Chapter 8: Behaviourism Flashcards
what did Watson give a talk about at Columbia
- dissatisfied with progress in psychology
- conceptual and methodological complaints
- didn’t like continued focus on mental states –> thought they were elusive to study
- disagreed with method of introspection
- thought science of psychology had failed –> initiated the behaviourism revolution
why was animal research not an option in structuralism
- structuralism relied on introspection
- only used in functional psychology (e.g. adapting to changing environments)
- also good to use in behaviourism
what is comparative psychology
subfield of animal psychology –> study nonhuman animal behaviour to generalize the findings to human behaviour
what were the conditions for comparative psychology
- only possible if there is some tie between humans and these other animals
- need some evidence of common ancestry
- most views beforehand had tried to keep humans separate from other animals
- Darwinian theory demonstrated morphological and behavioural ties between humans and rest of animal kingdom –> made humans seem somewhat less significant
describe Romanes’s “introspection by analogy”
- started from what was known subjectively of the operations of his own mind and activities which are prompted by these
- infer observable activities of other organisms the mental operations that underlie them
- more danger in the analogy between humans and lower species (but mammals are closer to humans)
describe Morgan’s response to Romanes’s work
- thought attributing human mental processes (e.g. reasoning) to animals lower in phylogenetic scale was unwarranted
- Morgan’s canon –> higher mental processes should not be invoked if the beahviour can be explained adequately by a lower mental process
- Watson & other behaviourists used Watson’s canon as a basis for rejecting psychological explanations that appealed to mental states like consciousness
what kind of methods did Morgan use
- did not rule out introspection by analogy
- limited use of introspection to only mammals
- stressed importance of empirical observations (under controlled conditions)
- simple experiments with animals in natural setting (i.e. manipulated environment to see how animals responded)
describe the work of Thorndike
- animal research in baby chicks and cats
- e.g. tested cat’s problem solving abilities
- found animals learn in a trial-and-error fashion –> rejected idea of reasoning being involved
- successful responses learned gradually, unsuccessful responses eliminated
law of effect/law of reinforcement
- Thorndike
- any act which produces satisfaction becomes associated with that situation
- when the situation recurs, the act is more likely than before to recur also
- also called “instrumental learning”
classical/Pavlovian conditioning
dogs start salivating before food is present –> elicited by stimuli that had been paired with food previously
what are the 8 parts of Pavlovian conditioning
- acquisition
- extinction
- spontaneous recovery
- generalization
- discrimination
- conditioned inhibition
- conditioned emotional reactions
- higher-order conditioning
what did Watson think the goal of psychology was
prediction and control of behaviour
why did Watson oppose the study of consciousness through introspection
thought introspection allowed so much personal bias into the observational process –> thought we had to measure physiological manifestations to get objective truth
what were some methods that Watson approved of
reaction time, experimental studies on memory, some psychological tests (but not mental tests), puzzle boxes by Thorndike
what was Watson’s most famous study
- conditioned emotions study (little albert)
- made him fear a white rat and any other qualities that resembled it (i.e. white fur) by pairing it with an aversive sound
- was never deconditioned
what three emotions did Watson think humans were born with
- fear
- rage
- love
to what fields did Watson try to apply his behaviourist psychology to
- advertising
- child psychology –> thought it was good to raise children by displaying minimal affection (induced self-reliance and independence)
why was Watson’s contribution to behaviourism important
- he crystallized scattered ideas of his predecessors into systematic formulation
- had drive and personality to sell the idea
- slowly spread and dominated American psychology
- called for science capable of prediction and control