The other side of the debate is the nurture argument which is argued by the empiricists. They believe that learning is environmentally determined through experiences, reinforcement and conditioning. These views were first established in behaviourism by Watson in the beginning of the twentieth century. Watson believed that psychology should focus on the scientific study of behaviour and that understanding learning is fundamental in understanding behaviour. He did an experiment in 1920 on a small child called Little Albert. He conditioned Little Albert to become afraid of a small white rat. He did this by pairing a loud noise, which Albert was afraid and caused him to cry, with a rat. After doing this several times Watson presented Albert with the rat with the noise and Albert started to cry when it was just the rat. This was done to show that a fear can be learnt from the environment. This experiment was based on Pavlov’s findings in the late nineteenth century on classical conditioning. Classical Conditioning is a training procedure for learning and it is built upon respondent behaviour which are reflexes triggered directly by a certain stimuli. Pavlov monitored the salivary reflex in dogs as he noticed that the dogs salivated before food was given to them. The dogs would usually salivate when they could see, hear or smell something which they could associate with the food. So Pavlov started to introduce a bell when he fed the dogs so that they would associate the sound of the bell with the food. So this made the dogs salivate to the sound of the bell and this is what Classical Conditioning is. Usually Classical Conditioning is in three stages: before the learning; during the learning and after the learning. The first stage is before the learning where an unconditioned stimulus (UCS), which in Pavlov’s experiment was the smell of the food, gives us an unconditioned response (UCR), which was the salivation. The second stage is during the learning and this is where the conditioned stimulus (CS), which was the bell, is added. This is added to the UCS, the smell of the food, to give the same UCR, salivation. This is the part where the dogs learn to associate the sound of the bell to food and therefore salivates. The final stage is when the CS, the bell, is used on it’s own without the UCS and it produces a conditioned response (CR) now, which is still the salivation. This is after the learning and it is this behaviour that shows us that the dogs have learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food.
The behaviourist approach was challenged by Skinner who came up with operant conditioning and proposed that organisms learn as a result of the consequences of their actions when operating in their environment. If these consequences are good, the behaviour becomes more frequent; if they are undesirable, it becomes less frequent. To try and prove this Skinner developed what is known as a ‘Skinner Box’ for rats. When the rats accidentally pressed a lever they got a food pellet so therefore learnt to press the lever when they wanted food. Skinner called this positive reinforcement. He also switched a light on in the box five seconds before giving the rat an electric shock. When the rat accidentally pressed a lever it turned the electricity off so the rat learnt to press the lever when the light came on to avoid an electric shock. Skinner called this negative reinforcement. The big problem with the nurture argument is the same as the problem with the nature argument and that is reductionism. The nurture argument reduces understanding of behaviour to stimulus-response relationships.
Stimulus-Response relationships were challenged by Tolman and Bandura in the middle of the twentieth century and they are followers of the cognitive approach to learning. Bandura believed people imitated other people due to the reinforcement that they observe. He believed that learning occurs through observation and role models. Instead of Stimulus-Response relationships Bandura talked about Stimulus-Observation-Response relationships to show how we learn. He also added two different types of reinforcement to Skinner’s. The first is vicarious reinforcement which is learning through observing someone else’s behaviour be reinforced. The other type of reinforcement he added was self approval which is behaving in a certain way because it makes the subject feel good about them self. The key experiment Bandura did to show his vicarious reinforcement was done in the sixties and was called ‘Bashing the Bobo’. This experiment observed how children imitated role models of the same and different sex in aggression. The children were exposed to these models and then let loose on a ‘Bobo’ doll to see how they behaved. The observers recorded three different types of aggression; physical aggression; verbal aggression and non aggressive verbal responses. Bandura found that the children tended to imitate the same sex role model and especially in the males. The cognitive approach is also an argument to how we learn things.
However, the real answer to how we learn is that it is a mixture of nature, nurture and cognition. It also depends on what is being learned and different things are learnt in different ways. For example the ability to breathe or open our eyes will be innate, learning a new language will probably be to with being reinforced and therefore would be from the nurture argument, and aggression or love may be cognitive. Although for all of these it is very hard to prove how it is learnt.
