Behaviorism Case
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Behaviorism had its origins in the early 20th century and made a lasting mark on psychology. This learning perspective was birthed by John B. Watson and its tenants developed and expanded further by B.F. Skinner and Edward C. Tolman. It tends to be the most scientific in its research methods of the other learning perspectives in psychology and has resulted in some very common applications for treatment in mental disorders. To understand what behaviorism is, we need to understand the men that founded this learning perspective and brought it to the forefront of psychology for so long.
John B. Watson had a short lived career of only fourteen years but it was during this short period that he founded the behaviorist perspective. He was born January 9, 1878, James Broadus Watson, to Pickens and Emma Watson in Greenville, SC. His father was unfaithful and left his mother in 1891. After struggling with the loss of his father by rebelling, he turned his life around in college. He was twice married and had a total of four children and he focused a great deal of his study of behaviorism on his children. His lecture, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”, given in 1913 was a turning point for him and gave way to the founding of the new behaviorist perspective. In this lecture he argued that due to its focus on unverifiable ideas, psychology had failed as a natural science. To this end, he removed all that had been points of contention within the scientific community at that time: consciousness and introspection.
“Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of
natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection
forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent
upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of
consciousness.” (Watson, 1913)
Instead, he proposed the study of peoples actions with the ability to predict and control those actions. He began experimentations with animals and behavior and then later switched to human subjects. One of the most famous of which is the Little Albert experiment. In this experiment, Watson and his assistant Raynor, exposed the baby to a white stuffed rat. They then began to cause a loud noise to sound every time the child reached for the rat. This eventually caused the baby to cry even at the sight of the animal and they were later able to generalize his fear to other white objects including Watsons own white hair. Though this experiment brought up obvious ethical questions, including the later discovered neurological impairments of the baby, it demonstrated empirical evidence of classical conditioning.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was known as a radical behaviorist and also for his development of operant conditioning and negative reinforcement. He was born March 20, 1904 in Pennsylvania and grew up with a love for creating new inventions. After graduating from Hamilton College in 1926 with a B.A. in English Literature he began to work as a writer. It was during the period of struggling in his profession that he discovered the writings of Pavlov and Watson which served to inspire his career change into psychology. He immediately enrolled in the psychology graduate program at Harvard from which he graduated in 1931.
He believed to understand behavior, you should look at the causes of an action and then its consequences. Skinner based his theory of operant conditioning on the work of Law of Effect proposed by Edward Thorndike. He took this theory and added reinforcement to the equation. He purported that when behavior is reinforced it is strengthened and tends to be repeated while behavior that is not reinforced becomes weakened and eventually extinguished. He used animals to experiment with this theory and created the Skinner Box to gather data. This box was designed to provide both negative and positive reinforcements through the use of food as a positive reinforcer and the use of electricity as a negative reinforcer. He also developed the cumulative recorder which was a device that showed rated of responding as a sloped line. The use of this device in experiments showed “that behavior did not depend on the preceding stimulus as Watson and Pavlov maintained. Instead, Skinner found that behaviors were dependent upon what happens after the response” (Cherry, 2012). Thus came the label operant behavior within the context of operant conditioning.
Edward Chace Tolman was born in Newton, Massachusetts on April 14, 1886. While at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he came across the work of William James and he changed the focus of his college education deciding to become a philosopher instead of a career in