Thus far this has been a brief characterization of what psychological behaviorism (including unified positivism) is as a science edifice, what it consists of. But PB is a framework theory that has been composed to stimulate and guide various avenues of advancement for psychology, in fact, in the very long view, to
change the nature of psychology. A very few words will be said of the heuristic properties of PB in the several fields that have been described.

As a background in the Staats view it is inevitable that psychology will progress toward and ultimately will be among the unified sciences. PB has already shown that many human behavior phenomena, traditionally considered as different, called by different names, and studied separately with different methods, are actually the same or function according to the same underlying principles. For example, PB has analyzing emotion, interests, values, attitudes, incentives, hedonic value, positive meaning, and abnormal fetishes as related phenomena that involve the same principles. Each time that is done for two or more concepts formerly treated as different the science of psychology is made more parsimonious, more orderly, more coherent, more connected and meaningful, more powerful, and more readily usable by students, scholars, researchers, and practitioners. That is why it is inevitable that psychology will ultimately make great strides in that direction. But that possibility cannot be seen generally in psychology. Psychology cannot see, either, that it is possible to construct theory that not only unifies separate topics like the concepts just described but that provides the foundation for unifying broad fields. But unifying theory has been of enormous value in some fields of science, like physics, and such theory will have to play a role in the unification of psychology. So psychology will have to advance at some point to systematic treatment—analysis of methods, heuristic value, parsimony, general potentiality--of overarching theory as well as use of the area theories within the larger structure. Those advancements lie ahead, however. To close this website a section will be devoted to brief suggestions about the new lines of development indicated by PB for research in the fields of psychology.

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