Behaviorism
Behaviorism is a psychological theory that focuses on observable behaviors rather than internal mental processes. It emphasizes the role of environmental stimuli in shaping and controlling behavior, and it often uses conditioning techniques to modify behavior. Behaviorism has had a significant influence on areas such as learning theory and therapy.
8 Key excerpts on "Behaviorism"
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Theories of Personality
7th Edition
- Robert B. Ewen(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...PART IV The Behaviorist Perspective Overview Behaviorism seeks to make psychology more scientific by studying only what can be observed. It therefore redefines psychology as the study of overt behavior. Behaviorism eliminates from consideration virtually all of what personality theorists consider to be important: inner causes of behavior, wishes, needs, thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs, expectations, preferences, self-perceptions, unconscious processes, intrapsychic conflicts, dreams. Thus Behaviorism is not another approach to personality theory, but rather an alternative to personality theory. Ivan Pavlov First demonstrated the simple form of learning called classical conditioning in his famous experiment with dogs, food, a tone, and salivation. In classical conditioning, the organism learns that one stimulus will be followed by another stimulus because the two stimuli repeatedly occur closely together in time. John B. Watson Also an advocate of classical conditioning, he demonstrated that fear to a previously neutral stimulus can easily be conditioned in his famous experiment with “little Albert.” B. F. Skinner Argued that most behavior is learned through operant conditioning, wherein the organism must make the correct response to be reinforced (receive a reward or avoid punishment). A response operates on the environment to produce consequences that either strengthen or weaken that behavior. If the response is reinforced, it is more likely to occur again; if it is not reinforced, it is less likely to recur. All of our behavior is determined by prior causes and by our environment; we have no free will. Therefore, the only way to change (and improve) our behavior is to design the environment appropriately, so that it will reinforce desired responses and not reinforce undesired responses. How reinforcement is administered (schedules of reinforcement) strongly influences learning and behavior...
- Amy E. Wenzel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Richard Yi Richard Yi Yi, Richard Carl W. Lejuez Carl W. Lejuez Lejuez, Carl W. Behaviorism Behaviorism 458 462 Behaviorism Behaviorism is a school of psychology that believes that psychology should be an extension of the natural sciences, with similar goals of prediction and control. Behaviorism emphasizes the study of observable behaviors that can be objectively measured. For instance, Howard Rachlin advocated for focus on pain-related behaviors over the internal experience of pain to understand and treat pain-related psychopathology. A corollary to this orientation is that the behavior of humans is not unique or substantively different from that of nonhuman animals; human and animal behavior are equally important to understanding behavior in general. Some behaviorists hold firmly to an exclusive focus on overt (i.e., observable) behavior with little consideration for internal or mental events that cannot be measured. However, more modern forms of Behaviorism are more integrative and acknowledge the importance of internal events. However, in contrast to cognitive perspectives, internal events are not viewed as causes of overt behavior but simply as another form of behavior that is influenced by environmental events. As a theoretical approach to the study of human behavior, Behaviorism offers explanations for normal and abnormal behaviors, as well as approaches to modify them. What follows are brief biographies of the principal figures in Behaviorism, some fundamental principles highlighted by this approach, current application of behavioral approaches to treat disorders relevant for clinical and abnormal psychology, and limitations. Principal Figures Prior to the formalization of Behaviorism, psychological study was constrained by the mind-body dualism of philosopher René Descartes. Many psychologists limited their study to understanding the immaterial “mind,” with introspection thought to be an acceptable form of psychological study...
eBook - ePubConsumer Behaviour
Perspectives, Findings and Explanations
- John O'Shaughnessy(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Behaviorism CONDITIONING Behaviorism is the perspective that all animal (including human) behavior is the result of past and present conditioning; a perspective that eschews quoting mental happenings as causal factors. Every perspective, paradigm or model is a way of seeing, and a way of not-seeing in that it can block out alternative viewpoints. It reminds us of those drawings in Gestalt psychology. From one viewpoint we see a very old lady, but from another view we see a young girl. We are unable to see both at the same time. There is always a danger of distorting whatever has to be explained (the explicandum) to fit one’s perspective or scientific paradigm. This was certainly true of Behaviorism, which dominated psychology until the 1950/60s. All human and animal behavior was made to fit the mechanism of operant conditioning. But this does not mean that Behaviorism is an obsolete paradigm (as is often suggested) but simply that it does not explain all that needs to be explained given our different purposes. CLASSICAL CONDITIONING VERSUS OPERANT CONDITIONING Classical conditioning: There are two forms of conditioning. The earliest was Pavlovian or classical conditioning. In Pavlov’s well-known experiment, when the sound of a bell was paired with food, the food reliably produced salivation in the dogs based on a reflex response. After some trials, the bell itself (without any sight of food) was sufficient to produce salivation. Pavlovian conditioning is an S>R (stimulus>response) psychology. Pavlov spoke of the unconditional stimulus (the food) and the conditional stimulus (the bell). The transformation of these two terms into ‘unconditioned’ and ‘conditioned’ does not sufficiently capture the original meaning but they have become so established that we are now stuck with them. Pavlov’s contribution to conditioning was not confined, as is popularly supposed, to demonstrating a conditioned stimulus and response...
eBook - ePub- Richard J. Mueller(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER TWO Behaviorism in the Classroom LEARNING is something we do almost every moment of the day as we assimilate and adapt to the environmental influences around us. Learning takes place in a wide variety of situations and at all levels of animal life—from the conditioned reflexes of lower animals to the complex thinking processes of man. Early evidence of learning among very low forms of life was reported by Day and Bentley (1911), who found that paramecia can, after repeated trials, reduce the time required for them to turn around in a capillary tube. More recent investigations show that the planarium, a simple flatworm, can be conditioned to respond to a stimulus of strong light (Thompson and McConnell, 1955). Although lower forms of life can learn, their learning is limited and slow. By comparison, the human child learns quite rapidly, although he requires a long period of infancy before he reaches the level of maturity necessary for independent survival. The most popular definition of learning among behaviorist psychologists is that it is a change of behavior. Or, as Cronbach (1963, p. 71) stated, learning is shown by a change of behavior as a result of experience. What is meant by “change of behavior”? If someone begins to react to a stimulus in an observably different way and continues this changed reaction over a period of time, he has learned something. From the standpoint of psychology, any change of behavior is considered an indication that something has been learned, whether or not the new behavior is desirable or useful. Educational psychology, however, focuses largely on changes of behavior that are positive and desirable—usually within the context of school objectives. EARLY Behaviorism: ASSOCIATIONISM For nearly a half century, the learning theories of one man dominated all others in America. In his book Animal Intelligence (1911), Edward L...
eBook - ePub- John B. Watson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...You will soon find that instead of self-observation being the easiest and most natural way of studying psychology, it is an impossible one; you can observe in yourselves only the most elementary forms of response. You will find, on the other hand, that when you begin to study what your neighbor is doing, you will rapidly become proficient in giving a reason for his behavior and in setting situations, (presenting stimuli) that will make him behave in a predictable manner. Definition of Behaviorism Definitions are not as popular today as they used to be. The definition of any one science, physics, for example, would necessarily include the definition of all other sciences. And the same is true of Behaviorism. About all that we can do in the way of defining a science at the present time is to mark a ring around that part of the whole of natural science that we claim particularly as our own. Behaviorism, as you have already grasped from our preliminary discussion, is, then, a natural science that takes the whole field of human adjustments as its own. Its closest scientific companion is physiology. Indeed you may wonder, as we proceed, whether Behaviorism can be differentiated from that science. It is different from physiology only in the grouping of its problems, not in fundamentals or in central viewpoint. Physiology is particularly interested in the functioning of parts of the animal—for example, its digestive system, the circulatory system, the nervous system, the excretory systems, the mechanics of neural and muscular response. Behaviorism, on the other hand, while it is intensely interested in all of the functioning of these parts, is intrinsically interested in what the whole animal will do from morning to night and from night to morning. The interest of the behaviorist in man’s doings is more than the interest of the spectator—he wants to control man’s reactions as physical scientists want to control and manipulate other natural phenomena...
eBook - ePub- Alexander Rosenberg(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER FIVE Behaviorism in the Behavioral Sciences The most influential twentieth-century attempt to circumvent the difficulties that the mind-body problem raises for social science was Behaviorism. This chapter traces the important motivations for this research program, which influenced all the social sciences. The reasons for its eventual eclipse as a research program reemphasize the problem of how beliefs and desires explain, and how central that problem is to understanding human action. Though Behaviorism went into eclipse in the social sciences, in experimental psychology it eventually gave rise to cognitive neuroscience, which seeks to identify the brain processes that produce human behavior. Cognitive neuroscience has been a remarkable success in its own domain; nonetheless, it is crucial to understand the philosophical problems it faces in the explanation of behavior. These problems are mostly the same as those that faced Behaviorism. Behaviorism IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES Behaviorism was a widely adopted label for a variety of social scientists’ responses to the problems of intentional explanation described in the last two chapters. In the second half of the twentieth century many scientists attributed the difficulty of developing a predictively powerful science of human action to the inability to observe and control mental states—beliefs, desires, and so on. Inspired by the logical positivist demand that science base itself on what we can observe and control, many social scientists determined to restrict their explanations of behavior to factors that can be observed: environmental factors that modulate, modify, elicit, trigger, or otherwise bring about the behavior to be explained...
eBook - ePubPhilosophy of Education
An Encyclopedia
- J.J. Chambliss(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Behaviorism Edward G. Rozycki DOI: 10.4324/9780203054253-24 The Behaviorist Enterprise In education, Behaviorism has been both a research program and a philosophy of psychology. As a research program, it undertakes to explain and predict an organism's behavior solely in terms of the effects of its present environment and the conditioning history of that individual organism. Put in simple mathematical form, it asserts that (l)B = f(E,H), that is, that behavior, B, is a function of environment, E, and conditioning history, H. In more colloquial terms, what formula (1) says is that specific pairs of values, that of an environmental variable and that of a conditioning history variable, specify a unique value of a behavioral variable. Or, in stronger causal language, a specific environmental state, given a specific conditioning history, is sufficient to cause an organism to act in a unique way. Thus, a different environment may cause an organism to behave differently, or a different conditioning history may cause an organism to behave differently in the same environment. Behaviorism disallows the possibility that the organism could behave consistently differently given the same environment and no new conditioning history. For the behaviorist, organisms do not develop independently of environmental stimuli. As the functional formula shows, E and H are assumed to be noninteractive, because such interaction would have to be done by some theoretically disallowed internal process. Thus, any formula of the form (2) Β = f(E,H, g[E,H]) where f and g are functions, is disallowed. The reason for this dismissal, given for example by B.F. Skinner, is that the behaviorist researcher needs to be able to assume that behavioral types, B, can be simply mapped back to environmental states, E, that presumably affect them, without worrying about physiological processes of the observed organism. As a doctrine, Behaviorism presumes to say what psychology should do...
eBook - ePubPersonality: A Topical Approach
Theories, Research, Major Controversies, and Emerging Findings
- Robert B. Ewen(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Some of these issues involve learning theory (e.g., is operant conditioning as different from classical conditioning as Skinner contended; is punishment as flawed a procedure as he believes). Other behaviorists are keenly interested in devising more effective methods of therapy. Still others prefer to focus on such issues as social learning, cognitive expectancies, and learned helplessness, as we have seen. What was originally intended as a radical departure from personality theory can no longer be regarded in that light. This is evident when we compare Bandura’s (and Rotter’s) emphasis on expected reinforcement to Kelly’s emphasis on anticipating the future, self-efficacy and learned helplessness to the Adlerian inferiority complex and Erikson’s and Fromm’s concept of mastery, Bandura’s work on the harmful effects of excessive self-criticism and self-hate to the Freudian overly developed superego and Horney’s emphasis on self-contempt, and the forms of behavior therapy that attempt to change the client’s cognitions and self-perceptions to insight psychotherapy. Although Bandura has done psychology a service by defending the importance of inner cognitive causes of behavior, he and most behaviorists usually have not related their ideas to the important personality theories that preceded them. Perhaps more efforts at integration will be made in the future. Dollard and Miller’s theory is currently regarded as primarily of historical importance. But the basic plan that they advocated—namely, trying to form a rapprochement between personality theory and Behaviorism—was indeed prescient, for this has proved to be the most profitable course for the psychology of personality. Postscript Thou hast spoken right, ‘tis true. The wheel is come full circle. —William Shakespeare Summary 1...
