Behaviourism and social constructionism

Abstract

This chapter explores science fiction’s deployment of behaviourism and social constructionism, which insist on the malleability of human psychology. B.F. Skinner’s near-future utopia. Walden Two (1948), authorizes the behaviourist model of the self by inscribing operant conditioning into long-standing progressivist discourses. But this is subverted by the novel itself, which persistently endorses historical, philosophical, and ethical discourses that have supposedly been rendered obsolete. Behaviourism is further undermined by Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and William Sleator’s House of Stairs (1974). These narratives juxtapose against behaviourism counter-discourses from different sources, including wisdom traditions such as world religions, and also antagonistic discourses such as psychoanalysis and existentialism. Social constructionism encourages science fiction to dissolve psychological and cultural givens of our time (such as heterosexuality or patriarchy) in a future or alternative social order. With enormously varying complexity and ethical sensitivity, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Edmund Cooper’s 1972 Who Needs Men? and Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three (1974), explore the utopian and dystopian reconstruction of gender relations, but are troubled by issues of natural and cultural diversity.