Behaviorism Exam Flashcards
Describe Watson’s belief system.
- Psychology should be entirely baed upon the observable
- The consciousness should not be included in psychology at all and is as unprovable as the idea of a soul
Explain how positivism (more so than other philosophical doctrines) reflects Watson’s behaviorism.
Positivism is a system arguing for total reliance solely upon facts and never using generalizations/unobservable traits, these characteristcs are very similar to Watson’s behaviorism
Describe how work in animal psychology changed after the work of Morgan, Romanes, and Washburn.
- Romanes was an early advocate for comparitve psycholgy using humans and animals: these studies were widely informal, anecdotal, and WRONG he believed animals were capable of morals and significant higher level thinking
- Morgan believed that the simplest explanation is likely the correct one (parsimony), arguing for careful observation and reporting
- Washburn believed in meticulous data and reporting work and wrote the first major book using comparitive psychology
Finale: All of which influenced the development and complete formalization of animal psychology and its research
Describe the popularity of animal psychology and career prospects within animal psychology during the early 1900s (think around 1900-1910).
Animal psychology was a highly unpopular area of research and had abyssal career prospects due to little funding and animal psychology being a commonly being a cut program
Describe Pfungst’s research involving Clever Hans and how that research influenced animal psychology and Watson’s behaviorism.
Pfungst was assigned to study Clever Hans and decipher whether the animal was truly intelligent and using higher order thinking. Pfungst observed the horse and experimented whether the horse could truly solve problems. Pfungst found that Clever Hans only knew the answer if the questioner knew the answer themselves
Describe Thorndike’s connectionism.
What is it: Connectionism is Thorndike’s chosen name for the study of association.
Belief: Study of the variation of associations, variation of responses, and inhibitions
What made his research different: Thorndike was still influenced by Romanes and included mentalistic descriptions for animal’s behaviors, but he was also meticulous in his research and was influenced by mechanistic tradition as well
Explain Thorndike’s law of effect as he originally wrote it and as he later revised it.
- Rewarding consequences aid in producing more of the same response; discomforting consequences aid in producing less of the same response
- Learning is mechanical
- Rewarding consequences aid in producing more of the same response; discomforting consequences have unstable results
- Learning is more infleunced by positive reinforcment
Identify Thorndike’s most significant contributions to psychology
- Trial and error learning: placed a animal within a puzzle box who through trial and error would discover the correct method for unlocking the box
- Law of effect:
- Law of excercise: Any action becomes associated with its particular situation (EX: going to a car door and reaching to open it)
- Foundational researcher for behaviorism as stated by both Watson and Pavlov
Describe Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes. What efforts did he go through to minimize outside influences and obtain precise measurements?
The Work: Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell, sight of a hand, lights, whistlets, etc, howing the conditioning of people to expect a certain result after a specific stimuli
How did he minimize influences: The saliva was collected through a surgical opening in the dogs mouth, the animal never saw the researcher feeding/collecting them, the building itself was also highly reinforced with steel to ensure little to noise pollution
Describe how Pavlov’s work shaped and influenced research in psychology and Watson’s behaviorism.
- Pavlov proved higher mental processes in animal subjects without guessing about the existence of consciousness
- The conditioning methods are still used today for modern behavioral therapy
- Watson understand the unit of behavior that Pavlov was focused upon and made it the core of his research
- Aiding in the transition from the study of consciousness to the study of behavior
Explain Bekhterev’s views on higher-level behaviors and the use of mentalistic terms in psychology.
Bekhterev believed that higher-level behaviors could be explained by reflexive movements/processes
Explain the importance of the research findings involving Little Albert.
- demonstrated the concept of conditoned responses
- believed that phobias and fears come from conditioned responses
Describe the 4 points of Watson’s behaviorism
- Psychology must be based on observable behaviors
- Psychology’s goal is to predict and control behavior not explain consciousness
- Human and animal behavior are comparable
- All behavior is the reslt of a stimulus-reponse association
Identify Watson’s methodologies for studying behavior.
- Observation
- Experimental studies
- classical conditioning
- Animal research
Explain how the role of subjects in experiments changed. What did subjects do in past research and what did they do in Watson’s research?
Before: Subjects were often trained on how to properly use introspection and were active in the studies
After: Subjects were meant to behave naturally and be observed, while the researcher solely impacts their behavior through exposure to stimuli
Explain the significance of Mary Cover Jones’s work with Peter.
Introduced the foundational method of treating fears and phobias -> Behavioral therapy
Methods: counterconditioning through slow exposure and surrounding positive experience
Significance: first documented case of behavioral therapy with a working result, foundation for modern CBT and exposure therapy
Explain how Watson proposed to measure thinking.
Watson believed that when an individual thought that their vocal chords were activated and slightly vibrating. Through this, he believed he could measure the electricity of the muscles and study the “behavior of thought”
Explain how Jastrow and Wiggam help convey psychology to the masses.
- Jastrow completed many articles for newspapers and participated in Radio takshows
- Wiggam wrote columns pertaining to psychology
- Both discussed psychology in a normal, everyday way
Explain how Lashley’s research discredited one of Watson’s major assumptions.
- Law of Mass Action: individuals with more mass of cortex have a higher ability to learn
- Equipotentiality: when one area of the brain is damaged, another area can cover the damaged area’s functions
- These disproved that Watson’s belief that learning was entirely conditioned while Lashley proved that internal processes has a large affect
Identify McDougall’s criticism of Watson’s behaviorism.
- Mcdougall theorized that all of human behavior was born from innate tendencies to thought and action
- Argued that consciousness cannot be fully forgotten and is an important component of psychology
- Introspection is vital to understanding a subject’s response and why they behaved that way (emotional reasons such as emjoyment of a song and sympathy at a war)
Identify the points on which neobehaviorists agreed
- Psychology must adopt the principle of operationism (make psych objective and precise)
- Behavior can be accounted for by the laws of conditioning
- Core of psychology is the study of learning
Describe intervening variables and explain how Tollman proposed to measure them.
The Five Variables: environmental stimuli, physiological drives, heredity, previous training, and age
How it is measured: Tolman set observable variables that displayed internal actions (independent vs dependent variables)
Describe the importance of Tollman’s intervening variables to the advent of cognitive psychology.
Tolman defined unobservable internal states which aided in the development of cognitive psychology.
- Tolman created the operationalization of modern cognitive psychology
Explain Hull’s habit strength and law of primary reinforcement and how that law differs from Thorndike’s law of effect.
Law of primary reinforcement: Theory that stimulus-response is followed by a reduction in need, the stimulus will likley evoke the same reaction next time
- Difference from Thorndike’s law of effect is the removal of the focus on satisfaction/emotions
Habit strength: once stimulus-response connections are strong, the habit is reinforced
