body; body dissatisfaction; eating disorder;
disordered eating; self-esteem; social construc-
tion of beauty; gender
History
The first documented discussions of body image
occurred nearly a century ago in the early field of
neuroscience. Around this time, medical science
was attempting to understand abnormal percep-
tual experiences of the body, such as phantom
limb pain in amputees (Fisher, 1990). During the
1930s and the following decades, Schilder was
among the first to use the term “body image” to
describe the picture we form in our minds of our
body and to highlight the subjective nature of
body image. He is also credited for bringing the
study of body image out of the realm of
Body Image, Overview
neurophysiology and into psychology. Psychoan-
alytic perspectives on body image were highly
influential during the first half of the twentieth
century and viewed body image as being
involved in the development of the ego. For
example, through the use of projective tech-
niques, clinicians could assess the psychological
“boundary” of an individual’s body image and,
hence, gain insight into a person’s past emotional
learning and any significant trauma. The clinical
significance of body image for eating disorders
was first introduced by Hilde Bruch (Bruch,
1962) who observed that patients with anorexia
nervosa reported feeling grossly overweight
despite the fact that they were emaciated. This
view of body image within the context of eating
disorders as a disturbance in one’s individual
experience of their body weight, size, or shape
has been highly influential in the way that we
research and currently conceptualize body image.
Traditional Debates
The traditional debates surrounding body image
within psychology revolve around its basic
nature. Researchers and clinical practitioners
have struggled with understanding the essential
characteristics that form the construct of body
image. As the field of psychology has evolved,
the answers to this question are changing as well.
The basic assumptions that underlie the body
image construct have important implications in
the measurement and treatment of body image
disturbances.
As reviewed above, body image is viewed as
having both a perceptual and an attitudinal com-
ponent. However, the importance of each of these
components in their applicability for explaining
body image disturbances has been a matter of
debate. Some researchers have argued that body
image disturbances can best be understood as
a discrepancy between a person’s actual (objec-
tive) body size and shape and their perceived
(subjective) size and shape, with larger discrep-
ancies being indicative of higher levels of
Body Image, Overview
psychopathology. However, recent research on
perceptual errors of body image has found that
overall, with or without an eating disorder, people
are generally poor at identifying their body size
and shape (for a review, see (Mills et al., 2011)).
Interestingly, people are reasonably accurate
when estimating the body size or shape of another
person. This research has called into question the
usefulness of conceptualizing body image as pri-
marily a perceptual process. Other researchers
have instead focused on the attitudinal aspects
of body image, stating that it is more meaningful
to examine how people feel about their body as
opposed to how they perceive it in their minds
(Smeets, 1997). The assumption here is that
high levels of body dissatisfaction are indicative
of body image disturbances. Again though,
body dissatisfaction in women is ubiquitous and
is not necessarily reflective of individual
psychopathology.
The second debate in the body image literature
surrounds whether or not an individual’s body
image is a stable personality characteristic (trait)
or something more flexible and fluid (state). Orig-
inally, body dissatisfaction was viewed as
a stable trait exhibited in persons with severe
psychopathology, such as in cases of anorexia
nervosa. However, more recent research has
called attention to the fluid aspects of body
image. For example, research has shown that
people feel differently about their body
depending on their current mood, feedback from
others, time of day, or exposure to certain media
(Cafri, Yamamiya, Brannick, & Thompson,
2005). Despite recent evidence to the contrary,
much of the research and measurement tools in
the study of body image still assume that it is
a stable trait.
The third debate surrounds the origins and
development of healthy (or distorted) body
image within individuals. Researchers frequently
discuss the multifaceted nature of body image.
However, the relative importance of each of these
factors is a matter of debate. Cognitive-
behavioral theorists highlight the importance of
individual beliefs about the meaning of body size
181 B
and shape as well as body-related behaviors.
Social or cultural influences (e.g., stigmatization
of obesity, feedback from others) are seen as
environmental inputs that the individual must
integrate within their existing cognitive schema. B
Behaviors such as repetitive body checking
(e.g., looking in the mirror) are understood to
exacerbate body dissatisfaction. At this time, the
cognitive-behavioral model of body image is
generally accepted. However, other theorists
highlight the role of additional factors, such as
past trauma and abuse, identification with femi-
nist ideals, and even family cohesion. As the field
evolves, it is anticipated that this question around
the origins of body image will remain a topic of
debate.
Finally, there is some debate about the effects
of exposure to media-portrayed thin ideal images
on women’s body image. It is unknown whether
the media reflects or informs societal attitudes
towards the thin ideal; however, it is probably
a combination of both. Nevertheless, the assump-
tion that the use of very thin models in fashion
and advertising is detrimental to women’s body
image has had an impact on society at large. In
2006, Spain passed regulation that no models
who were deemed to be medically underweight
(as calculated by body mass index) would be
permitted to participate in fashion shows, thereby
eliminating approximately 30 % of the models
employed in Madrid at the time. In response to
criticisms of the media’s portrayal of an unreal-
istic standard of beauty, some organizations have
enacted positive body image initiatives, such as
the Dove Self-Esteem Campaign. It is generally
agreed upon that the glorification of thin bodies
results in pressure for women to lose weight and
to achieve a very slim body. However, experi-
mental research has produced mixed results
pertaining to the immediate, causal effects of
thin ideal media images to body dissatisfaction
among female viewers (Mills, Polivy, Herman, &
Tiggemann, 2002). It is likely that personality
factors also play a role, with some individuals
being more vulnerable to negative effects of
such images than others. Body image theories,
B 182
such as those put forward by Cash and Smolak
(2011), highlight the importance of sociocultural
factors, and more research explaining the mech-
anisms that allow these factors to influence
women is warranted.
Critical Debates
Body image is theoretically complex in that it is
both a conscious and unconscious human expe-
rience informed by historical, cultural, social,
individual, and biological factors. The field of
psychology as a whole has been criticized for
overemphasizing individualistic, stable charac-
teristics associated with body image. Feminist
scholars have called for a revitalization of how
psychologists conceptualize and treat body
image and its associated problematic behaviors
(e.g., chronic dieting, purging, binge eating).
With estimates of over 75 % of average-weight
women “feeling fat” (Kilbourne, 1994), body
dissatisfaction has become the norm in Western
society. Bordo (1993) discusses how females
engaging in chronic dieting and exercise behav-
ior represent the “crystallization of a culture,”
meaning that women’s bodies are used as ves-
sels in which cultural preferences and norms are
captured. Indeed, the pressure to be thin has
emerged primarily within the last century.
Prior to this time, there is historical evidence of
larger bodies being desirable for women. Despite
this widespread cultural discourse, body image
treatment and prevention efforts remain centered
around how individuals can overcome cultural
pressure to be thin by challenging unrealistic cul-
tural messages and distorted body image thoughts.
Although these techniques may assist some indi-
viduals in feeling more positive about their bodies,
there is currently little to no attempt to change the
main cause of this discontent: societal pressure to
be thin.
Another debate related to body image high-
lights the economic, social, and political conse-
quences of pressure for women to achieve a very
slender body (Hesse-Biber, 2007). Generally
unmentioned within the psychological literature,
critical theorists argue that there is enormous
Body Image, Overview
profit to be made at the expense of women who
continually struggle to bolster their “will power”
and lose weight through expensive and generally
ineffective diet and exercise programs. Paradox-
ically, increasing pressure to be thin has been
paralleled by an increasingly heavier population
over the past several decades.
Critical disability theorists have challenged
the connection between the medicalization and
the aestheticization of the body (Hughes, 2000).
The predominant biomedical view of the body
inevitably results in an invalidation of the imper-
fect, flawed, or disabled body. Furthermore, the
ubiquitous practice of aesthetic normalization or
the “tyranny of perfection,” which values physi-
cal ability and somatic beauty, has contributed to
the further oppression and stigmatization of
impairment and disability. As a result, critical
disability theorists have suggested including
studies of “embodiment” as opposed to “body
image.” In contrast to an individualized, medical
view of the body, embodiment is suggestive of
a broader concept that incorporates social
constructivist viewpoints on the body and on the
sociopolitical space that it occupies.
A final critique of body image research in
psychology concerns who is, and who is not,
represented within the research literature, theo-
ries, and prevention and intervention programs.
The concept of body image emerged within the
historical context of psychodynamic explana-
tions of the experiences of women with anorexia
nervosa. As a result of its historical underpin-
nings, body image research has been extremely
limited due to assumptions related to its applica-
bility. Women are disproportionately impacted
by eating disorders by a ratio of 10:1 and the
age of onset is usually during adolescence. As
a result, body image research has been largely
limited to that of young women of Western cul-
ture. Media portrayals of women are highly
biased, equating “ideal” feminine qualities with
the women who are granted power within that
culture: women who are white, able-bodied,
thin, young, rich, and healthy (Cole & Daniel,
2005). Left out of these popular representations
are the experiences of men, older women, visible
minorities, children, and women with disabilities.
Body Image, Overview
These groups are also typically who is left out of
psychological research, theories, and interven-
tions on body image.
International Relevance
As mentioned above, the concept of body image
has been traditionally tied to clinical research and
practice related to eating disorders. However,
over the past 20 years, there has been a significant
increase in broader interest as the concept of body
image has become a strong theoretical and prac-
tical area of study on its own (Cash, 2004). The
emergence of the well-regarded journal Body
Image: An International Journal of Research in
2004 exemplifies this trend. This journal has
attracted authors from around the globe in fields
such as psychology, medicine, social work,
kinesiology, and rehabilitation science.
Additionally, there has been a substantial
increase in the number of special issues within
peer-reviewed journals related to body image as
well as the number of international conferences
and symposia dedicated to the topic. Within the
field of clinical psychology, the construct of body
image is referenced in the diagnostic criteria for
both eating disorders and body dysmorphic disor-
der. Within professional societies for eating disor-
ders, special interest groups on body image exist.
Although most research on body image has
been done in industrialized, Westernized
countries, the construct of body image has also
been examined cross-culturally. Specifically,
researchers have compared body dissatisfaction
and its relationships with eating and mental
health between countries. Across the majority
of industrialized countries, women exhibit
greater body dissatisfaction and desire for thin-
ness than do those in nonindustrialized coun-
tries, where women tend to prefer heavier
bodies (Swami et al., 2010). In one large-scale
study, perceptions of overweight status and
attempts to lose weight were higher in Asian
countries than in Western and European coun-
tries (Wardle, Haase, & Steptoe, 2006). Across
different geographical areas and cultures world-
wide, factors such as younger age, higher BMI,
183 B
and higher levels of exposure to Western media
are consistent predictors of body dissatisfaction
among women. However, more research is
needed, particularly in relatively less developed
countries. B
Practical Relevance
Traditionally, the practical relevance of body
image is evident within the following fields of
study:
1. Psychotherapy and counseling (treatment of
eating disorders, disordered eating, adjust-
ment to chronic medical problems, or general
issues surrounding self-esteem)
2. Health psychology (body image as an impor-
tant predictor of certain health-related behav-
iors, such as exercise, healthy eating, and
smoking)
3. Media studies (sociocultural influences on
body image from media have been an impor-
tant area of study including how media can
play a role in enhancing positive or negative
body image)
4. Education (prevention programs aimed at
reducing body dissatisfaction in young
women and men)
Interventions aimed at reducing body
dissatisfaction in young women have shown
modest improvements at best, and more research
is needed to identify the effectiveness of these
applications (for a review, see (Stice, Shaw, &
Marti, 2007)).
From a critical psychology perspective, there
is a need to broaden our understanding of body
image and embodiment. Traditional interven-
tions evolved from assumptions based on binary
classifications of the body (e.g., disabled vs. able-
bodied, thin vs. overweight, normal vs. abnor-
mal). Individuals who do not fall within the social
and medicalized “ideal” often suffer psychoso-
cial and physical consequences (i.e., body dissat-
isfaction, self-esteem issues, health risks).
However, interventions at the level of the indi-
vidual have little impact on the sociocultural
values of normalization and aesthetics. In order
to facilitate broad change, critical theorists have
B 184
suggested various practices that would result in
challenging traditionally held viewpoints and in
reducing the power differential that excludes full
participation of different bodies and embodi-
ments. For example, there is a call for active
participation of the individuals most impacted
by “body dissatisfaction,” such as persons with
eating disorders or disabilities, in the develop-
ment and implementation of body image research
and interventions, as opposed to traditional
research planning that often occurs with minimal
consultation or involvement of its participants.
Moving forward, interventions should also
include a larger sociopolitical agenda. Similar to
feminist-based interventions, participants should
be invited to discuss how social and cultural
narratives have impacted their own psychology.
Advocacy roles, including those that actively
challenge commonly held beliefs and practices,
should be encouraged and supported. Finally,
change on a large scale should involve political
involvement and encouragement of funding
initiatives such as education and challenging
attitudes that contribute to the “culture of
thinness and perfection.”
Future Directions
First of all, there is a need to conduct body image
research that addresses the fluid and
multidimensional nature of body image. Exam-
ples of methodological recommendations include
utilizing more qualitative research methods and
expanding participants beyond young women
with eating disorders. This means including
men, persons who represent differing bodies or
abilities, women of varying ages, and those with-
out disordered eating behaviors. Another area of
future need is that of more intervention-based
research. Much attention has been focused on
promoting positive body image, particularly for
young females. However, relatively little
research substantiates the effectiveness of these
education and intervention programs. Finally,
there is a need for more research and interven-
tions integrating sociocultural factors with body
image theory across various groups of individuals
Body Image, Overview
(e.g., visible minority, women, men, and older
women). Although most body image researchers
acknowledge the role of sociocultural factors
within body image theory, there are still limited
examples of this type of holistic approach within
the field of body image.
References
Bordo, S. (1993). Anorexia nervosa: Psychopathology as
the crystallization of culture. Unbearable weight: Fem-
inism, western culture and the body (pp. 139–164).
California: University of California Press.
Bruch, H. (1962). Perceptual and conceptual disturbances
in anorexia nervosa. Psychosomatic Medicine,
24, 187–194.
Cafri, G., Yamamiya, T., Brannick, M., & Thompson,
J. K. (2005). The influence of sociocultural factors on
body image: A meta-analyses. Clinical Psychology:
Science and Practice, 12, 421–433.
Cash, T. F. (2004). Body image: Past, present and future.
Body Image: An International Journal of Research,
1(1), 1–5.
Cash, T. F., & Smolak, L. (Eds.). (2011). Body image:
A handbook of science, practice, and prevention
(2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
Cole, E., & Daniel, J. H. (2005). Featuring females:
Feminist analyses of media. Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
Fisher, S. (1990). The evolution of psychological concepts
about the body. In T. F. Cash & T. Pruzinsky (Eds.),
Body images: Development, deviance, and change
(pp. 3–20). New York: Guilford Press.
Hesse-Biber, S. N. (2007). The cult of thinness. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Hughes, B. (2000). Medicine and the aesthetic invalida-
tion of disabled people. Disability and Society, 15,
555–568.
Jacobi, C., Hayward, C., de Zwaan, M., Kraemer, H. C., &
Agras, S. (2004). Coming to terms with risk factors for
eating disorders: Application of risk terminology and
suggestions for a general taxonomy. Psychological
Bulletin, 130(1), 19–65.
Kilbourne, J. (1994). Still killing us softly: Advertising
and the obsession with thinness. In P. Fallon,
M. Katzman, & S. Wooley (Eds.), Feminist perspec-
tive on eating disorders (pp. 395–418). New York:
Guilford.
Mills, J. S., Polivy, J., Herman, C. P., & Tiggemann, M.
(2002). Effects of exposure to thin media images:
Evidence of self-enhancement among restrained
eaters. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
28, 1687–1699.
Mills, J. S., Roosen, K., & Vella-Zarb, R. (2011). The
psychology of body image: Understanding body
image instability and distortion. In S. B. Greene (Ed.),
Buddhist Psychology
Body image: Perceptions, interpretations, and attitudes
(pp. 59–80). New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Schilder, P. (1950). The image and appearance of the
human body. New York: International Universities
Press.
Slade, P. D. (1988). Body image in anorexia nervosa. The
British Journal of Psychiatry, 153(2), 20–22.
Smeets, M. A. M. (1997). The rise and fall of body size
estimation research in anorexia nervosa: A review and
reconceptualization. European Eating Disorders
Review, 5, 75–95.
Stice, E., Shaw, H., & Marti, N. (2007). Eating disorder
prevention programs: A meta-analytic review.
Psychological Bulletin, 130, 206–227.
Swami, V., et al. (2010). The attractive female body
weight and female body dissatisfaction in 26 countries
across 10 world regions: Results of the International
Body Project I. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 36(3), 309–325.
Wardle, J., Haase, A. M., & Steptoe, A. (2006). Body image
and weight control in young adults: International com-
parisons in university students from 22 countries. Inter-
national Journal of Obesity, 30, 644–651.
Online Resources
Body Image Handbook. http://www.body-images.com/
research/books_audio.html
Body Image: An International Journal of Research. http://
www.journals.elsevier.com/body-image/#description
Centre for Appearance Research. http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/
hls/research/appearanceresearch
Dove Self-Esteem Project. http://www.dove.ca/en/Social-
Mission/Self-Esteem-Resources/
Eating Disorder Research Society. www.
edresearchsociety.org
International Association for Eating Disorders. www.
aedweb.org
Buddhist Psychology
Pradeep Chakkarath
University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Introduction
“Buddhist psychology” refers to central aspects
of a manifold philosophical, psychological, and
spiritual tradition of thought and practice that was
originally developed and systematized in India
during the last 400 years before the Common
Era (BCE). The earliest account of this tradition
185 B
is based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama
Buddha, who was born – probably in the fifth
century BCE – into nobility in the Hindu caste
system. The fact that early Buddhist thinking had
a Hindu background influenced the directions of B
Buddhist arguments and explains why parts of the
theoretical framework of Buddhist and Hindu
psychology somewhat overlap. Moreover, the
fact that the main body of early classical Buddhist
texts is written in Pali and Sanskrit, explains why
the first and still important accounts of Buddhist
psychology in the West stem from Indologists
while most Western psychologists remain unfa-
miliar with Buddhist psychological texts even
today. Unfortunately, only a few of the essential
texts, which were also written in other Asian
languages (e.g., Tamil, Chinese, Korean, Japa-
nese, and Tibetan), have been translated into
a Western language, and the quality of many of
the translations is highly disputed (de Silva,
2005). In addition, Buddhist psychology has
different schools that have different scholarly
traditions corresponding to different lines of Bud-
dhism. Nevertheless, the following sections will
focus on a few aspects shared by most of the
Buddhist traditions we know of today.
Definition
Since “psychology” is a Western term closely
connected to the scientific study of the human
psyche as it was conducted in the late nineteenth
century especially in Germany and the USA, the
term “Buddhist psychology” is commonly used
to characterize elements of Buddhist thinking and
practice that touch upon the observation, descrip-
tion, and analysis of phenomena deemed psycho-
logically relevant from a Western psychological
standpoint. However, since the Buddhist investi-
gations of mental phenomena as well as their role
in human well-being play a fundamental role for
the larger system of thought known as Buddhism,
the term “Buddhist psychology” should be rec-
ognized as a coherent cognitive framework and
belief system that as a whole plays
a psychologically important role in shaping the
culture-specific developmental contexts of many
B 186
human beings. The Indologist Caroline Rhys
Davids who translated many important texts
from Pali into English and was the first to use
the term “Buddhist psychology” emphasized
both its narrower and broader meaning (Rhys
Davids, 1900/2003).
Keywords
Abhidhamma; four noble truths; eightfold path;
therapy; skandhas; theory of dependent origina-
tion; identity; nonself; meditation; indigenous
psychology
Traditional Debates
Most classical debates are rooted in two crucial
outcomes of a series of council meetings during
the centuries following the Buddha’s death. First,
these meetings resulted in a collection of canon-
ical texts, known as the “three baskets”
(tripitaka): The sutta pitaka is said to contain
the original teachings of Siddhartha Gautama
Buddha, the abhidhamma pitaka contains com-
ments on these teachings and places them in
a larger systematic context, and the vinaya pitaka
lays down sets of rules for the community of
monks. Parts of the sutta and especially the
abhidhamma pitaka can be considered the textual
foundation of Buddhist psychology. The second
crucial outcome was a lasting separation of Bud-
dhism into two forms: the “path of the elders”
(theravada) or “small vehicle” (hinayana) and
the “great vehicle” (mahayana). The hinayana
form of Buddhism held that only the tripitaka
texts based on the teachings of the movement’s
founder have authority; the mahayana form held
that other texts and commentaries, including texts
that were still to come, are also fundamental to
Buddhist thinking. In the following centuries,
a third form of Buddhism developed: Tantric
Buddhism or the “diamond vehicle” (vajrayana).
The debates that accompanied the develop-
ment of these main schools and their various
Buddhist Psychology
branches with their different psychological
assessments were mainly about the development,
function, and meaning of identity; the role of
cognition, interaction, and communication in
the construction of psychological phenomena;
about causality, intentionality, and mind; as well
as the nature of certain states of consciousness,
including awareness and the perfect inner peace
called nirvana. Some basic aspects of Buddhist
psychology resulted from the debate of the Hindu
assumption that identity is an essential and per-
manent feature of a person, which Buddhism
denies. Although Indian Buddhist scholars like
Asanga, Buddhaghosa, Candrakirti, Dharmakirti,
Dignaga, Nagarjuna, Shantideva, Santaraksita,
and Vasubandhu – to name just a few – disputed
this and related topics among themselves, key
elements of their and later Buddhist’s theories
can be described by taking the “four noble truths”
as a starting point in order to show how the
Buddhist theory of the “nonself” (anatma) is
explained (cf. Kalupahana, 1987; Pickering,
1997). These truths denote the insights
Siddhartha Gautama had during his Enlighten-
ment, namely, (1) life is filled with physical and
psychological suffering (dukkha); (2) the source
of our suffering is our attachment to things, which
is driven by our desires (tanha) and our failure to
realize that everything we passionately crave for,
including our ego, is merely transient; (3) the
cessation of suffering can be reached by extinc-
tion (nirodha) of our desires through the attain-
ment of dispassion; and (4) the eightfold path
(atthangika magga), which leads to the cessation
of suffering, requires the development and exer-
cise of wisdom and intellect, morality and ade-
quate conduct, awareness, and meditation skills.
The content and structure of these four assump-
tions show that the diagnosis of suffering is par-
tially psychological, identifies cause and effect
relationships between perceptions, emotions,
and motivations that are also psychological, and
prescribes a cure that can be understood as
a cognitive and behavioral, that is, psychological
therapy (Kwee, Gergen, & Koshikawa, 2006).
Since these main facets of Buddhist psychology
Buddhist Psychology
are also reflected in its detailed analysis of the
self-concept, this analysis will be used to illus-
trate the general character of Buddhist psycho-
logical theory and practice in the following.
According to the Buddhist psychological
analysis of the self-concept, one’s “I” conscious-
ness is constituted by five aggregates (skandha):
(1) physical form (rupa), which includes the four
elements: earth (solidity), water (liquidity), fire
(temperature), and wind (expansion); (2) sensations
and feelings (vedana), which refer to unpleasant,
pleasant, or neutral sensations (touch, sound,
appearance, smell, taste, and mental object) that
result from contact between any of the six internal
sensory organs (body, ears, eyes, nose, tongue, and
mind) and external objects; (3) perception (sanna)
of physical form, sound, appearance, smell, taste,
and spirit; (4) mental formations (sankhara),
including stereotypes, prejudices, and habits from
which the six expressions of will emerge, which
can be directed toward all of the sensations and
perceptions specified above; and (5) consciousness
(vinnana) of the six sensory organs and the external
objects assigned to them.
Humans are thus described as an aggregate of
different mutually causal factors that are in con-
stant flux, transient, and temporary. The six inter-
nal sense bases (organs) and their six external
sense bases (objects) are called the 12 sense
bases. The 12 sense bases and the six forms of
consciousness are together called the 18 elements
(dhatu). When the physical factors are also taken
into consideration, every mental procedure can
be described as a specific combination of ele-
ments with the perception and volition phenom-
ena they cause. This analysis is based on the
Buddhist theory of dependent origination
(pratityasamutpada) according to which all phe-
nomena arise and cease to exist as a function of
multiple nested causes and conditions and the
notion that these processes cease when the con-
ditions cease to exist. The theory is empirically
supported by the most elaborate introspection
techniques, known as meditation, ever developed
in the history of psychology. They aim to show
that the powerful illusion of a self that witnesses
187 B
all these events is created by means of causal
interplays that are constantly changing and
being restructured and does not correspond to
anything in reality because this self is also only
the result of a process that is constantly beginning B
and ending (samsara). Thus, the widely spread
notion of a personal soul or a lasting identity is
refuted. Moreover, one can also understand why
this self-concept can be identified as the key
source of human suffering: In the causal nexus
described above, it bears selfish attitudes and
resultant motivations and actions, which finally
lead to psychological discomfort.
Interestingly, Buddhism declares the belief in
an unchanging and even immortal self an expres-
sion of human selfishness deeply rooted in psy-
chology: It is out of ignorance, weakness, fear,
and desire that man develops the consoling idea
of a stable and enduring self. Having started as
a critical intellectual and social reform move-
ment, Buddhism aimed to detect the psychologi-
cal roots of these kinds of irrational beliefs and
thus also provided a critical perspective on the
psychology of psychology and psychologists.
Critical Debates
The interest in an encounter between Buddhist
and academic Western psychology began to take
shape in the first few decades of the twentieth
century, for example, when C. G. Jung and Erich
Fromm along with Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki
began searching for the common grounds of Bud-
dhism and Western psychoanalysis. In addition,
representatives from humanistic psychology
showed interest in the therapeutic value of certain
meditation techniques and the holistic perspec-
tive taken by Buddhist psychology. Beginning in
the 1960s, these topics were popularized by
Western Buddhists like Alan Watts and Jack
Kornfield. When Francisco J. Varela co-initiated
the Mind and Life Institute in the 1980s, many
prominent neuroscientists and cognitive scien-
tists, including psychologists, also became inter-
ested in an intensive exchange with leading
B 188
Buddhist scholars, among them the 14th Dalai
Lama and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Although these kinds of exchanges mark a new
quality of interest and exchange, as said before,
the scientific value of Buddhist psychology is
frequently measured by assessing the degree to
which it can be adapted to Western traditions of
psychology and integrated into various clinical
settings. This, of course, can be seen as an
ethnocentric, presentistic, and distortive assess-
ment of “Buddhist psychology” (cf. Pickering,
1997). For example, in Buddhist argumentation,
the links between the theory of rebirth and the
analysis of self and identity are quite important.
However, in this example, Western psychology is
only interested in self and identity theory, which
is therefore normally decoupled from its original
framework and transferred into contexts of West-
ern interest and Western ways of doing psychol-
ogy. Indigenous psychology, however, holds that
any intellectual tradition – including Western or
Buddhist psychology – can affect human devel-
opmental contexts, including lay theories. This
remains true even if scholars from one psycho-
logical tradition doubt the scientific value of
another tradition and merely use parts of it to
form or bolster their own theories. Thus, the
debates about the contents, character, and cul-
tural psychological importance of Buddhist psy-
chology also touch on questions very familiar to
the areas of postcolonial theory, power politics,
and the philosophy of science.
References
de Silva, P. (2005). An introduction to Buddhist psychol-
ogy (4th ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kalupahana, D. (1987). The principles of Buddhist
psychology. New York: State University of
New York Press.
Kwee, M. G. T., Gergen, K. J., & Koshikawa, F. (2006).
Horizons in Buddhist psychology: Practice, research
& theory. Chagrin Falls, OH: Taos Institute
Publications.
Pickering, J. (Ed.). (1997). The authority of experience:
Essays on Buddhism and psychology. Surrey, UK:
Curzon.
Rhys Davids, C. A. F. (1900/2003). Buddhist manual of
psychological ethics. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger.
Bullying, Overview
Bullying, Overview
Debra Pepler
Faculty of Health, Department of Psychology,
York University, Toronto, Canada
Introduction
Bullying has been with us since the beginning of
humanity, but only over the past 35 years has
there been research, educational, and clinical
interest in bullying problems. This issue has
only become mainstream in the past 5 years,
with concerns raised through all forms of media
and the recent release of a documentary, Bully,
detailing the nature of bullying and the pain it
inflicts on those who are victimized.
From a critical psychology perspective, the
problem of bullying needs to be understood as
a dynamic of power that unfolds at an interper-
sonal level but is reflected in the structures and
systems of societies as a whole. The problem of
bullying has most often been studied among chil-
dren and youth; however, it is a problem that also
persists in adult relationships within the family,
workplace, and community. Because bullying
involves the use of power and aggression to con-
trol and distress another, it must be understood
and addressed from a social justice and rights
perspective. As Dan Olweus, the grandfather of
bullying research and intervention, claimed: “It is
a fundamental democratic right for a child to feel
safe in school and to be spared the oppression and
repeated, intentional humiliation implied in
bullying” (1999, p. 21).
It is generally accepted that bullying is
a global phenomenon, with evidence from the
World Health Organization of bullying in many
countries around the world. Bullying has been
studied from both developmental and systemic
perspectives. In other words, to understand
bullying, it is important to consider not only
how children are developing but also how their
relationship environments are shaping their
development. Ideally, children’s experiences
enable them to develop the skills and
Bullying, Overview
understanding required to create and maintain
positive relationships. Some children lack these
critical, supportive experiences within the family,
school, and/or community. Consequently, their
social interactions remain immature and based
on self-interest and on gaining power and status,
often at the expense of others. The broader social
systems in which children grow up also shape
their understanding of relationships and of
power in relationships. Interpersonal power
dynamics are often embedded in inequities within
societies, such as socioeconomic disadvantage,
race, gender, gender identity and expression, sex-
ual orientation, and experiences of colonization.
Therefore, although bullying is a problem that
often unfolds among children and youth, it can
only be addressed through broader social change
that promotes respect and the well-being and
positive relationships of all individuals and
groups in society.
Definition
Bullying has been defined as aggressive actions
(physical or verbal, direct or indirect such as
electronic), which are repeated over time and
involve a power differential between the person
(s) who is bullying and the person(s) being vic-
timized (Olweus, 1993). Although formal defini-
tions include repetition, children indicate that
even a single occurrence of the use of power
and aggression can be considered as bullying.
Recently, bullying has been defined as
a relationship problem (Pepler et al., 2006). In
bullying power dynamics, those who bully learn
how to use power and aggression to control and
distress another; those who are repeatedly victim-
ized become trapped in an abusive relationship
that is increasingly difficult to escape. Cross-
sectional and longitudinal research provides sup-
port for this relationship perspective. Youth who
report bullying their peers are also more likely to
report engaging in sexual harassment and dating
aggression – other forms of interpersonal aggres-
sion in which there is a dynamic of power and
aggression (Pepler et al.; Pepler, Jiang, Craig, &
Connolly, 2008). Youth who bully at a high rate
189 B
also experience strained relationships with both
their parents and peers. There is a concern that
boys and girls who bully at a high and persistent
rate through elementary and high school may be
at risk for transferring these interactional patterns B
to other forms of power and aggression across the
lifespan, such as in workplace harassment,
domestic violence, child abuse, and elder abuse.
The definition of bullying has been further
extended with the recognition that bullying is
not just an individual problem, but often arises
in the context of exacerbating group dynamics. In
a recent report, the Nova Scotia Task Force on
Bullying and Cyberbullying has included
bystanders in the definition: “A person partici-
pates in bullying if he or she directly carries out
the behavior or assists or encourages the behav-
iour in any way” (MacKay, 2012, p. 43).
Keywords
Bullying; harassment; victimization; peer
relations; aggressive behavior; schools; power
relations
History
Although bullying was described in novels of
boys’ school experiences in the nineteenth cen-
tury, the first research and clinical interest in
bullying was generated in the late 1960s and
early 1970s in Swedish publications by
a school physician, Peter-Paul Heinemann, and
a personality psychologist, Dan Olweus. The
concern for bullying began to take hold beyond
Scandinavia with Olweus’s (1978) English pub-
lication, Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and
Whipping Boys. School-based bullying preven-
tion programs, led by Olweus and others, began
in Norway following reports of three 10–14-
year-old Norwegian boys who had committed
suicide, allegedly as a consequence of severe
victimization by peers. The success of this
national campaign against bullying sparked
research and bullying prevention efforts around
the world.
B 190
During the 1980s, interest in bullying was
emerging in Japan, quite disconnected from the
research in Europe. The Japanese word, “ijime,”
is in line with but not exactly the same as the
English word “bullying.” Ijime is socially manip-
ulative behavior within the process of group
interactions (Taki, 2001). The power dynamics
in ijime emerge because the dominant individual
(s) has a goal of causing mental and/or emotional
suffering to another member of the peer group.
There is substantial research on the nature and
frequency of bullying in Japan, with considerable
support from the National Institute for Educa-
tional and Policy Research.
Over the past 30 years, there have been
marked changes in the ways that bullying prob-
lems are understood and addressed. There is
growing awareness of bullying problems across
the lifespan and the impact of persistent involve-
ment in bullying on both those who bully and
those who are victimized. Education authorities
around the world have relied on research to
inform their legislation requiring school officials
to address bullying problems when they arise.
Most of this legislation provides a clear definition
of bullying, also based on research, to enable
educators to understand the complex power
dynamics of bullying so they can provide effec-
tive strategies to address this problem. These
prevention and intervention efforts can only be
effective when there is awareness of the power
differential between the individual who is bully-
ing and the individual who is being victimized, as
well as the power dynamics among those who are
witnessing the bullying. It is essential to under-
stand that these power dynamics in bullying arise
systematically in the context of a relationship and
a broader social context, rather than being ran-
dom aggressive interactions or a problem that
resides with one or other of the individuals
involved.
Traditional Debates
There have been many debates about the nature
of bullying, given the universality of the problem
and different perspectives across disciplines and
Bullying, Overview
cultures. There have been two debates about the
very nature of bullying focused on the following
questions: (1) Is bullying an individual or group
problem? and (2) Is bullying just a normal part of
growing up or is it a serious problem behavior
reflecting psychopathology that needs to be
quickly rectified?
Bullying: An Individual Problem or Group
Phenomenon
Bullying has been considered a problem that
resides within an individual, as well as within
a group process. The early perspectives of bully-
ing were that it was an aggressive behavior prob-
lem that required a punitive approach with
consistent sanctions for those who bully (Olweus,
1993). Olweus (2010) justifies his perspective of
bullying as an individual problem because chil-
dren in a class vary considerably in their degree
of aggressiveness and those who are highly
aggressive tend to remain that way over time,
especially if they do not receive treatment. Sim-
ilarly, Olweus argues that victimized children are
often exposed to bullying systematically and over
longer periods of time, suggesting a problem with
the individual.
In contrast to this perspective of bullying
being a problem that resides with the individual
child who is aggressive and/or victimized, there
is considerable evidence that bullying unfolds in
the context of a social theatre. The other children,
who are always there, contribute to the power
dynamics in bullying by attending as passive
bystanders, joining in and exacerbating the bul-
lying, or occasionally defending the victimized
child (O’Connell, Pepler, & Craig, 1999). In his
research in Japan, Taki (2010) has found that
anyone can be involved in bullying, depending
on the social dynamics in the peer context in
which bullying unfolds. He found that involve-
ment in bullying is transitory – many children
become involved in bullying for a short period
of time. Consequently, Taki sees bullying as
a group phenomenon and not a problem of
a small group of very troubled children who
bully others or are victimized. (Note: In keeping
with this perspective, the labels of “bully” and
“victims” have not been used in this chapter
Bullying, Overview
because these labels constrain thinking of the
problem as solely a characteristic of the individ-
ual, rather than as problem that emerges from
complex social dynamics over time).
Bullying: A Normal Part of Growing Up or
a Serious Problem Behavior
In some ways, bullying can be described as “nor-
mative” because it has the potential to unfold
whenever and wherever we bring children and
youth together. Most children probably bully at
one time or another but readily learn that bullying
is hurtful to others and do not persist. Similarly,
most children are likely victimized at one time or
another, but their experiences do not continue.
Consistent with the definition of bullying, it is
the repetition of bullying that presents a serious
problem, increasing the concern for the well-
being of both the child who is being victimized,
as well as the child who is bullying.
There is not a single profile of the “problem”
child who bullies; instead there are vast differ-
ences among the children who bully. Some of the
children who bully fit the traditional stereotype of
having aggressive behavior problems and a range
of difficulties in relationships. In contrast, other
children who bully are highly socially skilled,
have a strong understanding of others’ thoughts,
and are popular in their peer groups. The latter
group of children who bully have been character-
ized as Machiavellian – they use aggression as
a means to gain power over their peers.
Bullying is not a pathway to healthy normal
development for children and youth. Bullying
should be considered a red flag for more serious
aggressive and relationship problems. Regardless
of the profile of children who bully, there is
a need for constructive interventions to enhance
their moral compass and relationship skills, as
well as to help them develop positive strategies
to achieve attention and power. Because the use
of power and aggression is destructive to those
who are being victimized and are unable to
defend themselves or escape this form of abuse,
bullying is most often understood as wrong and
an infringement on a child’s basic right to safety.
Consequently, children who are victimized also
need constructive support to ensure they are not
191 B
only safe, but also are able to enjoy their right to
belong and be included with peers.
Critical Debates B
Traditional debates in the field of bullying have
led to broader critical debates about the diverse
causes of bullying and the ways that it should be
addressed. The former debate focuses on power
structures inherent in society and the diverse
perspectives that must be taken to understand
the problem. The debate about responding to
bullying is polarized, with some recommending
criminal charges, while others recognize the
importance of ensuring that children who bully
receive the corrective and constructive support so
they can have healthy, positive relationships.
Broader Sociocultural Context
Consistent with a critical psychology perspec-
tive, the phenomenon of bullying has been placed
into a larger sociocultural context in recent years.
It is now being examined not only as a problem
with an individual but increasingly as
a developmental issue that arises from relation-
ship experiences in the family and peer group, as
well from broader sociocultural lessons about
power and understanding differences of race,
gender, ability, sexual orientation, economic sta-
tus, etc. This broader perspective recognizes that
bullying is a social process that unfolds between
people and needs to be understood in light of
historial and cultural processes (Maharaj, War-
wick, & Ryba, 2000). Another way of describing
bullying from a broader, rather than individual,
perspective is that it is a relationship problem and
as such requires relationship solutions (Pepler,
2006). Downes (2010) also considers bullying
from a relationship perspective, noting that bul-
lying, as with any relationship, is a constant and
dynamic interplay without stable identities. From
this relationship perspective, Downes challenges
the traditional view of the authoritarian teacher
who uses power to solve students’ problems and
instead suggests that a teacher’s role is to be
a source of social and emotional support for
students.
B 192
Responding to Bullying
Whenever there is a tragic bullying situation,
calls for the criminalization of bullying echo
through the media. This view holds that the prob-
lem resides with troubled children and youth who
primarily need to learn that their bullying behav-
iors are wrong. This punitive perspective was the
foundation for the “zero tolerance” approaches to
bullying, which have been found to be ineffec-
tive. Although some children and youth who
bully engage in behavior that would be consid-
ered criminal, a youth justice perspective holds
that society’s response to these transgressions
should be rehabilitative, rather than punitive.
When children who bully are punished and iso-
lated (e.g., expelled from school), they lack the
opportunity to learn critical relationship skills.
These children need to learn about respectful
behavior and positive use of power, which are
lessons that will help them move away from
patterns of using power and aggression and onto
a pathway to healthy, positive relationships
through the lifespan.
International Relevance
Bullying has been documented and studied in
many nations around the world, with the longest
tradition of research and intervention in Europe
and Japan, followed by North America, Australia
and New Zealand, and some South American and
Asian countries. One of the difficulties in com-
paring differences across countries arises from
different cultural perspectives on the use of
power and aggression, as well as different words
used to describe the phenomenon. Smith, Cowie,
Olafsson, and Liefooghe (2002) conducted
a study of the meaning of bullying across 14
different countries to identify terms in different
languages that correspond to the English word
bullying. There was a wide range of words and
meanings for bullying, including intimidation,
abuse, violence, aggression, maltreatment, and
mobbing.
Since 1993, the World Health Organization
has included questions on bullying as part of the
Bullying, Overview
Health Behaviours of School-Age Children
(HBSC) survey. Analyses of the HSBC data
reveal that the levels of bullying across countries
are strongly linked to income inequities among
their citizens (Elgar, Craig, Boyce, Morgan, &
Vella-Zarb, 2009). Recent data from this survey
reveal rates of bullying and victimization in 38
countries; however, all these are in Europe or
North America, making a truly global perspective
on the problem out of reach.
On the international stage, bullying is now cast
as a critical issue of children’s rights and social
justice. In 2007, international participants at the
Joint Efforts Against Victimization Conference
in Kandersteg, Switzerland, pledged long-term
commitment and determination to promote
healthy relationships and prevent bullying and
victimization among children and youth. The
Kandersteg Declaration has been translated into
15 languages and can be read on the website
http://www.kanderstegdeclaration.com/.
Practice Relevance
The nature of responses to bullying depends on
the lens through which bullying is understood.
Effective responses to bullying need to take into
account an understanding of the developing
child, as well as of the relationship contexts in
which that child is embedded at home, in school,
in the community, and in society as a whole.
When children bully, they require some form of
corrective response. For this response to be con-
structive, it must be based on coaching according
to the children’s needs. A focus on the individual
child, however, is not sufficient. There also needs
to be an understanding of and response to peer
processes that promote the abuse of power,
behaviors of adults that may also contribute to
a culture of negative power dynamics, and
a broader consideration of the norms, attitudes,
and pervasive messages in children’s worlds. For
children who are victimized, the first response is
to protect their right to be safe. Similar to
responses for children who bully, effective
responses for victimized students need to take
Bullying, Overview
into account their strengths and needs. A broader
perspective is also required to ensure that their
relationships at home, within the peer group, with
staff at school, and with others in the community
are supportive and able to provide them with the
coping skills and social experiences to ensure
they are safe, respected, and included. Further-
more, although the focus of bullying has been on
children and schools, it is important to recognize
that use of power and aggression to control and
distress another unfolds in many other contexts,
such as families, workplaces, community set-
tings, and sports teams.
The Kandersteg Declaration (2007) provides
the following guidelines for preventing bullying:
• Stop bullying now in all the places where
children and youth live, work, and play.
• Start prevention efforts early and continue
these through childhood and adolescence,
targeting known risk and protective factors
and promoting healthy relationships.
• Educate and empower all adults involved with
children and youth to promote healthy rela-
tionships and prevent bullying.
• Use policy and prevention programs, based on
scientific research, that are appropriate for
age, gender, and culture and that involve fam-
ilies, peers, schools, and communities.
• Provide ongoing assessment and monitoring
necessary to evaluate the success of policy
and programs and to guarantee the rights of
children and youth.
Future Directions
There is much to be done to ensure that those who
have power do not misuse it. Evidence is mount-
ing that bullying creates problems from the level
of the cell and brain all the way to the level of
society. A critical psychology perspective calls
for a move away from considering bullying as
just a problem with the children who bully or with
the children who are victimized. The issue of
bullying needs to be considered in a broader per-
spective of the relationships that influence chil-
dren’s behaviors within the family, school, peer
193 B
group, broader community, and sociocultural
context. The challenge in effectively preventing
bullying appears to come from recognizing how
power is misused and modeled in our social sys-
tems, media, structures, as well as in our daily B
interactions with children and youth. Although
bullying is a problem in schools, it is not
a school problem, but a broader societal problem.
Consequently, it requires a broader societal
response to support families and schools in their
critical mission to socialize children and youth to
become respectful, engaged, caring, and contrib-
uting citizens. An example of this broad-based
response to promoting healthy development of
children and youth can be found in Canada. The
Promoting Relationships and Eliminating
Violence Network (PREVNet; www.prevnet.ca)
brings together 65 researchers with their graduate
students and 52 national youth-serving organiza-
tions to prevent bullying. PREVNet recognizes
that preventing bullying is everyone’s responsi-
bility and will only be successful when we pro-
mote healthy relationships in all the places where
children and youth live, learn, play, and work.
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Elgar, F. J., Craig, W., Boyce, W., Morgan, A., &
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Online Resources
Many countries have developed national initiatives or
networks to address bullying, with accompanying
websites with evidence-based resources. Other
English websites with strong research foundations for
information on bullying are also listed.
About kids health is a resource for all issues on children’s
health, including bullying. www.aboutkidshealth.ca
Australia national safe schools framework. http://www.
deewr.gov.au/Schooling/NationalSafeSchools/Pages/
nationalsafeschoolsframework.aspx
Australia: Bullying. No way!. http://www.bullyingnoway.
gov.au/
Canada: Promoting Relationships and Eliminating
Violence Network (PREVNet). www.prevnet.ca
Melissa Institute for Violence Prevention and Treatment,
which is dedicated to the study and prevention of violence
through education, community service, research support,
and consultation. www.melissainstitute.org
PACER is an organization for parents and youth who have
disabilities, with guidelines for dealing with bullying
problems. http://www.pacer.org/bullying/
Scotland anti-bullying network. http://www.antibullying.net/
United States Department of Health and Human Services –
stop bullying now. http://www.stopbullying.gov/