Lecture 1 - Introduction & History Flashcards
What was the context Prior to Watson?
Freud and his psychoanalytic approach
* psychoanalysis dominated psychology
* introspection
Watson’s view on the current psychological approach (Freudian views)?
- Psychology was dependent on the subjective judgement from the researchers
- research lacked objective rigor
- lack of rigor caused a lack of explanation and predictive power
What did Watson say in his landmark paper?
Many saw this article as the start of behaviorism
* psychology should only use objective data
* should avoid all forms of subjective data
* should be concerned with prediction and influence
* animal research is fine
The impact of Watson’s article ‘Psychology as the behaviourist views it’
- Paper became known as the behaviorist manifesto
- Watson argued that the environment shapes behaviour relative to biology
*Thus, if the environment alters behaviour, we can change the behaviour by changing the environment - Views were incompatible with freudian views
What is conditioning
Association learning
Conditioning is a form of learning in which either
1. a given stimulus (or signal) becomes increasingly effective in evoking a response
2. a response occurs with increasing regularity in a well-specified and stable environment.
The type of reinforcement used will determine the outcome.
Famous conditioning study
Pavlov - first person to show association empirically:
* he showed that a previously neutral stimuli (a bell) can prompt the same physiological response as food
Watsons comments on Pavlov’s study
Someone watching Pavlov’s work can see the chain of events for themselves
They do not need introspection or internal models to understand what was happening
What was Watsons famous study
Little Albert Experiment:
* Watson presented Little Albert with a white rat and he showed no fear.
* Watson then presented the rat with a loud bang
* After the continuous association of the white rat and loud noise, Little Albert was classically conditioned to experience fear at the sight of the rat.
* Albert’s fear generalized to other stimuli that were similar to the rat, including a fur coat, some cotton wool, and a Father Christmas mask.
What is respondent conditioning?
an organism is presented with two things at the same time, and thus comes to associate them
respondent conditioning = classical conditioning
Skinners contribution to behaviourism
there are ways the environment can help us learn other than just association - CONSEQUENCES
* consequences can increase or decrease the rates of behaviour
* He did not think that classical conditioning was wrong, just that this was an incomplete account of the way the environment can shape behaviour
Skinners study of operant conditioning in rats
A Skinner box, also known as an operant conditioning chamber, is a device used to objectively record an animal’s behavior in a compressed time frame
An animal can be rewarded or punished for engaging in certain behaviors, such as lever pressing (for rats)
* operant conditioning chamber
* lever, food dispenser, light and loud speaker
* skinner could alter the environment and measure the impact this had on behaviour
* the research suggested that the consequences of an action can impact the probability of those actions being repeated
Why did skinner use animals
- Watson said we can gain useful information about human behaviour based on animal behaviour
- high experimental control with animals
- ethics
What is ABA?
Applied behaviour analysis:
* the attempt to solve behaviour problems by providing antecedents and consequences that change behaviour
What is a behaviour problem
A behaviour analyst would say that this is when a certain behaviour is happening too much or too little. Thus, the job of a behaviour analyst is to change the frequency of behaviour
Steps of a behavioural assessment
- define the target behaviour
- identify functional relations between the target behaviour and its antecedents and consequences
- identify an effective intervention
Defining the target behaviour (what does this mean?)
- The behaviour to be changed by an intervention
- Aim is to identify the actions the client does which are problematic - what is the thing you want to increase or decrease?
- Can be identified by interviews of the client, observations, informants
- Needs precision
Identifying functional relations between the target behaviour and its antecedents and consequences (what does this mean?)
- Once you know the target behaviour, need to identify what happens before and after the behaviour
- You can assess this by gathering a detailed description of the behaviour and everything around it. Then you ask the same questions around an entirely different episode where the target behaviour was also displayed.
- you are building a pattern - trying to get an idea of the chain of events
How do we identify the functional relations between the target behaviour and its antecedents and consequences?
A functional analysis
* the process of testing hypotheses about the functional relations among antecedents, target behaviour and consequences
* this includes observing more behaviour, assessing the assumptions of why a particular behaviour is happening too much or too little
What is an intervention? Give an example…
Something put in place to change the frequency of behaviour
e.g. Mary who would only eat by being fed by the nurses. Wanted to increase self-feeding bahviour.Mary took pride in appearance. The intervention of nurses being sloppy caused her to feed herself
Why do we need a tentative intervention plan
Need to be open to get it wrong!!
4-term Contingency
Establishing Operation
Antecedent
Behaviour
Consequence
What is an Establishing operation
A type of motivating operation that makes a stimulus more desirable (more effective as a reinforcer)
= a condition of deprivation/aversion that temporarily alters (usually raises) the value of a particular reinforcer.
The extent to which someone will find something reinforcing will change depending on the context
We want people to be motivated to access a reinforcer to have the best chances of behaviour change
What are behaviour analysts interested in doing?
Figuring out the relationship between antecedents, behaviour and consequences. This is known as the ‘ABC’s’ - three-term contingency
What is reinforcement?
The procedure of providing CONSEQUENCES for a behaviour that INCREASE or maintain the frequency of that behaviour.
Most important tool we have for increasing the rate of behaviour
Kinds of Reinforcers
Positive Reinforcer - a reinforcing event in which something is added following a behaviour
Negative reinforcer - a reinforcing event in which something is removed following a behaviour
Reinforcers are both a consequence, they follow a behaviour to provide a consequence to change the rate of behviour
How do we increase the rate of a behaviour?
Reinforcement
How do we decrease the rate of a behaviour?
Extinciton or punishment
What is Extinction?
Withholding the reinforcers that maintain a target behaviour
Behaviour is maintained by its consequence. Therefore, preventing the consequences that maintain a behaviour should weaken it
What is punishment
The procedure of providing consequnces for a behaviour that decrease the frequency of that behaviour
Behaviourism views on free will
- we feel like we have free will but what really contributes to someone acting to the way they do is the reward. the context of the environment has led a person to make that decision.
- the context we grow up in we have no control over, therefore we and our actions are predetermined to act in a particular way rather than having true free will.
VIEW = NO FREE WILL (actions are predetermined via context we grow up in)
Why did behaviourism die?
Noam Chomsky - wrote an article about skinners ‘Verbal Behaviour’
* skinners behavioursim could not account for the generativity of language
We could not have been reinforced for every word we’ve ever learned. This caused a rise in cognitive psychology
* human behaviour cannot be fully understood without examining how people acquire, store and process information
But, is behaviorism really dead?
- the terminology lives on
- It still has the advantage of prediction and influence
- no replication crisis
- books, journals and societies are still popular
- it aligns with other well-supported movements in psychology
Evidence of behaviourism in real life
- therapy
- language
- education
- group functioning
