Psychological behaviourism is present in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), Edward Thorndike (1874-1949), as well as Watson and B.F. Skinner.
B. F. Skinner
1904 – 1990
B.F. Skinner was a strong behaviourist, and he was convinced of the importance of objective method, experimental rigor, and the capacity of elegant experimentation and inductive science to solve the most complex behavioral problems. His theory has long been described as the stimulus-response theory. His research is based on the idea of the connection between a response and a subsequent reinforcing event, not a stimulus and a subsequent response. He theorized that there are no controlling stimuli for most normal behaviors.
Skinner was born in 1904 and raised in Pennsylvania, as the son of a small town lawyer. Skinner died in 1990, two days after being awarded the only Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology, by the American Psychological Association.
Skinner feels that people are not in control of their behavior that it is purely a consequence of actions taken onto them. He feels that serial killers should not be blamed for their actions it was the cause of outside forces, not personal choice. Skinner shows a great indifference to structural variables. Skinner’s focus was on behavior that could be changed therefore he had little interest in characteristics that seemed permanent. This is mainly because of his emphasis on the control of behaviour. Skinner is as uninterested in the role of evolution and genetics. Skinner also avoided structural concepts, and mildly dynamic or motivational concepts.
(3) In the course of theory development in psychology, if somehow, mental terms or concepts are developed in describing or explaining behaviour, then either # these terms or concepts should be eliminated and replaced by behavioural terms or # they can and should be translated or paraphrased into behavioural concepts. This theory within philosophy about the meaning or semantics of mental terms or concepts is called “Analytical” behaviourism. It says that the very notion of mental state or condition is the notion of a behavioural disposition. For example, we are not saying about a person that he or she is in a particular internal state or condition. Instead, we are characterizing the person in terms of what he or she might be doing. Analytical behaviourism traces its historical toots to the philosophical movement known as Logical Positivism. Logical positivism proposes that the meaning of sentences used in science be understood in terms of the experimental conditions or observation that verify the truth.
Analytical behaviourism may be found in the work of Gilbert Ryle (1900-76) and later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-51).
Behaviorism was an immensely popular research program or methodological commitment among students of behavior from about the second decade of the twentieth century through its middle decade. Behaviorists created journals, organized societies, and founded psychology graduate programs reflective of behaviorism. Behaviorists organized themselves into different types of research clusters, whose differences stemmed from such factors as varying approaches to conditioning and experimentation. Behaviorism generated a type of therapy, known as behavior therapy. It developed behavior management techniques for autistic children and token economies for the management of chronic schizophrenics. It fueled discussions of how best to understand the behavior of nonhuman animals, the relevance of laboratory study to the natural environmental occurrence of behavior, and whether there is built-in associative bias in learning.
One major difference between mentalistic (mental states in-the-head) and associationist or conditioning accounts of behavior is that mentalistic accounts tend to have a strong nativist bent. This is true even though there may be nothing inherently nativist about mentalistic accounts.
Mentalistic accounts tend to assume, and sometimes even explicitly to embrace, the hypothesis that the mind possesses at birth or innately a set of procedures or internally represented processing rules which are deployed when learning or acquiring new responses. Behaviorism, by contrast, is anti-nativist. Behaviorism, therefore, appeals to theorists who deny that there are innate rules by which organisms learn. To Skinner and Watson organisms learn without being innately or pre-experientially provided with explicit procedures by which to learn. Learning does not consist in rule-governed behavior. Learning is what organisms do in response to stimuli. A behaviorist organism learns, as it were, from its successes and mistake.
The deepest and most complex reason for behaviorism's demise is its commitment to the thesis that behavior can be explained without reference to mental activity. Many philosophers and psychologists find this thesis hopelessly restrictive. They reject behaviorism because of it.
Another reason for rejecting behaviorism is connected with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has been one of behaviorism's most successful and damaging critics. In a review of Skinner's book on verbal behavior, Chomsky (1959) argued that some behavior (linguistic behavior, in particular) has to be understood in terms of internally represented rules. These rules are not products of learned associations. They are part of our native psychological endowment as human beings. Chomsky charged that behaviorist models of language learning cannot explain various facts about language acquisition, such as the rapid acquisition of language by young children, which is sometimes referred to as the phenomenon of "lexical explosion". A child's linguistic abilities appear to be radically under-determined by the evidence of verbal behavior offered to the child in the short period in which he or she acquires those abilities. By the age of four or five (normal) children have an almost limitless capacity to understand and produce sentences which they have never heard before. The basic rules or principles of grammar, therefore, argues Chomsky, must be innate.
The problem to which Chomsky refers, which is the problem of behavioral capacities outstripping individual learning histories, seems to go beyond merely the issue of linguistic behavior in young children. It appears to be a fundamental fact about human beings that our sensitivities and behavioral capacities often surpass the limitations of our individual learning histories. Our history of reinforcement often is too impoverished to determine uniquely our behavior. Much learning, therefore, seems to require pre-existing or innate representational structures within which learning occurs.
Though functionalism is significantly different from behaviorism in that the latter attempts to explain behavior without any reference whatsoever to mental states and processes, the development of two important strains of functionalism, “psychofunctionalism” and “analytical” functionalism, can both be profitably viewed as attempts to rectify the difficulties, respectively, of empirical and logical behaviorism, while retaining certain important insights of those theories. Functionalism is the doctrine that what makes something a thought, desire, pain (or any other type of mental state) depends not on its internal constitution, but solely on its function, or the role it plays, in the cognitive system of which it is a part. More precisely, functionalist theories take the identity of a mental state to be determined by its causal relations to sensory stimulations, other mental states, and behavior.
An important component of many psychological theories in the late nineteenth century, including psychoanalysis was "introspection", the study of the mind by analysis of one's own thought processes. It was in reaction to this trend that behaviorism arose, claiming that the causes of behavior were not founded in the mind, but rather that they were the results of conditioning and responses to stimulus. Behavioral theorists emphasize that behavior is a result of a process of learning from observing.
Another difference is found when you look at research methods. Psychoanalysis is based around introspection and as such has very little research, due to the fact that the theory has very little testable data, it can neither truly be proved nor disproved. Behaviorism tested and researched ideas before they were published, all of the research was directly observable and testable, this was due to the basic aim of behaviorism, which is to produce analyzable and scientific results.
I do not think that Behaviorism, as theory, can be proven correct or incorrect, as long as lots of its elements are useful and effective in modern life. I do not agree with some ideas, like Watson’s idea that psychology should study only observable behavior, because I think that there is much more to human personality than behavior. I believe this because people act different when they know they are being watched, or even when they are in the presence of other people than when they are alone. Some people might decide to act in a certain way to prove a point, hide their weaknesses, or hide their true personality. So, the scientific results might not always be reliable. Even so, I do think that a lot of psychology hypothesis come from observing human and animal behavior. Psychologists will constantly expand theories and critics will continue, for as long as people will have different opinions.
