HSS Workshop: Henry Cowles

Henry Cowles is a historian of science and medicine. He writes and teaches about a range of topics, including psychology, addiction, self-help, and expertise. In addition to the History Department, he is affiliated with the Science, Technology, & Society Program, the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. Current projects include a material history of mental health since 1800 and a history of habit from the celebration of daily routine in Thoreau's Walden to the rise of “persuasive technologies" in Silicon Valley and beyond.
 
Consider the toddler. Like kittens and puppies but unlike lobsters, fascists, and a host of other alien creatures, toddlers tend to induce positive affect from strangers and fierce devotion from familiars. This talk uses the attention and anxiety focused on kids and pets to open up a new history of science, capitalism, and the self in the modern United States.  Some of the most popular  methods by which Americans are trying to raise humans and non-humans today—from “clicker training” to attachment parenting—share a surprising origin: the radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. While Skinner’s approach is often dismissed for its failure, indeed refusal, to explain interiority or affect, his work undergirds much of the prolific (and profitable) advice literature we seek out to manage our most affectively potent relationships. This paper takes up that paradox by following the fading tracks of Skinnerian behaviorism from the dolphin tank and the psychiatric institution to the daycare and the dog park. In doing so, it offers a history of habit—both conscious and unconscious, internal and external, chosen and unchosen—as a means of linking our intimate interactions with loved ones to broader social and economic pressures of which we are often unaware.