Welcome to the second part of my series "Introduction to Psychology" where I'll cover a variety of different schools of Psychology. In the first part I focused on Humanism by Carl Rogers which you can read here. Today, i'll be covering the behavioristic approach. Let's dive in!
Behavorism is an approach in psychology in which learning-processes play the main role to explain behavior. Behaviorists put the emphasis on objectivity, which means that we only can explain behavior from the things we can actively observe. As a result, we can't for example analyse thoughts or dreams because they're subjective and therefore unreliable.
In the most basic form of behaviorism, the starting point is the supposition that everyone comes to life as a white page, a "tabula rasa" as Aristotle already called it in 300BC. As we are born, we know nothing. Hence, behavior is the result of everything we learn and experience throughout the following years.
I included a picture of John Watson to reduce the confusion on everyone's mind. No, we're not talking about the sidekick of our beloved Sherlock Holmes, we're talking about the person linked to the beginning of the behavioristic approach. In 1913, Watson published his article "Psychology as the Behaviorist views it". Behavior, as Waston sees it, can be interpreted as a reaction (R) of an organism to a certain outside signal or stimulus (S). Behavior is learned though S-R links. His approach is very mechanical and follows a cause -> consequence pattern. Waston didn't see a fundamental difference between animals and humans and pursued practical applications. Learning processes were they key to understanding behavior.
Pretty quickly this approach evolves into what people would later call neo-behaviorism. This new viewpoint offers the idea that behavior (R) is both dependent on an outside stimulus (S) and the circumstances inside the organism (O). The neo-approach introduces a variable (O) between the stimulus and response which can intervene with the outcome. These variables, as we're still in the behavioristic approach, have to be objectively measurable. This new variable isn't the only thing that the neo-behaviorism discerned from the basic approach. Introducing "operant conditioning" by Burrhus Skinner
Skinner emphasizes it's not so much the reaction gets provoked by a signal, but states that the consequence of certain behavior determines if behavior will increase or decrease. It's not about a response to a stimulus, but about a response started by the organism, which leads to consequences. Skinner rejects the mechanical viewpoint of Watson and understood that the behavior of an organism is about interplay between the organism and his environment. behavior with positive consequences will increase, if it has negative results it'll decrease. Simple as that. We can't see humans or any other living organism apart from his environment.
In the early sixties it gets clear that we can't analyse behavior with only two forms of conditioning. The ideas about social learning emerge for example, and it gets clear that people don't always need "a positive consequence" to learn certain behavior. The influence of the behavioristic school declines and would get replaced by the cognitive psychology. But that's something for another article.
I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to the behavioristic school. if you did, be sure to read my previous article about the Humanistic psychology and hit the follow-button to get informed when my next blog in this series comes out. Thanks in advance for reading and see you next time!
Sources:
Het palet van de Psychologie - Jakop Ritger (book)
Burhuss Skinner
