Overall, behaviorism studies only what can be observed. This means that any other phenomenon within the mind cannot be studied. And, because organisms are "active processors of information" (J. Golding, personal communication, February 26, 2013), much of these processes cannot be seen.
Problems
1) Causal Attributions
Causal attributions are one way in which behaviorism is unable to study certain behavior. Behavior is often learned through the cognitive relationship between events and their circumstances. For example, if you were to see someone trip, you might explain this with a dispositional attribution (they are clumsy), or with a situational attribution (the ground is uneven). Dispositional attributions explain a quality within the individual, while situational attributions explain outside influences on behavior. Because these attributions are made by an individual's own thinking process, behaviorism cannot study it.
Heider and Simmel (1944) pose an example of how behaviorism cannot be used to examine behavior in all instances. They conducted an experiment looking at the attributions that people made when viewing a movie featuring three moving geometric figures. They found that participants tended to make dispositional attributions and give the geometric figures motives for their actions (Heider & Simmel, 1944).
So, the question that Heider and Simmel bring up is, How do you teach an animal something if it is up to them to determine how a situation is viewed? If you had a kitten who was convinced that going to the bathroom meant going in your closet, how would you litter train it? How would you change its idea of how going to the bathroom works?
2) Food Aversion
Have you ever eaten something and gotten sick later? Did you eat that food again, or did you stay away from it? Most people and animals would end up staying away from the food. However, this goes again the notion of behaviorism. Why? Because behaviorism involves shaping, or multiple trials. If an organism were to learn in one instance that they should avoid something, behaviorism would not be able to explain this. Also, because time would have elapsed between the stimulus and the response, behaviorism would not be able to explain how learning still occurred, as learning is best accomplished right after the stimulus is presented.
3) Observational Learning
Another way that behaviorism cannot explain all behavior is shown in an experiment by Bandura, Ross, and Ross (1961).
What this experiment shows is that reinforcement is not always necessary to produce a desired response. In the experiment, the children's actions were not reinforced, but they were still able to reproduce the violent behavior.
4) Biological Constraints
Breland and Breland (1961) discuss their problems with training animals through behaviorism. They describe that when they first started training animals they believed behaviorism could result in the successful training of all of them. However, they soon encountered problems with many different types of animals, ranging from pigs to hamsters.
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Another example of training problems was described in the case of a pig who was supposed to carry big wooden coins and put them in a piggy bank in return for food. Interestingly, at first the pig was willing to do the task, but overtime (a period of weeks or months) the pig would get slower and slower, regardless of the incentive for food. Finally, it was obvious that the task could not be learned, as the pig had gotten to the point that it was not getting enough to eat in a day. What is even more fascinating is that this pig was not alone; there were attempts to train many other pigs in similar ways, and they all failed in the same manner.
So, how did Breland and Breland explain this? They determined that some behaviors cannot be trained because they go against instinct, referring to this phenomenon as "instinctive drift" (p. 684). They further concluded that animals are not blank slates waiting to be taught, as they had believed, and that there are substantial differences between different animals and what they can learn.
Do Not be Discouraged
Although the above examples show that behaviorism cannot teach animals everything, do not be discouraged. Animals are trainable in many ways. As long as the behavior you are trying to train does not go against an animal's instinct, you should be able to train it just fine with behaviorist techniques.