Women, Borscht, Gays, Laboratory Animals, and Nuclear Extinction

Evalyn F. Segal

San Diego State University

Invited address to Divisions 25 and 9, Annual Convention of the

American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August, 19R2

I want, first of all, to thank Aaron Brownstein, the prograM co-chair of

Division 25 (The Division for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior), who
honored me by inviting me to address you today. I'm sure he had another sort
of topic in mind when he made the invitation, and probably he gulped when I
sent him my title, but he was gentleman enough not to withdraw the invitation,
and for that, too, I thank him.

I also thank Division 9 (the Society for the Psychological Study of

Social Issues--SPSSI) for agreeing to cosponsor this event. I hope Division 9
members who are here will forgive me if some of my remarks make specific
reference to colleagues in Division 25 whom they may not know. Since the
invitation came originally from Division 25, I had that division in mind as I
prepared this talk.

I thank Ellen Reese for her willingness to introduce me, even after being
forewarned that,my talk would not be the usual Division 25 fare. I thank her
for the moral support of being up here with me, for I'm feeling more than
usually nervous about this bit of public speaking. It's all very well, six
months before the event, to commit oneself to doing something out of the
ordinary, but for the last several weeks, and especially for the last several
days, I've been wishing I could call in sick and forget the whole thIng.
There are few things I fear more than making a fool of myself, yet here I am,
about to do just that.

And, I thank all of you who have come today, bizarre title notwithstand
ing, to help me celebrate my 50th birthday. Although my birthday was actually
last week, that's what I want this talk to be, a shared celebration of the
completion of my 50th year.
And also a celebration of my 30th year as a born-again behaviorist. It
was just 30 years ago, in 1952, that Kenneth MacCorquodale, at the University
of Minnesota, introduced me to the experimental analysiS of behavior. The
text was Keller and Schoenfeld's great book, and it took just that one course
to open my eyes. I've been a behaviorist ever since, and I've never seen
reason to switch my point of view, although I've welcomed the changes that the
year~ have brought to hehavioral analysis.

One reason I approach this task. with anxiety has been the response of
many of my friends and colleagues who had advance notice of the title. The
least discouraging response I've had has been embarrassed silence, or a
noncommittal, "Interesting title." Last week, while having dinner with
friends, I kept trying to broach the topic of this talk. I was still in the
process of writing it, and I wanted their reaction to some of the things Twas
thinking of saying. But every time I mentioned it, there was stony silence,
and then they'd change the subject. Finally I asked why. One of them, a
 2

scientist in another field, said that if her professional society had honored
her with an invitation to address them, she'd have talked on her scientific
subject, and couldn't understand why I'd chosen to do otherwise.

But I haven't. I am going to talk about my scientific field, although

not in the usual way. I'd like,to share with you a little of how it's been to
be a gay woman behaviorist who loves her laboratory animals and fears the
Bomb.

Another Division 25 colleague sent me a note a few weeks ago to let me

know that he wouldn't be coming to this talk.

Another friend gave me the wise advice, on hearing the title of my talk,
"Eve, you'll have to decide whether you want to be brave or to be effective."
I do want to be effective, so far as I can, and I'm not so very brave. I will
share a few regrettable personal experiences that have come my way over my 30
years in behavioral analysis, but not in a spirit of outraged moralizing. I
come to praise more than deplore, and where I must deplore, it isn't
behaviorism or behaviorists, but our shared predicament as inhabitants of a
world that we might all wish were better and wiser than it is.

I'm violating some taboos about what's a fit topic for a scientific
meeting of Division 25, but I don't do it to be outrageous. I do it out of
co~viction that though nature is impersonal, data may be impersonal, science
is not impersonal, nor is it value-free. Science is a human enterprise
carried on by real people. We need, I believe, to acknowledge and incorporate
our humanity in all our scientific activities. Further, as with any human
activity, science cannot escape a moral dimension. For example, as biological
scientists who understand technology and scientific research better than
others, I believe we have a special moral obligation to make clear to the
public the terrible jeopardy in which the life of the Earth is placed by
nuclear armaments.

Another friend, on hearing the title of my talk, said, "BUT WHY BORSCHT?"
Why, indeed? Let's get the question of borscht out of the way so we can get
on to other things.

Now, borscht comes from Russia, so let me start by saying that my gift to
you of three borscht recipes (the first 2 pages of my handout) is not an
endorsement of the Soviet way of life. I come by borscht as a birthright, my
grandparents having immigrated to the United States from Russia well before
the Bolshevik Revolution. My people (and many others) have fared almost as
ill under the Soviet regime as they did under the Tsars, so I hold no brief
for the Soviet Union. Though r will tell you that I fear nuclear holocaust a
great deaL more than I fear the Soviets.

So why borscht? Well, back in the early 1960's, when both I and the
JOURNAL FOR THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR (JEAB) were very young, JEAB
used to publish little helpful hints for the lab worker. They published
recipes for cumulative recorder ink, and recipes for building shock
scramblers, and recipes for home-made lock-up relays. I had just discovered a
brand of kitchenware called Tupperware. It's a type of plastiC storage
container with an airtight lid. If you "burp" the lid as you fit it on, it
creates a partial vacuum inside, and the contents stay exceptionally fresh.
 3

I found that it was not only good in my kitchen at home, it was equally
good for storing rat chow in my new lab, and I wanted to share my discovery
with other lab workers, so I sent a short note to JEAB extolling the virtues
of Tupperware. The JEAB editor who handled my note rejected it, saying that
he didn't see how Tupperware was better than tightly-sealed glass jars. Any
woman knows that Tupperware keeps food fresher than glass jars, but a man
wouldn't know that. Nor was the editor prepared to take my word for it, and
that's what bothered me. I felt his summary dismissal of my little helpful
hint smacked of sexism. He couldn't see publishing kitchen lore in the pages
of JEAB. If it was sexism, it was certainly unwitting. That editor, I'm
sure, is no sexist today. And maybe it wasn't sexism at all. I might have
been mistaken. But you know, women do encounter sex discrimination in a man's
world (and the animal lab part of behavioral analysis is a man's world, by and
large). The sexism we do encounter makes us hypersensitive, and sometimes we
see slights where none was meant. In any case, that rejection of my .
Tupperware note has stayed with me for 20 years, and now I have the chance to
say:

Oh, so a note about Tupperware is too feminine for the pages of JEAR?
Well, I'll give you feminine in spades--and a bit of my ethnic heritage to
boot. Here are three fine borscht recipes of my own--Bon appetit!

* * * * * * * *
What about being a gay woman in behavioral analysis? First I should
explain that I can't divorce my experience as gay from my experience as a
woman from my experience as a behaviorist. I've been all three all my adult
life, and I've encountered, at one time or another, opposition to each of
them. (There are people, you know, who scorn behaviorists.) I don't wish to
speak in moralistic generalities. I only wish to relate a few personal
experiences and their meaning to me, and let you take it from there.

I'm going to have the pleasure of paying tribute, at several places, to

Fred Skinner. Did you know, or do you remember, that Skinner included an
eloquent statement of feminism in WALDEN TWO? It begins on page 135 of the
paperback edition, with Frazier's reply to a question as to whether women feel
less necessary to their families when children are raised, kibbutz style, in
quarters separate from their parents'. "Of course they do," Frazier answers,
"and they ought to. You are talking about a tradition of slavery, and of the
sentiments which have preserved it for thousands of years. The world has made
some progress in the emancipation of women, but equality it still a long way
off. There are few cultures today in which the rights of women are respected
at all. America is one of perhaps 3 or 4 nations in which some progress has
been made. Yet very few American women have the economic independence and
cultural freedom of American men To make matters worse, we educate our
women as if they were equal, and promise them equality. Is it any wonder they
are soon disillusioned? The current remedy is to revive the slogans and
sentiments which have made the system work in the past. The good wife is told
to consider it an honor and a privilege to work in the kitchen, to make the
beds every day. to watch the children. She is made to believe that she is
necessary, that she has the care of her husband's happiness and health and
also her children's. That's the stock treatment of the neurotic housewife:
reconcile her to her lot! But the intelligent woman sees through it at once,
 4

no matter how hard she wpnts to believe. She knows very well that someone
else could make the beds and get the meals and wash the clothes, and her
family wouldn't know the difference Here [in Walden Two] each of us is
necessary in the same amount Each of us is necessary as a person to the
extent that he is loved as a person."

The passage goes on in that vein, but to save time I'll simply ask you to
go back and read it again for yourselves. Read the whole book again.

I also remember an EPA meeting. back in the late '60's. when I ran into
Skinner just as he came from the formative meeting of the women's movement
within psychology. He was very excited, and urged me to go quick and join up.
There was an important thing happening, and I should be in on the startof it.

But I wasn't in on the start of it--although my career has profited from

it in so many ways. I kept aloof from the women's movement, both within and
without psychology, for a good many years. I had been conditioned to think
that the women's movement was a bunch of whiners who couldn't make it on their
merits and so had to plead sex discrimination to explain away their lack of
advancement. I'd made it on my own, and so could they, if they were worth
anything.

I think what I really feared was that my male colleagues would think that
I, too, lacked merit if I felt it necessary to identify with the women's
movement. I wanted to be an honorary man, because that was the only way to be
a real scientist, I thought. (I remember a male colleague once telling me
that I was "the best girl boy-theorist around" and I was fool enough to think
that was a compliment.)

Any number of men had told me that women had no place in the man's world
of science. I remember running into an old friend from graduate school a
couple of years after we'd both earned our Ph.D.'s, and I was on my way to my
first job, at San Diego State College. He urged me, with the greatest good
will, to give up the folly of being a scientist, get married and have
children. That was the proper function of women, and I'd only make myself
unhappy if I tried to work in the male world of science.

Shortly before that, I'd been interviewed for a job as a research

associate at Yale. It was a soft-money job, to be paid from the PI's grant,
and I was concerned about my long-term prospects. I asked a faculty member of
the Yale psychology department about my chances for a permanent appointment.
He told me that Yale did not hire women in tenure-track positions, unless,
perhaps, it was absolutely impossible to find a qualified man--as for example,
to teach Chinese.

Well, I wasn't offered that research associateship. The reason, I was

told, was that I hadn't shown the proper respect for the man who told me that
Yale didn't hire women in tenure-track positions.

By then. fortunately, I'd met the then-chairman of the psychology

department at San Diego State College, Merle Turner. Merle hired women in
tenure-track positions. Since San Diego State College was a fairly obscure
place, Merle thought he had a better chance of hiring a first-rate woman than
a first-rate man. A man could choose where he wanted to go, but women didn't
 5

have much choice. I joined the faculty at San Diego State College--now San
Diego State University--and I've never felt unfairly treated there. Thank
heavens it wasn't Yale.

During those early job-hunting days, I also inquired of the chairman of

the psychology department at th~ University of Minnesota, where I'd taken my
B.A. and Ph.D., about my prospects of a faculty position at r~innesota. He
said, as nearly as I can remember, that he thought Minnesota would be ready to
hire women in tenure-track positions in a few more years, but not yet. That
conversation bewildered me. I couldn't understand why Minnesota had allowed
me to earn a Ph.D. when it apparently didn't believe that women should hold
academic positions. Yet an academic position was what I'd been trained
f'or--and all I'd been trained for. Are younger women still going through
schizoid experiences like mine back than?

Let me go back a few years. I first went to the University of Minnesota

as an undergraduate, and got turned on to behavioral analysis. Hell, the
father of behavioral analysis was Fred Skinner, and Skinner was at Harvard, so
I thought I'd go to Harvard for my graduate training. And so I did, for one
semester, in the fall of 1953. 'vIe 1 1 , actually I didn't go to Harvard,
although I did, sort of. I had to enroll in Radcliffe, the women's college,
though all my courses were in the Harvard psychology department.

That semester was great. I got to take Skinner'S course in verbal

behavior while he was still polishing the manuscript. Charlie Ferster was
there, and he gave me my first lessons in relay circuitry. (Murray Sidman
completed that job some years later.) Doug Anger, Bill Morse, Nate Azrin and
Dick Herrnstein were all there, Doug as a Junior Fellow, Nate, Bill and Dick
as fellow graduate students in the operant program. Bill Verplanck was
teaching there, and Nate and I had a good time doing a runway study together
for Verplanck. Lucy Turner, who then worked in the pigeon lab and later
collaborated with Dick Solomon, taught me how to use chopsticks.

It did strike me as odd, though, that my first official duty as a

psychology graduate student was to prepare the refreshments for the weekly
Harvard Psychology Department colloquia. Everyone seemed to think that was a
woman's job, and I didn't know better than to go along with them.
Two other very odd things happened that semester. I was invited to a
party to celebrate another student's passing his prelims. I drank too much of
whatever was going around, and retired to the bedroom to sleep it off. I
awoke a little later to find myself being raped by the graduate student whose
party it was. (It probably didn't meet the legal definition of rape. Maybe
it should be called "sex without consent.") Do you know, I never protested?
I didn't call for help, or resist, because I was embarrassed--I didn't want
everyone to run in from the living room and find me in such an awkward
predicament. And I must have felt I'd brought it on myse1f--after all, I had
drunk more than I should have, and I did pass out in the student's bedroom.

Not only that, when the student came around the next day to apologise, I
let him buy off his misdeed with a hamburger and a milk shake.

The whole thing is so unthinkable to me now. It's very hard to explain

to myself, and it must be very hard for you to understand, how I could have
 6

accepted being raped so calmly. But this was 1953. I was 21. And I was
intruding on the male stronghold of graduate school. I felt I had no one to
blame but myself.

There's one more reason why I didn't protest. I was gay. And very
anxious to conceal it. Even tO,the point of being heterosexually promiscuous,
if it took that; even rapable. I had been led to believe that if I resisted
men's advances, everyone would immediately know I was gay. And that had to be
concealed.

Well. as it turned out. I didn't conceal it well enough. Because the

final odd thing that happened to me, at the end of my semester of graduate
study with Fred Skinner, was that I was expelled. And the reason I was
expelled is this. Early in the semester I had gone to see a psychiatrist
whose name had been given to me by the Radcliffe Health Service. although he
was not, so far as I knew, in the employ of Radcliffe. I saw him only once,
but during that interview I confided to him that I was gay and that I'd been
having an affair with a married man while at the University of Minnesota the
year before. The upshot was that the psychiatrist wrote to the graduate dean
of Radcliffe pronouncing me psychopathic and recommending that I be expelled
before I brought disrepute to Radcliffe.

And expelled I was, at the end of the semester. despite the earnest
efforts of Fred Skinner to reverse Radcliffe's decision. Could such a thing
happen today? I hope not. But I share that stale old story with you in the
hope that you will be angry enough to be sure that it doesn't ever happen at
your university.

You know. when I try to get inside the skin of that foolish 21-year-old
kid, I can't. I'm not that person any more. When I ask myself what I feel
about her, I find mostly a feeling of irritation, that a kid so bright
academically should have been so damn dumb about looking out for her own
self-interest.

So there I was, out in the cold after one semester of graduate school.
But I still wanted to be a behaviorist. So I thought I'd try to get
readmitted to the University of Minnesota. From Boston. I called the chair of
the Minnesota psychology department. said I'd been expelled (didn't say why)
and asked if I could return to Minnesota. His answer, as near as I remember.
was, "Sure, we'll take you back. The only reason we wouldn't take back a
student who had been expelled somewhere else would be if they'd had a brush
with the law, or if they were psychopathic or homosexual." Well. as you can
imagine, I never did tell him why I'd been expelled. And I'm thankful to say
that he never asked. And I thank Fred Skinner, once again, for trying his
best to enable me to continue studying with him.

I'd like to mention two other men who proved to be good friends. One was
Eliot Stellar who, a few years later, offered me a fellowship to work with him
at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a problem. though. I really
wasn't interested in physiological psychology, and I didn't like cutting up
live animals, but physiological was Eliot's specialty. Well, since I didn't
want to do physiological research. he fixed me up with my first operant
chamber and a few relays, and let me alone. Furthermore. he never seemed to
 7

hold it against me that I didn't want to work in his'area, which was more than
generous, since he was paying my way.

Another friend was Howard Kendler. When I arrJved at San Diego State in
1960 and applied for my first NSF grant, they sent Howard to site-visit me.
\oJhen Howard and I went to chat wi th my college' s v:ic~ president for- research,
.>.~; .. '
I was astonished to hear the vice president tell Kenaler that he needn't take
my grant proposal too seriously. After all, I waso~ly a woman. Howard
Kendler, of course, is married to a woman as eminent as himself, and I want to
tell you, my dears, he gave the vice president what.Jor. I've always liked
him for that. And by the way, I got the grant.' ~,>
"

I'd like to say just a bit more about the experf:ence of being gay.
although you may be wondering why I should. After all, this is an enlightened
profession, and an enlightened time, and no one here~needs reminding that
gays, too, are entitled to respect. (Even Anita Bryant now says so!) But
when I put a notice in the Division 25 Recorder 3 years ago, asking who wanted
to join me in forming a Gay Behaviorists support group, I received only two
replies, one from a man and one from a woman. I believe the woman's reply
explains why more gay behaviorists didn't show interest". (I know there are
more. One can reasonably assume that about 10% of any group is gay.) The
woman said in her letter that, much as she'd like "to join such a support
group, her professional work was with children, and~he feared that joining
such a group would be risking exposure and might cost her her career. (This
was not 1953, but 1979 or 'BO!)

Sad to say, she was probably right. Enlight~ed as people have become
about gays, children still s'eem to be a sore point. In a survey that the APA
Task Force on Lesbians and Gays did a few years ago, it was found that a good
half of psychologists did nQt want to see gays working with children, or even
. raising their own children . Lesbian moihers and ~ay fathers still are denied
custody of their children by the courts,and just lots of people, including
educated ones, think that children shouldn't be exposed to gay teachers. As
though homosexuality were catching. But there's no reason to think that it
is. The origins of sexuality in childhood are still poorly understood, but
I'm told the general thinking is that sexual orientation and gender identity
are established early, in the home environment, almost certainly before school
age. HomOSexual orientation develops, just as heterosexual orientation does,
in a heterosexual family setting.

Although gay teachers can't influence anyone's sexual orientation,

there's something very good they could do for their gay students, if they were
free to be open, and that's to serve as positive role models. Since I came
out, several gay students have come to tell me how much it meant to them to
know there was a self-identified gay professor in the department. It makes
them feel less alone, less weird, less that there's something terribly wrong
with them, and dreadfully shameful.

And that has to be good, because if there's any special pathology about
being gay, it's the pathology that comes from being made to feel terrible
about yourself. Alan Malyon, a gay clinical psychologist, has written an
article about what he calls the biphasic adolescence of gay people. When the
JUlces start to flow in puberty, and gay adolescents become aware that their
sexual feelings are toward members of their own sex, it is so frightening and
disturbing to them that many suppress their homosexual feelings and do their
best to live as heterosexuals. Many marry and have children. But a point
comes in the adult lives of most suppressed homosexuals when they no longer
feel they can deny their true sexuality. when integrity and sanity demand that
they come out. And when they do, and start dating members of their own sex,
they've got to start adolescence allover again. They've got to go through
all the nonsense of crushes and identity crises and promiscuous sexual
experimentation, whether they're 25 or 35 or 45. For a time. they may behave
quite foolishly. as any adolescent does. And society takes that--often very
visible--foolishness as evidence of the essential pathology of homosexuality.
It must be hard for nongays to imagine the self-hatred that many. if not
all, gays feel at one time or another. and must struggle to overcome. I so
despised my own sexuality that for a period of almost 10 ye~rs, before I
finally finally came out, I simply suppressed all sexual feelin~s. I can't
tell you the thousands of dollars I've paid to psychotherapists, trying to be
cured. At one point. I persuaded myself that I was cured. and the proof I
offered myself was that I scorned and abhorred homosexuals. This was while I
was director of the Institute for Child and Family Development at the
University of North Carolina at Gree~oro, and, like the woman who wrote to
me, I was fearful lest anyone find out that I, who was then working closely
with children, had once been gay.

Don Baer came to the university about then to give a talk, and I happened
to make a scornful remark ~o him about a gay woman student who had a crush on
me. Don chided me for my insensitivity to her feelings, and my disrespect of
her humanity. That woke me up to what I'd been doing to myself. A short time
later, I began the growing-up process of coming out.

Now, at 50. I think I finally have about grown up, though I wish I'd been
able to do so 25 years ago, as at least some of my nongay peers did.

Almost without exception, the response I've had from nongay people I've
come out to is, "So what else is new?" And then, generally. the conversation
moves on to something else. I know they mean to indicate that nobody cares.
most everybody already knew. so forget it. But I wish they would sometimes
say, "Tell me more. \fnat's it be:en like? How w:Juld Y'JU like things to be
different'?" I'd be more than happy to tell them more. as, here and now, I'm
telling you more than you had thought to ask. more, probably, than you wanted
to know. But after one has mustered up their courage to come out to someone,
it's terribly anticlimactic to have them say "So what else is new?" and change
the subject. And I do believe that a greater sharing of personal experience
can only make people respect and cherish each other the more.

* * * * * * *
Enough. Let's move on to laboratory animals. I really have just one
thing to say about laboratory animals: please be kind to them. They are.
after all, our distant cousins. If some relative of ours were caught and
caged by aliens on another planet, wouldn't we hope that at the least they'd
be treated kindly?

For the past 5 years I've been studying the behavior of two Barbary
macaques. Mac and Sarah. They've had training in several discriminative and
 9

conceptual tasks, but I haven't published any of my data, partly because

they're so voluminous I don't know where to begin, and partly because their
importance pales in comparison to what I've learned just by watching Mac and
Sarah interact with us and with each other over the years. I'd like to share
with you some of my observations, even though they are only anecdotal, and
only on two animals.

They've completely changed my thinking about the origins of social and

emotional behavior in humans. I've been amazed to see the range of subtle
emotional and social reactions that I share with two macaques (they're not
even apes!). That leads me to think that there must be a broadly-shared
biological basis to social and emotional behavior in primates, including the
human primate.

I've also been amazed, even chagrined, to see gender differences in Mac
and Sarah's behavior that match some of the stereotypes about gender
differences in humans. (I've seen nothing to indicate gender differences in
intelligence, however.) Sarah is adroit, Mac is bombastic. Sarah can spend
all day delicately picking things apart with her fingers; Mac is more apt to
bounce off the four walls of the cage and pound on things. Sarah has the
deviousness of a diplomat, Mac is forthright. If Sarah is mad at you, she'll
sometimes put out her arms through the cage bars, as though inviting friendly
grooming. But draw near to her and she pinches, scratches and pulls your
hair. (B~t only if she's mad at you.) If Mac is mad, he makes what I call
his Mussolini face--jaw jutting forward--and pounds on the walls. You always
know where you stand with Mac. Sarah remembers small slights and holds
grudges for weeks; Hac is forgiVing, and forgets his anger the minute the
cause is removed.

Once Hac has accepted you, he's your friend for life. Sarah's trust and
affection have to be earned each day. But that's surely a result of their
different upbringings. Mac was human-raised from birth at the San Diego Zoo
and came to us when he was just 6 months old. He's never known anything but
lovingkindness. Sarah was 3 when she came to live with Mac. She'd been
raised with other macaques in a different zoo, and when she came to us she was
missing one phalanx from each hand, apparently the result of a fight long
before. Besides, on arrival in San Diego, she was an intruder into Mac's
territory, and had to watch her step for months until a peaceful relationship
was established between them, with Mac the dominant one. So Sarah has good
reason to be wary of other primates.
The monkeys live together in a vast cage, about 3 feet on a side, that
adjoins an even vaster outdoor exercise cage where they spend an hour a day in
fine weather. There's a movable mesh partition down the center of their
living cage, so we can separate them for feeding.

And that brings me to a story. A couple of years ago, I was on

sabbatical, and although I was in San Diego, I wasn't conducting experiments
but was working on a book. A student assistant fed and cleaned the monkeys
every day, and I came in a few times a week to say hello to them. But their
life was dull and monotonous compared to times when they were in training, and
I believe that sheer boredom caused a deterioration in their relationship.
Having nothing else to do, they started bickering. I've come to believe that
 10

intellectual stimulation is as important to their mental health as it is to

ours.

Hell, one day there was a spat, and Sarah wound up with a few scratches.
Nothing very serious, but I thought I'd separate them while her scratches
healed. ifuen I opened the barrier between them a week later, Sarah entered
Hac's compartment, and all was fine for a few minutes,. Then, all at once,
Sarah attacked Mac. Apparently she'd been nursing a grudge for the full week,
and was now getting back at Mac for scratching her . NOW, Mac is the heavier
animal, and definitely the dominant one, and it was practically unheard of for
Sarah to start a fight. But her surprise attack took Mac off guard, and he
retreated into the far end of the other compartment.

For the next several months, ~1ac suffered a nervous breakdown. He

cowered in a far corner of their cage, urinated and defecated whenever any of
us came into the room, ran from Sarah (who appeared to enjoy her new
dominance) and refused to corne to the front of the cage to greet us and engage
in mutual grooming, as had been his custom before.

What do you make of that? What I make of it is that his hasty retreat
from combat with Sarah caused Mac to suffer a loss of self-esteem. His pride
was hurt, and he could not look us, or Sarah, in the eye. He was a
humiliated, a mortified monkey.

We finally cured Mac by a little behavior therapy consisting of offering

him ginger snaps dipped in yogurt. Over a period of several weeks, he
progressed from snatching the cookie and running away, to allowing us to touch
him just before we offered the cookie, to licking cookie and yogurt "from our
fingers, to full friendly contact and mutual grooming. As his interaction
with us became normal, he reasserted his dominance over Sarah, and all was as
it had been.

This incident, and my other observations, have convinced me how close is

the bond between us and other primates. Virtually everything we can feel,
they seem to feel, too, in some form or another. The more I'm convinced of
that, the more I grieve over our customary treatment of laboratory animals-
and not only monkeys and apes, but rats and pigeons and cats and dogs as well.

Behavioral research has made fantastic progress in recent years. Surely

everyone ~s as impressed as I am by the new revelations of heretofore
unsuspected (or at least unproven) cognitive capacities in animals. But our
treatment of laboratory animals has not kept pace with our growing apprecia
tion for their capacities and, I would add, their capacity to suffer the same
subtle emotional states as we ourselves. I think they deserve greater
consideration.

Many animals are social creatures in the wild; wouldn't it be kinder to

cage them in groups? In cages large enough to permit free movement, exercise,
and play?
Where aversive stimUlation is the specific focus of research (and not
merely a convenience owing to the availability of a shock scrambler and,
perhaps, the unavailability of a pellet dispenser), wouldn't it be kinder, and
mightn't we learn more, if we used natural aversive stimuli instead of severe
 11

electric shock? All we have to do to scare Sarah and r1ac is hold up a rabbit
fur--they retreat in terror, though I've no idea why.

Even if shock must be used, several researchers have pointed out that
less severe shock levels are possible. Hank Davis has written that his rats
perform as well at a threshold intensity of shock just sufficient to get the
behavior he's interested in, as at higher shock intensities. So why use
higher intensities? J. D. Keehn has reported that rats will learn a
wheel-running avoidance response at much lower shock intensities than they'll
learn a barpress avoidance response. Then why not use wheel-running as the
standard avoidance operant?

In any case, a great deal of research that uses aversive control is not
really about the effects of aversive stimuli, and it seems that the same
behavioral processes could be studied using positive reinforcement instead.
Wouldn't it be kinder to do so?

For example, in recent years there seems to be less and less resort to
shock-based conditioned suppression as the means of studying Pavlovian
conditioning, and more and more reliance on autoshaping based on food for the
same purpose. I welcome that change.

Stephen Lea has pointed out that many, if not most, animals will work for
preferred tidbits even at full body weight. Then wouldn't it be kinder to use
preferred foods as reinforcers, instead of starving the animals so tbey'll
work for Noyes pellets?

A while back, as an associate editor of JEAB, I got into an exchange with

an author about the customary deprivation level for animals in positive
reinforcement studies. He had used 75% of free-feeding weight, and I had
asked him to justify the unusually severe deprivation (80~ being more
customary, I thought), and also to explain how he would defend against a
charge of unwarranted cruelty to animals. (Let me remind you that we're very
vulnerable to such charges by the public.) The author ignored the second
question. In reply to the first, he said he'd asked some of his department
colleagues and all agreed that 75~ of free-feeding weight was about as common
as 80%.

Well, hard data are the only way to settle this kind of disagreement, so
I've done a tabulation of the deprivation levels reported in JEAR, LEARNING
AND HOTIVATION, and the JOURNAL OF EXPERIHENTAL PSYCHOLOGY: ANIHAL BEHAVIOR
PROCESSES, for 1980 and 1981, and a month or so of 1982 as well. The results
are on pages 3 and 4 of your handout.

Where several experiments were reported in the same paper. I counted only
the first one. The count may not be complete, but I think it's nearly so.
And so far as I'm concerned, it settles the question of what deprivation level
is regarded as standard among animal researchers. By far the preponderance of
studies with rats and pigeons used 80~ of free-feeding weight to motivate
their subjects. A few experimenters, perhaps out of thoughtlessness or
inexperience, did deprive their subjects more severely than that, and a few,
I'm glad to say, used less severe deprivation levels.
 1?

The majority of primate studies I surveyed did not report percentage

weights at all. Instead they described procedures similar to the one I use
with Mac and Sarah. They're given all the food they'll eat in ~bout 4-6 hours
a day, and then run about 16 or 18 hours' food deprived. The reinforcers are
small bits of fruits and vegetables, and when those pall, toward the end of a
session, we switch to chocolate chips. I've found that if my monkeys won't
work under those conditions it isn't because they're insufficiently motivated
but because the task is too hard for them. As soon as I simplify it a bit,
they go right back to work. (My monkeys hate making a mistake. Sarah starts
to shake, and Mac slams the apparatus. Neither will work after a series of
errors, which tells me they're not ready for the task I've set them.)

By the way, when we offer Mac a tidbit he's not interested in that day,
he doesn't merely fail to take it. He turns his head to the side as a gesture
of refusal, much like a child refuSing medicine. I've wondered if that's the
origin of the hUman headshake for "No." (Sarah pushes your hand away if
you're offering a tidbit she doesn't want.)

I want to return to aversive control, just for a moment. A recent

article in JEAB dealing with the difference between the discriminative and
motivational functions of stimuli pointed out that it's a mistake to think of
shock in an escape situation as a discriminative stimulus. It's a motivation
al operation that makes it possible to use shock offset to reinforce the
escape response. The author goes on to describe a hypothetical thought
experiment in ~hich the escape response would be brought under discriminative
control. "Let the escape response terMinate shock only when a tone is
sounding; the shock remains on, irrespective of the animal's behavior, when
the tone is not sounding." This, of course, would make the tone a
discriminative stimulus for the escape response.

This hypothetical experiment is a good way to illustrate the difference

between the motivational and discriminative functions of stimuli. Just one
thing worries me, and that's that someone reading the article may think it
necessary to carry out the confirming experiment. That would subject the
animals to an awful lot of shock--they'd be shocked during all the times when
the tone was not sounding.

I wish the author had thought to add a disclaimer, saying that a

confirming experiment was not called for, and pointing out that to perform one
would be unjustifiably cruel. I wish the journal editor who handled the
manuscript had thought to suggest such a caution. Indeed, I wish it were firm
policy in our behavioral journals to refuse manuscripts that report unjusti
fiably stringent shock or deprivation levels.

I recently learned that the offi ial journal of the Society for the Study
of Pain does have ethical guidelines overning the acceptability of manu
scripts. For example, they will not ccept manuscripts reporting subjecting
animals to pain under paralytic drugs like curare, with no means open to the
animal to escape from the painful sti.ulus, and no measures taken by the
experimenter to alleviate the animals suffering. I wish we could give some
thought to adopting humane editorial uidelines of our own.

This is the right place to pay t ibute to Fred Skinner once again. I
remember his cautioning me, years ago not to starve my animals unduly. And
 13

he told me of his sorrow and regret that he had once been persuaded to
participate in a study where rats were allowed to starve to death, to see how
their barpressing would change as death approached. As you know, Skinner has
campaigned against the use of aversive control throughout his career. Just
this month, in the Convention issue of the Monitor, he published a letter
expressing his pleasure over the fact that since he showed how effective
positive reinforcement could be, the training of circus animals no longer
depends on beating them.

* * * * * * *
The title of my talk mentioned nuclear extinction. I might say a lot on
that topic, but there's no time left, so I'll just refer you to an unpublished
piece by John Nevin that he was kind enough to let me include as pages 5 and 6
of my handout. Let me refer you, as well, to the important book by ,Jonathan
Schell, THE FATE OF THE EARTH, which came out this spring, and which discusses
fully the consequences of nuclear war and the folly of our nuclear policy. It
was Schell's book that prompted Nevin's piece (1 understand Nevin's
full-length review of Schell's book will appear in JEAB in a few months), and
it was Schell's book that persuaded me, too, that the chief--the supreme-
issue of our day is to put an end to the nuclear arms race, and to do
everything we can to get the superpowers (starting with our own) to dismantle
their nuclear arsenals. Fortunately, the nuclear issue is well represented at
this convention. There are films and discussions and organizing meetings
going on, and there will be a gathering of psychologists at the Viashington
f.lonument at 7 AM on Thursday to protest our nuclear policies and to
demonstrate in favor of nuclear arms reduction. The speakers will be George
Al bee, 11011 y Harrower, and B. F. Ski nner. I hope you'll jo in me, Nev in, and
Skinner there.

I have just one tiny bit of behavioral engineering to offer: I've taken
to keeping a supply of dollar bills on hand, and, following Jeri Sechzer's
lead, some note paper near my television set. Whenever I hear that a
politician has acted in support of nuclear disarmament, 1 jot down their name
and send them a dollar. My dollar doesn't amount to anything, but politicians
always need money, and all our dollars together would amount to a good deal.

Thank you very much for hearing me out. Shalom.

 14

References

Davis, H. Ethical considerations in the aversive control of behavior. Social

Science and Medicine, 19B1, 15F, 61-67.

Keehn, J. D. Running and barpr~ssing as avoidance responses. Psychological

Reports, 1967. 2Q, 591-602.

Lea, S. E. G. Alternatives to the use of painful stimuli in physiological

psychology and the study of animal behavior. Alternatives to Laboratory
Animals Abstracts, 1979. 7. 20-21.

~'alyon,A. K. The homosexual adolescent: Developmeni-.al issues and social

bias. Child Welfare, 1981, 60(5), 321-330.

Skinner, B. F. Human rewards. APA Monitor, August, 1982.

Skinner, B. F. Walden Two. Second edition. New York: Macmillan, 1976.

(Originally published 1948)