Watson’s interest in behaviorism also influenced B. F. Skinner (1938), who became one of the best-known psychologists in North America. Skinner’s radical behaviorism carried the mechanistic paradigm to an extreme by disregarding anything that cannot be seen and measured. Thoughts, hopes, goals, emotions, values, meaning were all relegated to an impenetrable mental “black box” of no interest to science of the day. Despite its exclusion of much of what people consider crucial to their experience of life, behaviorism established some very clear answers to why we behave as we do. We are part of a natural world of other living organisms, and like many others, we learn from consequences. This association of stimulus with response happens quite apart from our intentions or beliefs or other non-directly observable thoughts or feelings. This kind of learning occurs over time by incremental practice in a process that is similar to how neural connections are strengthened by practice. Coaches rely on behaviorist principles when they suggest acknowledging small wins and taking one step at a time.

However, Gestalt psychologists had for some time investigated perceptions that could not be explained by specifying every one of their constituent qualities. People see the typographical characters of a colon, dash, and close parenthesis as a “smiley face”:-). However objectively and in whatever detail we analyze the characters from the outside, if we ignore the phenomenological experience of the person doing the perceiving, we cannot understand the relationship between the characters and the meaning given to them. Wolfgang Kohler (1959), a psychologist who had studied with Max Planck and who discovered insight learning among the apes he studied during World War II, called the extreme demand of objectivity “methodological behaviorism.” Because of it, he claimed, psychological researchers … refrain from observing, or even from referring to, the phenomenal scene. And yet, this is the scene on which, so far as the actors are concerned, the drama of ordinary human living is being played all the time. If we never study this scene but insist on methods and concepts developed in research ‘from the outside,’ our results are likely to look strange to those who intensely live ‘inside’. (p. 732)

Psychometrics is another field that attempts to measure experience “from the outside”. It concerns the practice of assessing psychological traits and states and was accorded acceptance as a science because of its anchoring in statistics. From the beginning, psychometrics was assumed to shed light on concepts on the inside of the black box, such as intelligence and personality. Many coaches rely on assessments to guide their coaching. By mid-20’h century, nonparametric statistical techniques that allow researchers to work with categories and concepts rather than only numbers made studying phenomenological data more acceptable.

Developmental psychology was influenced by Jean Piaget (1928), who observed patterns of maturation in his own children. Being from France, Piaget was not limited by North American demands for methodological behaviorism, allowing him to draw conclusions about the development of intellect that later became more generally important in cognitive psychology. Erik Erikson (1950, 1968, 1975) extended developmental theory to adults. His recognition of “identity crisis” and later adult challenges (such as “generativity”) are relevant to all coaches. However, the idea that everyone goes through the same life cycle stages was brought into question by globalization and differences in the experience of aging among diverse communities and individuals. Thus, reliance by early behaviorism on objective behavioral observations began to shift by mid-20′” century to including people’s internal experiences-that is, what people think, feel, believe, imagine, and hope for.