Causes of unity and disunity in Psychology and Behaviorism: An encounter with Arthur W. Staats’ Psychological Behaviorism1

The following is a synthesis of a number of interviews with Arthur W. Staats. For the last fifty years A. W. Staats has made important contributions in developmental psychology, learning Psychology, emotional behavior, language, behavioral theory and theoretical unification in psychology. His theoretical proposal, Psychological Behaviorism (PB), is illustrated as a non-eclectic framework for unification between behaviorism and Psychology. In this document we give special consideration to: (a) historical factors in behaviorism history, including similarities and pathways of influence between firstand secondand third-generation behaviorism; (b) theoretical fragmentation in contemporary Psychology; (c) the role of eclecticism as an artificial framework for unification in Psychology; (d) unification in psychology; (e) differentiation between PB and Radical Behaviorism with regard to functional analysis, emotional operation/classic responses, and their theoretical conception of the relationship between basic and applied research; and (f) key concepts in PB, including basic behavioral repertoires, threefunction theory, multi-level theory, experimental-longitudinal method, behavioral use of psychometric tests, and PB theory of intelligence. 1 The author would like to show his appreciation and gratitude to Arthur W. Staats for his accessibility and kindness. The author thanks Stephen N. Haynes, Karen C. Kloezeman and Joanne E. Ogata for their suggestions for linguistic improvement of this paper. This work was developed during an internship granted by the Andalusian Service of Health (Servicio Andaluz de Salud) at the Hawai’i State Hospital and the University of Hawai’i. 2 Correspondence: Facultad de Psicología. Universidad de Granada. 18071 Granada (Spain). E-mail: