Behaviorism Flashcards
Describe and explain the behaviorism school
Behaviorism was created as a reaction to psychanalysis. Watson, who was one of the main figures of behaviorism, claimed that psychology must be more scientific.He criticized Freud and psychanalysis for a luck of scientific requirements. Psychanalysis explained outer behaviors as a consequence of unconscious mechanisms and underlining processes. It was not possible to prove if they actually existed. So, all the concepts, like mind, personality, mental processes ,that they weren’t observable in psychanalysis, they were vanished from psychology.
Behaviorism is the study of the relation between people’s environments and their behavior.
Edward Thorndike, was an important figure of behaviorism, defined the law of effect.
“Any act which in a given situation produces satisfaction becomes associated with that situation, so that when the situation recurs the act is more likely than before to recur also. Conversely, any act which in a given situation produces discomfort becomes disassociated from that situation, so that when the situation recurs the act is less likely than before to occur.”
According to this principal, the organism looks for pleasure and avoid pain. So, organism that successfully adapt to the environment there are more likely to survive and behaviors that produce positive outcomes are more likely to recur than other ones.
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, he became known from his studies on animals. He found an important learning method, called classical conditioning. He induces salivation in dogs by pairing the sound of a bell, with giving food. So, he showed that, through experience, an animal could learn to make a response to a stimulus.
Behaviorism was formally introduced as a school of psychology with the book of John Watson, psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist.
Watson’s definition of behaviorism was that psychology focuses only on observable stimulus-response behaviors, and considers that all behaviors are learned through events and situations within the environment.
There was a strong emphasis on scientific observation and methods. Mind was regarded by Watson as a black box, meaning something that is no possible to analyze. Therefore, behaviorism was interested only at the stimulus and the respond to the stimulus.
