HUDSON HOAGLAND 
We control each other in a great variety of ways. Force and 
the threat of force, which are clearly objectionable, may not 
be used but education, persuasion and moral pressure have the 
same effects. Cajolery, seduction, incitement and a variety of 
other techniques are used. B. F. Skinner has pointed out} that 
ethical counter-controls in most countries prevent exploitation 
by the use of force and deception. But he emphasizes that there 
is real danger that the rapid development of new techniques of 
control will outstrip counter-control. Despite objections, science 
will increasingly facilitate control of human behaviour and 
it must be used wisely if we are to avoid disaster. 
The behavioural sciences have developed new methods to 
modify and direct conduct. Examples are Pavlovian condition- 
ing and the conditioning methods developed by Skinner, which 
have become widely used in studies of animal and human 
behaviour. By the use of appropriate reinforcing stimuli, be- 
haviour may be modified and directed. The techniques involve 
carefully programmed rewards, reinforcing the subject’s known 
hierarchies of values. Operant conditioning is the basis of the 
programming of teaching machines which are increasingly being 
used in education. The use by advertisers and others of subli- 
minal messages in television has caused alarm and been made 
illegal in some countries. The effectiveness of this clandestine 
form of subconscious communication is, however, question- 
able. 
C. H. Waddington, in his book The Ethical Animal+ has con- 
sidered that the long range objectives of the control of behaviour 
are ethical systems, the values of which may be judged in rela- 
tion to their ability to further a desirable evolutionary direction, 
unique for mankind, and he discusses the nature of this evolu- 
tionary progress. Human culture, he points out, is based on a 
mechanism that requires people to be brought up in such a way 
that they accept beliefs given them by others such as parents 
and other influential persons in authority. Of course such beliefs 
are subject to later testing and rejection or retention, but before 
this can happen ideas must be transmitted as a form of social 
heredity. Ideas thus function in cultural evolution in a way 
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