Lecture 5 - The rise and fall of Behaviourism

Question 1

What was psychology like in the early 1900s?

Answer 1

• Psychology as a science has arrived
• In the US, the dominant methodology is introspection.
• The dominant mindset is functionalism, which meant only doing research that had meaningful impact, none of this intellectual research for the sake of research.
• There is a soft conception of what psychology should be, but progress is stagnating and ppl begin to understand psychology won’t qualify as a hard science (some silly Americans even wanted it to not be a hard science)
  
  • Psychological laboratories are poorly funded and frowned upon, cus they produce shitty results compared to hard science labs

This was a simple flashcard, but the book yapped a lot ab history so i added the extra bits here. The main point is that psych was in a precarious situation, so behaviourism seemed so appealing to most since it was fancy and scientific.

Question 2

What three developments in the 1900s offered ingredients that lead to behaviourism?

Answer 2

1. Clarification of hard vs vague sciences
2. A time of revolutions
3. Humans are animals…

Question 3

Hard vs Vague science

Vague science

Answer 3

The early 20th century is dominated by
- Mesmerism (mind control via magnetic alignment)
- Phrenology (measuring the skull and its bumps to determine intelligence and personality levels of a person)
- Spiritualism (contacting the dead)

Claims based on these approaches don’t hold true, cus they’re bs. however, the public lovedddddd them.

Question 4

What is positivism?

Answer 4

The view that science is the only source of true knowledge and the motor of progress
Objectivity of knowledge must be guaranteed.

It became popular at the start of the 1900s, which clashes with introspection

Question 5

A time of revolutions

What did Einstein’s theory of relativity do?

Answer 5

It turned physics upside down.
Einstein asked ‘How do we establish through measurements that two events are simulatenous?’
Newton’s intuition of absolute time appears to be wrong, because Einstein’s theory shows that time is relative.

Bridgman, a physicist, gets spooked by this and tries to save physics from another revolution by clearly attaching all concepts to measurements procedures

Question 6

But before Bridgman, we discuss the Philosophy of science, what is it?

Answer 6

The philsophy of science is a 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.
(yap, im sorry)

It originated from ppl looking at the natural sciences, and wondering why they were so damn good at research and producing results.

Question 7

What did Bridgman mean by attaching ‘concepts’ to measurement procedures?

Answer 7

Operationalisation!!
He intended to reduce concepts down to measurements, making physics less susceptible to relativity.
This is one of the outcomes from the philosophy of science.

Question 8

What is the issue with what Bridgman wanted?

Answer 8

Length can be measured with multiple different procedures, so no unique definition of length.

Howevah! Operationalism becomes immensely popular in psychology.
Psychology starts to use measurement for anything

Question 9

What is measurement theory?

Answer 9

You take a concept, find the measurement, and that becomes your operational definition of the concept.
E.g. the concept of mass, the measurement is number of grams registered by the scale, and that is also the operational definition.

Question 10

Why is measurement theory kinda vague?

Answer 10

Take for example hunger as a concept.
If you use the measurement ‘time past since last meal’, it can be the operational definition of hunger. However, it doesn’t fully cover the concept, because what if you ate a small meal, or a large meal. Then the hunger time will be different.
Alas, psychologists loved this shit at the time.

Nowadays, we see it as a way of measuring the concept, not defining it. (given the example above)

Question 11

Including operationalisation, What else did behaviourists take from the philosophy of science?

I yapped a lot ab operationalisation cus it was discussed a lot in lecture and book, but the other two points are also important

Answer 11

1. Operationalisation (we’ve discussed)
2. Independent (stimulus) and dependent (response) variables
3. The need for verification.
   ↳ A proposition was meaningful (scientific) if its truth could be empirically verified)

Question 12

3) Humans are animals

People started questioning why we are doing things differently to the science of biology since we are human.

Answer 12

This lead to people doing experiments on animals, and transferring the knowledge, cus after all, we are all animals.

Question 13

What did Pavlov learn from his dogs.

Answer 13

He invented the first learning model, classical conditioning.
(I won’t explain it fully, but if you need a reminder lmk, but I think since we had to cover it in the PA, it should be fine)

Question 14

What did Thorndike learn from cats?

Answer 14

He studied their behaviour in Puzzle boxes.
From this, he formulated the law of effect: behaviours followed by a reward are more likely to be repeated (see figure 4).
↳ This forms the core of instrumental conditioning (which skinner later calls operant conditioning)

Question 15

Since biology is successful in studying animal behaviour, what did this make people think?

Answer 15

Nobody ever asks a dog what it thinks of anything, but it’s behaviour can be studied correctly. (In nature, what an animal thinks doesn’t matter, how it acts does matter, it is directly related to survival rates)
So behavioural science in biology doesn’t need introspection.
So why should that be necessary with people?
Can’t we just let psychology revolve around behaviour? Get rid of those ‘mental states’??

Question 16

What are the three ingredients from these developments?

Answer 16

1. Positivism (science brings us to truth) and requires objectivity
2. Operationalism (scientific concepts should be defined through measurements) (and the other philosophy of science points)
3. Learning theory (based exclusively on stimuli and behaviour, inspired by animal research)

Question 17

What cake did these three ingredients make?

Answer 17

Behaviourism!
John B. Watson writes his behaviourist manifesto, and suggests that psychology shold be all about behaviour.

Question 18

What else did Watson say about behaviourism and how psychology should be?

Answer 18

He suggests…
- No more introspection
- only behavioural analyses in terms of reinforcement and punishment
- A psychology without consciousness
- Get rid of all those silly psychologist’s work
- Revolution!!!! Lets start over

He also cheated on his wife… with his grad student that he published the little albert study with (DAMN)

Question 19

What is the political counterpart to behaviourism?

Answer 19

The Tabula Rasa
Remember the watson quote “give me a dozen health infants… and I’ll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select.”
This goes along with behaviourism

Question 20

Whose ideas did Watson essentially repeat?

Answer 20

He repeated many ideas from the British Empiricists
The Tabula Rasa is a copy from Locke
The learning theory is very close to Hume’s theory

Question 21

Are behaviourist ideas still used today?

Answer 21

Despite behaviourism being an absolutist system (you only use this system and nothing else, according to behaviourists),
A lot of content is still used today.
E.g. in psychotherapy, behaviourist concepts (e.g. conditioning, extinction, exposure) are still widely used.
Learning theory is rooted in behaviourism

Question 22

What did B.F. Skinner promote?

Answer 22

Radical behaviourism: the idea that all human behaviour can be understood as S-R (Stimulus-response) relationships.
Terms that refer to mental states or information processing in the mind are irrelevant, and if it’s not directly measureable, it should be left out.

Note, Skinner didn’t deny that dreams, expectations, thoughts, etc. existed, he just insisted they didn’t belong in science

Note Note, Skinner was a RADICAL behaviourist, like, forget the idea of free will cus it causes wars, instd, focus on the S-R relationships.

Question 23

What did Skinner believe humans are?

Answer 23

He thought we aren’t an actor, but a lens, a point where influences come together.
Behaviour is the outcome; free will is an illusion.
“I” doesn’t refer to a mind/brain, but to the person as a whole; an input-output mechanism.

He believed there was no “homunculus”. not even in the brain

Question 24

Did Skinner believe there was a difference between humans and animals?

Answer 24

No! he believed there was no essential difference.
He even found an explanation for superstition in an analogy with a pigeon.
He proposed that very complicated behaviour can explained by reinforcement

Question 25

Was Skinner the only behaviourist?

Answer 25

No (duh), there were others, most of them less radical and more realistic.
Hull allowed some score for internal mental processes in the form of internal r-s connections (leading to S-r-s-R sequences)

Tolman doubted Skinner’s interpretation of operant conditioning, arguing that it couldn’t be understood in simple S-R terms.

Question 26

What experiment did Tolman and his student Blodgett (hehe) do to show this?

Answer 26

• Tolman put rats in a maze, and had different conditions, with each condition having food placed in the maze on later days.
• The first condition quickly learnt the fastest route to the food.
• The second condition waltzed around, but after the food was put in the maze on day 3, they ran straight to the food.
  
  • This goes against Skinner’s S-R explanation of operant conditioning, because the rats should have had no reason to learn the layout of the maze because there was no food there. Yet they did learn the layot, and used this knowledge when they needed to.

Look at figure 5 for a diagram of the maze

Question 27

How did Tolman explain this behaviour? What is his version of behaviourism called?

Answer 27

He explained the rats behaviour as latent learning, the acquisition of knowledge that is not demonstrated in observable behaviour. He said the rats obtained a cognitive map of the maze, and used it once they had a goal.

Because of this finding and other research, his approach is called:
purposive behaviourism, which saw behaviour as goal-related, he still agreed that psychology should be based on observable behaviour.
He did believe that goals could be studied objectively.

Question 28

The debate between Skinner and Chomsky

Answer 28

The behaviourists think they can explain all behaviour, the ambitious bastards they are.
They (Skinner) became overconfident and tried to explain language in his book “verbal behaviour”.
Chomsky said nuh uh (complicatedly)

Question 29

What was the main issue with Skinner’s behaviourist explanation for verbal behaviour?

Answer 29

He is limited to only talking about S-R associations, but language is a very complex thing.

Question 30

How did Skinner propose children learned language?

Answer 30

Children start with imitation of what they hear.
Through reinforcement and punishment, the child learns to make increasingly complex sentences
The end result is a very complex S-R based range of “language behaviours”
He says a child who masters language is actually a sort of very well-conditioned pigeon

Question 31

Chomsky says nuh uh to Skinner’s book,
what are the three main points he made?

Answer 31

Chomsky shows that Skinner’s theory…
1. Is much more vague than Skinner pretends
2. Is unable to explain language because it cannot use internal states
3. Does not do justice to the learning process that we see with children.

Points 1 and 2 are made directly in his review, 3 can be detected indirectly.

Question 32

1. Is much more vague than Skinner pretends

Why is Skinner’s theory much more vague than he pretends?

Answer 32

It’s supposed to be more objective because the terms he uses (stimulus, response, reinforcement) refer to observable things and behaviour

Chomsky says Nuh uh
- If we take these terms literally then they hardly apply
- If we take them metaphorically, they become just as vague

The next few flashcards will be examples of this point.

Question 33

1. Is much more vague than Skinner pretends

What is the issue with trying to identify a lawful relation between a stimulus and response?

Answer 33

Look at figure 2, a simple object has so many responses, how do you identify the correct one?
If you make the stimulus the physical chair, then there is no lawfulness.
Skinner proposes a solution where you make a property of the chair the stimulus (e.g. its redness)
However, if the redness is the stimulus, then it’s no longer objective because we only know what the stimulus is after you say “red”

Question 34

1. Is much more vague than Skinner pretends

What is the issue of using “response strength” (pitch, stress, and quantity) when presenting a human with a stimulus?

Answer 34

Having a loud response isn’t the only possible way to show a strong response, e.g. if you go to a museum and you see a good painting, you might whisper in admiration. This is a strong response, but its not loud.
If you make it so that “response strength” is metaphorical asw to cover the quiet response, then it becomes very vague.
Shits silly.

Question 35

1. Is much more vague than Skinner pretends

The circularity of “reinforcement”

Answer 35

Skinner says that reinforcement should explain why someone gives a certain response.
To explain all responses, the concept reinforcement should be so vague that there is always some reinforcement.
‘X is reinforced by Y’ is another way of saying ‘X wants/likes/wishes for Y’

Question 36

1. Is much more vague than Skinner pretends

To summarise all the examples and this point

Answer 36

If skinner’s terms are taken literally they do not apply and if taken metaphorically these terms are just as vague as the original terms!

Question 37

2 . Is unable to explain language because it cannot use internal states

What is the issue when skinner uses the listener’s behaviour to explain whether something is a question/request/order?

Answer 37

Typically this is explained by the speaker’s intentions, but Skinner says just look at the listener. This isn’t sufficient, because the listener might respond in a multitude of different ways to a question, and you can’t identify anything consistently.
Chomsky says you need the speaker’s internal state, and thusly their intentions to identify this.

Question 38

3 . Doesn’t do justice to the learning process that we see with children

What is the issue with saying children learn language through reinforcement and punishment from parents?

Answer 38

Parents aren’t precise enough in reinforcing and punishing to explain language acquisition.
Additionally,
* children learn language spontaneously
* children can construct and understand an infinite number of sentences
* The type of mistakes children make doesn’t suggest they learn by trial and error

Question 39

3 . Doesn’t do justice to the learning process that we see with children

Look at figure 3, what does it imply about children’s learning process.

Answer 39

Children know that they should move the green ‘is’ to the front to make the first sentence a question.
But based on Skinner’s logic, they should randomly pick either colour ‘is’ to move to the front since children supposedly learn through trial and error’.
But they don’t, so skinner is stupid

Question 40

How is language capability like in reality?

Answer 40

It requires a mastery of grammar, and
- Grammar cannot be learned purely inductively with S-R associations.
- Grammar is generative (you can produce an infinite # of sentences and tell if they are correct.

Question 41

What is the Poverty of the Stimulus argument made by Chomsky?

Answer 41

• Grammar is a theory that cannot be derived from the data available to the child
• Yet the child still understands it.
• Knowledge of grammar must therefore be innate

Question 42

How does Chomsky explain the innate ability to acquire language/grammar?

Answer 42

He explains it with the Learning Acquisition Device (LAD)
So, Chomsky is a modern nativist

Question 43

What does Chomsky think about the assumption that the meaning of language can be found in the observable outside world?

Answer 43

He thinks that linguistics should let go of the assumption.
He thinks the meaning of a word is a mental concept: it’s in our head.

For example, you take a seed of a willow tree and make it so that it will grow exactly like the current willow tree. You then cut down the original willow tree, and plant the seed. You wait for it to grow, and it’s exactly the same as the original. Is the new willow tree the same as the original one?
We would say it isn’t, we know that its a new tree since the old one got cut down. If we looked at it from an external perspective, its the same tree, but we know that its a different tree innately.

(Sorry for the yap, treat the example as a story, don’t memorise)

Question 44

What is controversial about the LAD?

Answer 44

How does it work? Where is it in the body?
And, how “poor” are the stimuli that kids get? they hear a fuck ton of language, surely they can figure grammar out.
To support that view, look at the success of ChatGPT. That suggests that certain aspects of grammar can be learned inductively.

Question 45

What happened in WW2 that started to lead to an alternative to behaviourism?

Answer 45

The enigma code of the Nazis gets cracked by a machine made by Alan Turing.
This machine proves that it can handle all calculable functions. This also includes all standard logic, showing that the Turing machine can “think” a bit.
This machine was the first computer
It uses boolean algebra (logical operations) to process information (see footnote)

It She talks about Boolean algebra, and how it can be used to explain logic and calculate it. I won’t yap about it cus if i do, i wont shut up. The explanation is on slide 46

Question 46

What does the success of boolean algebra/operations imply

Answer 46

Since information (premises about reality) can be processed (via boolean) on hardware (a computer), why isn’t the same true for us humans?
e.g. information (thoughts/mental representations) can be processed (via reasoning/thinking) on hardware (the brain!).

It was shown that under certain assumptions, the operations of a neuron and its connection with other neurons could be modelled in terms of boolean logic.

This results in the computer analogy

Look at figure 6 for a summary/picture to help understand.

Question 47

Could this logic be applied to S-R chains? Meaning, can behaviourism explain how computers work, and therefore how brains work?

Answer 47

S-R chains are not powerful enough to be Turing machines (computers), and thus they can’t simulate human behaviour.

Question 48

What is the computer analogy?

Answer 48

Mind:Brain
=.
Software:Hardware

The mind is a thing, it’s just in the brain, the same way computer software is stored on the hardware.

Question 49

If thinking is indeed nothing more than implementing logic, then a computer can also think.
What question does this raise?

Answer 49

Could a computer also develop consciousness?
This question will be explored next block. Stay tuned for more folks!

Question 50

What led to the cognitive revolution? (kind of a summary)

Answer 50

• Chomsky shows S-R theory is insufficient to understand complex behaviour such as language
• Thus, to understand complex behaviour, we need theories about what goes on inside the black box
• The development of digital computers provides a framework for doing this, as
  
  • The mind can be seen as a program that performs information processing
• The study of this information processing in humans becomes known as cognitive psychology

Question 51

Summary of the timeline ab behaviourism

Answer 51

• Behaviourism briefly satisfies the need for an objective, hard science
• However, it falls short in the analysis of complex behaviour (language)
• Behaviourism goes kaputt (though it has left its marks in psychology, for an example, look at vici’s PTPR and what she uses to explain how exposure therapy works)
• In the 1950s cognitive psychology becomes dominant framework

Question 52

What else did we learn from the computer analogy?

Answer 52

• The computer made it easier to understand how an organism can seem to be goal-directed, without there being a homunculus (little human) who sets the goals and checks the progress.
• Computers need programmers to who deal with the information processing independently of the ways in which the processes are carried out in the machine.
  
  • This means that potentially, psychologists can become ‘programmers of the brain’, and figure out how the code works.

Question 53

What were the major steps in the emergence of cognitive psychology (besides the computer stuff)?

Answer 53

Miller’s 1956 article on the limits of human short-term memory, which showed that we can store up to 7 (±2) items in our short-term memory.
↳ We can conceptualise the brain as a computer with limited capacity

Neisser’s 1967 book Cognitive Pyschology , which summarised the available evidence of information processing in the mind, and gave the field a name and definition

Question 54

So, what is Cognitive psychology?

Answer 54

A movement in pyschology arguing that observable behaviours are the result of information processing in the mind.
It started in the 1950s and is currently the dominant form of mainstream psychology.

Question 55

What are some specific features of cognitive psychology?

We will get into each of them in the next flashcards

Answer 55

• Mental representations
• Information processing
• Boxes-and-arrows diagram
• Computational models
• Top-down processes

Question 56

What are mental representations?

Answer 56

They are information patterns in the mind that represent knowledge obtained through observation or the application of an algorithm (could be any cognitive function).

They form a realm separate from the brain and could in principle be copied to another brain. (This idea came from how you can take binary code (1011001) and copy it to another machine and it will work.)

Question 57

What is information processing?

Answer 57

It is the dynamic processes by which we handle/process information.
Such as encoding mental representations, transforming them via algorithms, and integrating them with existing knowledge.

It forms the core of cognitive psychology.
From this, psychologists began to make models of how this processing can be achieved. Two approaches were used.

Question 58

How can a boxes-and-arrows diagram explain information processing?

Answer 58

Boxes stand for (temporary) stores of information.
Arrows stand for cognitive processes that transform the information.

An example is Broadbent’s model of selective attention, look at figure 7 (you don’t need to understand it, its just an example)

Question 59

What are computational models?

Answer 59

They are computer programs that attempt to/actually perform the different transformations theorised to occur in human information processing.
This is more demanding, but it resulted in psychologists having to be much more precise than boxes-and-arrows diagrams about the precise mechanisms involved.
Additionally, if the model worked, then its guaranteed that proposed solution works as predicted.

Question 60

Researchers tried to make a computer program that translates from english to another language. They assumed this would be straightforward (ha)
What problems did they face?

Answer 60

• The meaning of words often depends on the meaning of the surrounding words.
  
  • Many words have more than one meaning and use (e.g. bank, coach, swallow), so they aren’t completely interchangeable
• Its difficult to compute the syntactic structure of sentences and ambiguities often have to be solved on the basis of the plausibility of the different interpretations

Question 61

What did researchers learn about humans and what is this process called?

Answer 61

They learnt that humans add a lot of background information to the language input they receive, in order to come to the correct interpretation.
(This goes heavily against the idea that human knowledge is nothing but associations between elementary sensations, shared by empiricists and behaviourists)
This resulted in cognitive psychologists introducing top-down processes

Question 62

What are top-down processes?

Answer 62

They refer to the fact that information from higher processing stages is fed back to previous processing stages, which influences processing at these stages.

Information in the human mind doesn’t flow unidirectionally from input to output (bottom-up), but requires multiple interactions between the different processing components to solve ambiguities and direct interpretation

Top-down processes were inspired by information-feedback mechanisms discovered during WW2, thanks Weinerrrrr

Question 63

Since in the 1950s, cognitive psychologists couldn’t image the brain, what techniques did they use in experiments to produce good results?

Answer 63

They borrowed the experimental framework from the behaviourists.
They noticed other sciences also investigated imperceptible processes and did so by examining the influences of these processes on perceptible phenomena. (e.g. astronomers unravelling the origin of the universe by looking at the movements of stars relative to one another).

In other words, they made models designed to lead to predictions that can be verified in experiments making use of performance measures

Question 64

What experiment did Sperling do in 1960 to investigate why we can only list a small number of stimuli in our short-term memory?

Answer 64

He reasoned that the stimuli traces rapidly fade whilst we say the stimuli, so we can only list a few.

He investigated this with the letter display (look at figure 8)
He did so by playing a tone (with its pitch corresponding to row, high being top, low being bottom).
People could then list all 4 letters, and could do any row, despite the fact that there was 12 letters flashed at them.
He also found that the longer the delay between the display and the tone, the less people could report the letters, after a second they couldn’t report them.

Question 65

Did Behaviourism and cognitive psychology completely revolutionise the field of psychology in their time?

Answer 65

It seems like it, but no.
The book has a focus on whether behaviourism defeated structuralism and functionalism, and whether cognitive psych did the same for behaviourism.
It says that not really, because whilst behaviourism was huge in the USA, it wasn’t that big of a deal in Europe, so psychological research did occur during the ‘behaviourist revolution’ that was cognitive based.
The same thing happened with cognitive psych.
Some people argued that behaviourism still has stuff to offer for psychology, and its wrong to treat behaviourist ideas as scum.

im sorry for the yap.