Lecture 5: The Rise And Fall Of Behaviorism

Question 1

Eugenics

Answer 1

Social philosophy claiming that the fate of a nation can be improved by selective breeding of the inhabitants —> Galton

Question 2

Phrenology

Answer 2

View that mental functions are localized in the brain and that the capacity of a function corresponds to the size of the brain part devoted to it; gave rise to personality assessment by means of analyzing bumps on the skull; initiated by Gall and Spurzheim at the beginning of the 19th century

Question 3

Mesmerism

Answer 3

Cure patients by restoring their ‘animal magnetism’; existence of an invisible natural force that could have physical effects, including healing —> use this force to heal

Question 4

Spiritualism

Answer 4

Belief that the spirits of the dead could be contacted by mediums

Question 5

Anthropomorphic interpretation

Answer 5

Interpreting behavior of non-human living creatures by attributing human motives and human-like intelligence to them

Question 6

Law of effect

Answer 6

Behavioral law introduced by Thorndike to refer to the fact that behaviors followed by positive consequences are strengthened and more likely to be repeated

Question 7

Instrumental conditioning

Answer 7

Name introduced by Thorndike to refer to learning on the basis of the law of effect; called operant conditioning by Skinner

Question 8

Comparative psychology

Answer 8

Study of behavior of animals, usually with the intention to shed light on human functioning within the framework of the evolutionary theory; Thorndike

Question 9

Classical conditioning

Answer 9

Form of learning discovered by Pavlov in which an association is made between two events in the environment; usually studied with a stimulus that elicits a reflex-like response to which a second, initially neutral stimulus is coupled

Question 10

Behaviorism

Answer 10

Movement in psychology arguing that observable behaviors are the most important aspects of human functioning to be understood; denies to various extents the relevance of information processing going on in the mind

Question 11

Philosophy of science

Answer 11

Branch of philosophy that studies the foundations of scientific research, to better understand the position of scientific research relative to other forms of information acquisition and generation

Question 12

Operational definitions

Answer 12

Definition of a variable in terms of how the variable has been measured; allows description of the variable in quantitative form

Question 13

Verification

Answer 13

Principle that up to the 1950s formed the core of the scientific method: a proposition was meaningful (scientific) if its truth could be empirically verified

Question 14

Radical behaviorism

Answer 14

strong version of behaviorism, defended by Skinner, which denies the relevance of information processing in the mind and holds that all human behavior can be understood on the basis of S-R associations

Question 15

Purposive behaviorism

Answer 15

Version of behaviorism, defended by Tolman, which saw behavior as goal-related (means to an end); agreed with other behaviorists that psychology should be based on observable behavior

Question 16

Turing machine

Answer 16

First computer operating on the basis of Boolean logic

Question 17

Homunculus

Answer 17

Word (meaning little man) used to refer to the difficulty of explaining goal-oriented behavior without making use of an ultimate intelligent (human like) control centre

Question 18

Information feedback

Answer 18

Mechanism in which the current performance level is compared to the desired end-state and the discrepancy is used to bring the performance closer to the end-state aimed for; important for psych because it explained a great deal of goal-directed behavior that previously seemed to require a homunculus explanation

Question 19

Turing test

Answer 19

Test described by Alan Turing which involves a human interacting with a machine and another human without being able to discriminate the machine from the human; machines that pass the tuning test are seen as the goal of artificial intelligence

Question 20

Cognitive psychology

Answer 20

Movement in psychology arguing that observable behaviors are the result of information processing in the mind; started in the 1950s and currently the dominant form of mainstream psychology

Question 21

Mental representation

Answer 21

Information pattern in the mind representing knowledge obtained through observation or the application of an algorithm; forms a realm separate from the brain and could in principle be copied to another brain

Question 22

Information processing

Answer 22

Encoding mental representations, transforming them by means of algorithms, and integrating them with existing knowledge; forms the core of cognitive psychology

Question 23

Boxes-and-arrows diagram

Answer 23

Flowchart outlining the different information stores (boxes) and information transformations (arrows) involved in the execution of a particular task with observable input and output; used by cognitive psychologists to detail the information-processing involved in the task

Question 24

Computational model

Answer 24

Computer program simulating the human information processing assumed to be involved in the execution of a task; requires researchers to be much more precise about what is going on than in boxes-and-arrows diagram

Question 25

Top-down process

Answer 25

Process by which information from a higher processing stage is fed back to previous processing stages and influences the processing at these stages; found to be a helpful (even essential) element in many computational models

Question 26

What 3 things were needed to give rise to behaviorism

Answer 26

1. Positivism (science brings truth) and requires objectivity
2. Operationalism (scientific concepts should be defined through measurements)
3. Learning theory (based exclusively on stimuli and behavior, inspired by animal research) —> human as animals

Question 27

What are 3 ideas that were distilled from the writing about philosophy of science for the development of psych

Answer 27

1. Requirement of operational definitions
2. Distinction between dependent and independent variables
3. Need for verification

Question 28

What are the 3 main criticisms Chomsky had of Skinner’s book

Answer 28

1. Skinner’s theory is just as vague as traditional theories
2. The theory cannot explain the complexity of language
3. The theory doesn’t do justice to how children learn language

Question 29

What is the poverty of the stimulus

Answer 29

argument from Chomsky that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language, therefore, according to Skinner, they should not have the language capabilities that they have at a certain point. However since they do have these capabilities, knowledge of grammar must be innate

Question 30

What are ways in which Chomsky shows that Skinner’s theory doesn’t do justice to how children learn language (5)

Answer 30

1. Parents are not precise enough in reinforcing and punishing to explain language acquisition (poverty of stimulus)
2. Children don’t to mimicry
3. Children can construct and understand an infinite number of sentences
4. Children learn language spontaneously
5. The type of mistakes children make does not seem to suggest that children learn by trial and error

Question 31

Chomsky is a … (rationalist/empiricist)

Answer 31

Rationalist

Question 32

Skinner is a … (rationalist/empiricist)

Answer 32

Empiricist

Question 33

What was Watson’s most important contribution

Answer 33

He suggested that psychology should be all about behavior, introspection was not important —> start of behaviorism

Question 34

What was Skinner’s most important contribution

Answer 34

Radical behaviorism; total ban on the use of terms referring to mental states, all behavior can be explained in S-R associations

Question 35

What did Tolman think of Skinners radical behaviorism

Answer 35

He disagreed with it, he said that would mean that rats who weren’t reinforced shouldn’t learn but this was not the case —> coined the term purposive behaviorism

Question 36

What are 3 ways in which computers changed psychological research

Answer 36

1. New explanation of the purposiveness of behavior; computers did not require a homunculus because they had information feedback
2. Simulation of human thinking
3. Psychologists as software engineers

Question 37

What were the 2 turning points from behaviorism to cognitive psychology

Answer 37

1. Miller’s articles on the limits of short-term memory (which is similar to a computer)
2. Neisser’s book Cognitive Psychology which showed evidence in favor of information processing in the mind and helped establish the new movement

Question 38

How did the computer provide a framework for understanding what goes on in the brain

Answer 38

It showed us that the mind can be seen as a program that performs information processing inside of the brain: mind:brain = software:hardware