Conventional wisdom says that congressional Republicans vote with President Trump despite knowing better because they fear his retribution, which could cost them their jobs. GOP legislators, including feckless Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, demonized Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to their constituents and then voted for it, demonstrating they fear Trump more than their voters.

Republicans used to have minds of their own. How did they lose them so quickly? Can fear alone control behavior so effectively?

I recalled the answer while we were signing books about our pet parakeet in a Maine bookstore. A customer said her first experience with birds had been in B. F. Skinner’s pigeon lab at Harvard in 1981.

“You knew B. F. Skinner?” I exclaimed. I hadn’t thought about Skinner since graduate school, in the mid-1970s.

Skinner is considered the most eminent 20th-century psychologist by the American Psychological Association. He brought his “radical behaviorism” to psychology in the 1930s and 1940s, whereby all voluntary behavior is explained by the extent to which it is or isn’t rewarded.  For example, you do an especially good job and are taken out to lunch by the boss, so you make the effort again.

Skinner took mind out of psychology to great acclaim, by insisting that behavior isn’t caused by internal mental processes. An action persists only if it’s rewarded by some external event.

But by mid-century, radical behaviorism was eclipsed by the “cognitive revolution,” which put mind back in psychology as a determinant of behavior, with such mental processes as memory and our interpretations of events — much to Skinner’s consternation.

I asked the bookstore customer to describe Skinner. “He had a dry sense of humor” she said, and continued, “At a party for the lab assistants, I told him I’d learned much, to which he replied, ‘Now you know how to manipulate people.’” The not-so-funny “joke” being that the principles that apply to training the behavior of pigeons and rats apply to humans equally well. Really.

Skinner rejected punishment, which he found less effective than reward and caused strong, chaos-inducing emotional reactions that, he wrote, “interfere with the behavior of the individual in his daily life.” Punishment disorganizes the organism, especially impeding learning by inducing fear, anxiety, rage and depression. Excessive guilt and self-punishment have also been observed.

Skinner described I’m-not-playing-this-game-anymore passive resistance. For example, upon receiving Trump’s primary threats, North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis announced he’s not running for reelection. Tillis also demonstrated active resistance in voting against Trump’s bill, along with Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins and Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul.

Then there’s Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who in April said, “We are all afraid … I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” She added that she didn’t plan to stop speaking out, even if she was frightened of retaliation. “That’s what you’ve asked me to do,” she said, referring to her constituents. “I’m going to use my voice to the best of my ability.”

That was Murkowski in April. In July, she cast the deciding vote for Trump’s bill, giving her rationalization for that “agonizing” decision in obtaining legislation that benefited Alaskans, though not all Alaskans agreed that it did. Is she now just another GOP rat in Trump’s Skinner box, “pressing the bar” to avoid getting shocked? At least she expressed some guilt.

Trump’s use of punishment to create fear and chaos has worked like a charm in controlling GOP congressional representatives, who stick to Trump’s guns with politically self-destructive behavior to avoid his primary-them wrath. But in voting for his bill to the detriment of their constituents even in red states, they might lose their jobs anyway. Putting themselves in this lose-lose situation reveals just how much they’ve lost their minds.

Those of us in any party who haven’t lost our minds will be moved to pull the lever for pro-democracy candidates in November. A Democratic Congress could reward us by thwarting Trump’s authoritarian ambitions and restoring order amidst the chaos he thrives on. Skinner would have surely loved to know what, if anything, American voters have learned since the 2024 elections. I’m interested in the same thing.