There are many people who, perhaps because of the influence that the works of Sigmund Freud have had, believe that Psychology is in charge of unraveling the secrets of something that we usually call “mind”. In fact, many of those who totally reject the psychoanalytic ideas born with Freud in practice still believe that the mind is an entity that, despite remaining hidden inside the human skull, is the cause of all our behaviors, the helmsman of our movements, thoughts and emotions.

This idea, which may even seem obvious, is not shared by all psychologists. Those who belong to the behavioural current , famous by researchers like B. F. Skinner or John B. Watson, made famous the idea that the human mind is a black box, a metaphor that gives the idea of representing something mysterious, impossible to open to be explored. However, this is a myth, and in fact since behaviorism has been understood as a black box is not that.

The metaphor of the black box does not mean that the mind cannot be studied as one would study a dead animal. What it means is that the mind does not exist.

What is the black box for behaviorists?

To understand what comes next, one thing must be clear: the psychological current of behaviorism, which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and was dominant in many countries of the world until the 1960s, is defined by its concern in to define human behavior as an operational process , something that with the appropriate instruments can be measured objectively.

That means that behaviorists, unlike other psychologists based on metaphysics, began by analyzing the observable: the behavior patterns of humans and non-human animals. From these events they raised hypotheses that they tried to use to predict behavior and, as far as possible, influence it.

Mainly, the black box figure is used to represent what is between an input (a stimulus received by the person or animal) and the output (the behavior performed by the person or animal). If we think for example of the act of rewarding a dog with a treat, and input is the treat and output is the propensity to perform again the action that has served before to win that prize.

Therefore, what is between the stimulus and the reaction is not known , only that there is a mechanic that links the input with the output. Now then… does that mean that the black box is unfathomable? The answer is no.

The black box can be opened

The idea is that the black box is only as long as a certain level of analysis is maintained between a type of stimulus and a type of response. If we choose to study the relationship between receiving a treat and the consequence of acting in a certain way as a result of it, what has happened between those two phases is not known, but neither is it necessary to know it in order to generate knowledge at that moment. There is nothing to suggest that later on one cannot know what has happened “in there”.

In the end, behaviorism is based on the philosophical currents that were born with positivism , and that means that no time is spent discussing the possibility that there are non-physical elements directing behavior. If something of what happens in our behavior cannot be investigated at a given moment, it is not because it is something “spiritual” and by definition impossible to observe or measure, but because either we do not have the means to do so or we are not interested in studying it directly.

As much as the black box is mysterious, it is still something material, and therefore participates in the chain of cause-effect of the world in which we live; there is nothing in it that appears out of nowhere, everything has an origin in measurable and observable events that occur around us or within us.

That is why for behaviorism the mind as an entity isolated from the rest and generating behavior, does not exist . In any case there are mental processes (that occur in the brain), whose existence is totally conditioned by other processes that are not mental and that are as normal and current as a vibrating eardrum or a few drops of water falling on the skin. And that is also why B. F. Skinner, shortly before his death, accused the cognitive psychologists of being “psychology creationists,” implying that for them there is a source of behavior without a particular origin.

In short, those who believe that the black box is a metaphor used by behaviorists to reluctantly admit that they need a carpet under which to accumulate their unquestionable doubts will be disappointed.