Critically assess the value of behaviourism as a psychological approach?

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Foundations of psychology 1

Critically assess the value of behaviourism as a psychological approach?

In his essay I will provide information related to the assessment criteria. I will demonstrate my understanding of behaviourism from a psychological approach. The behaviourists that I have chosen to compare and discuss are, Watson, Pavlov, Thorndike and Skinner. From a psychological approach I will seek into the different behaviour therapies.

The value of behaviour changes as a result of experience. The behaviourists approach to psychology started in America in the early years of the twentieth century. John Broadus Watson (1878-1955) was the founding father of behaviourism. Watson believed that the most important thing for psychology was that it should be scientific. His idea of this was that introspection was too broad and confusing. To study the mind would be time consuming and virtually impossible, because we cannot see directly into it. All that we can see is physical skin behaviour.

Watson’s approach rested on five fundamental assumptions. His first assumption was the most important factor in understanding behaviour, so understanding learning would lead to understanding of all behaviour. Secondly, that learning arose from the association between an external stimulus and a behavioural response. Thirdly that only measurable information counted as valid scientific data and fourthly, that any apparent mental processes or inferences about what was going on in an organism should be rejected, since the only thing which could be observed directly was that organisms behaviour. The fifth assumption was that all behaviour, whether animal or human was learned in the same way. Watson’s theory was partly taken from and elaborated from the earlier works of Pavlov, Thorndike and Skinner.

Early behaviourists were greatly influenced by the works of Ivan Pavlov (1848-1936), and his theory of classical conditioning on dogs. Pavlov led an experiment on dogs to find out whether or not dogs would react to a neutral stimulus such a tone. Pavlov found that they trained to salivate; he trained a dog and on many occasions just before food was given a tone was presented so that the toe signalled the immanent arrival of food for the dog. Finally Pavlov rang out the tone and found that the dog would salivate once it heard the tone. Classical (or Pavolian) conditioning where by a stimulus (a bell), which would not normally produce, a particular response (salivation) eventually comes to do so by being paired with another stimulus (food) which does produce the response. (Gross, pg157)

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Pavlov and his co-workers spent great time and effort in the study of higher nervous activity and came to use it as the base for their study. The conditioned reflex was not treated by them as a tool, but as their unit for their subject matter. This signalled the start of behaviourism as a self-conscious movement.

Another American behaviourist named Edwin L Thorndike (1874-1949) carried out research into the study of problem solving in animals. Using a series of puzzle like tasks. Thorndike built puzzle boxes for cats their task was to operate, which would automatically cause the trapped door ...

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