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Arthur W. Staats

1924-2021

By Rodger Rossman

Biography

Arthur Wilbur Staats was born in New York in 1924 and grew up mostly in Los Angeles. His father died when Staats was an infant, leaving his mother to raise four children. At age 17, Staats left high school and joined the U.S. Navy. During World War II, he served aboard the USS Nevada, including during the D-Day invasion.

After the war, the GI Bill gave Staats the opportunity to return to school. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned his Ph.D. in psychology in 1956.

Staats taught at Arizona State University and held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin. In 1966, he joined the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where he remained until his retirement in 1997.

During his career, Staats studied learning, language, child development, and personality. He also developed the time-out from reinforcement procedure for use with children. As his work expanded, he developed an approach that became known as psychological behaviorism.

Skinner had shown how behavior could be understood through learning and the consequences of behavior. Staats wanted to take behaviorism further. He did not think behaviorism had to be limited to simple behaviors that could be seen in a laboratory. Emotion, motivation, language, and thought could also be part of a behavioral approach.

This was especially important for the study of personality. Staats believed that much of what we call personality develops through learning. Our behavior, emotions, language, and thoughts develop throughout our lives and become part of who we are.

Arthur W. Staats's long life came to an end on April 26, 2021, in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the age of 97.

Theory

Psychological Behaviorism

Arthur Staats called his approach psychological behaviorism. Like other behaviorists, Staats believed learning was extremely important in explaining behavior. Unlike some earlier behaviorists, however, he believed behaviorism could also help explain personality, emotion, motivation, language, and thought.

This was different from Skinner's radical behaviorism. Thoughts are difficult to study because another person cannot directly see them. Skinner therefore focused on behavior and the environment, which could be observed and measured. Staats believed that did not mean we had to ignore thinking. People can report what they are thinking, and Staats considered thinking itself a type of behavior.

Biology, Learning, and Individual Differences

Staats did not ignore biology. Different species obviously have different abilities. A dog cannot learn everything a human can learn, and a human cannot learn everything a bird can learn. Biology places some limits on learning. Staats believed biological differences among individuals can also affect how they learn.

But learning was still extremely important to Staats. No two people have exactly the same experiences while growing up. We learn different things, receive different rewards, and develop different ways of responding to the world. Staats believed differences in both biology and learning help explain why we develop different personalities.

Development and Learning

For Staats, development is largely a process of learning. Children learn which behaviors bring rewards and which do not. Stimulus control and schedules of reinforcement also influence what children learn and how they behave.

Childhood is especially important because early learning becomes the foundation for later learning. A child does not start over with every new experience. What has already been learned affects what the child notices, how the child responds, and what the child learns next.

Basic Behavioral Repertoires

Staats called some of these learned abilities basic behavioral repertoires. Think of them as groups of behaviors and abilities we build through experience. They then become the foundation for more learning. Staats described three major groups:

Think about what this means. Learning does not start over every morning. What you learned yesterday affects what you can learn today. What you learn today becomes part of what you bring to tomorrow's experiences. Language, thought, emotions, motivations, and physical skills all become part of the person who faces the next learning situation.

Emotion and Reinforcement

Staats also believed emotion could be part of learning. Something that creates an emotional response can affect and reinforce behavior. Emotion, therefore, does not have to be pushed outside of behaviorism. It can be part of the learning process.

This helped Staats move behaviorism beyond simple actions that could be watched in a laboratory. Thought and emotion could also affect what we learn and how we behave.

Personality

So, where does personality fit into all of this? Staats believed that much of what we call personality is learned. We each begin life with somewhat different biological abilities and predispositions, but then we have a lifetime of different experiences.

We learn different things, react emotionally to different things, and develop different ways of thinking and behaving. Our basic behavioral repertoires also affect how we respond to new situations and what we learn from them. Put all of that together and you begin to have an individual personality.

Applications

Staats was interested in using behavioral principles to change behavior, not just explain it. Two procedures associated with his work that became widely used are token economies and time-out.

We have already discussed token economies. In time-out, access to reinforcement is temporarily removed after a behavior. Without the reinforcement, the unwanted behavior may become less likely to occur again.

Behaviorism as a Changing Science

Before we criticize Skinner and the early behaviorists for ignoring thought and emotion, we need to remember the science available to them. When behaviorism developed, psychologists could not look at the activity of a living human brain while a person was thinking or experiencing an emotion. Skinner concentrated on behavior and the environment because those were things he could observe and measure. That was not bad science. In many ways, it helped make psychology a more objective science.

Staats pushed behaviorism further. He argued that thought and emotion could also be studied. People could report their thoughts and emotions, and Staats considered thinking itself a type of behavior. He was expanding what behaviorists were willing to study.

Today we have tools Staats and Skinner did not have. Researchers can measure patterns of brain activity while people think, remember, experience emotions, and attempt to speak. Scientists have even developed experimental systems that can recognize brain activity connected with intended speech in some people who once could speak but later lost the physical ability to do so. A computer can then help turn those patterns into words.

No, this does not mean a scientist can simply hook you to a machine and read everything you are thinking! These systems require special equipment, training, and controlled conditions. What they do show is that some things that were almost impossible for early behaviorists to study can now be investigated scientifically.

So Staats did not simply throw out Skinner's behaviorism. Skinner worked with what scientists could reliably observe and measure at the time. Staats expanded the range of things behaviorists were willing to study. Science continued to change, and so did behaviorism.

Readings

If you would like to read more about Staats, three of his important books are Complex Human Behavior (1963), Social Behaviorism (1975), and Behavior and Personality: Psychological Behaviorism (1996).

These books also show how Staats's ideas developed over time. Complex Human Behavior was an early attempt to use learning principles to explain complex human behavior. Social Behaviorism expanded that approach. By Behavior and Personality: Psychological Behaviorism, Staats was applying his ideas directly to personality and other complex human behaviors.

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