Behaviorism


Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, deriving from Skinner's two levels of selection, they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism views internal mental states as explanations for observable behavior.
Behaviorism emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally. It was derived from earlier research in the late nineteenth century, such as when Edward Thorndike pioneered the law of effect, a procedure that involved the use of consequences to strengthen or weaken behavior.
With a 1924 publication, John B. Watson devised methodological behaviorism, which rejected introspective methods and sought to understand behavior by only measuring observable behaviors and events. It was not until 1945 that B. F. Skinner proposed that covert behavior—including cognition and emotions—are subject to the same controlling variables as observable behavior, which became the basis for his philosophy called radical behaviorism. While Watson and Ivan Pavlov investigated how neutral stimuli elicit reflexes in respondent conditioning, Skinner assessed the reinforcement histories of the discriminative stimuli that emits behavior; the process became known as operant conditioning.
The application of radical behaviorism—known as applied behavior analysis—is used in a variety of contexts, including, for example, applied animal behavior and organizational behavior management to treatment of mental disorders, such as autism and substance abuse. In addition, while behaviorism and cognitive schools of psychological thought do not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in the cognitive-behavioral therapies, which have demonstrated utility in treating certain pathologies, including simple phobias, PTSD, and mood disorders.

Branches

The titles given to the various branches of behaviorism include:
  • Behavioral genetics: Proposed in 1869 by Francis Galton, a relative of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that inherited factors had a significant impact on individuals' behaviors, however did not believe nurturing was not important. Which was later discredited due to association with the eugenics movement - researchers did not want to associate with Nazi politics whether direct or indirect.
  • Interbehaviorism: Proposed by Jacob Robert Kantor before B. F. Skinner's writings.
  • Methodological behaviorism: John B. Watson's behaviorism states that only public events can be objectively observed. Although it was still acknowledged that thoughts and feelings exist, they were not considered part of the science of behavior. It also laid the theoretical foundation for the early approach behavior modification in the 1970s and 1980s. Often compared to the views of B.F Skinner. Methodological behaviorism "representing the logical positivist-derived philosophy of science" which is common in science today, radical focuses on the "pragmatist perspective."
  • Psychological behaviorism: As proposed by Arthur W. Staats, unlike the previous behaviorisms of Skinner, Hull, and Tolman, was based upon a program of human research involving various types of human behavior. Psychological behaviorism introduces new principles of human learning. Humans learn not only by animal learning principles but also by special human learning principles. Those principles involve humans' uniquely huge learning ability. Humans learn repertoires that enable them to learn other things. Human learning is thus cumulative. No other animal demonstrates that ability, making the human species unique.
  • Radical behaviorism: Skinner's philosophy is an extension of Watson's form of behaviorism by theorizing that processes within the organism—particularly, private events, such as thoughts and feelings—are also part of the science of behavior, and suggests that environmental variables control these internal events just as they control observable behaviors. Behavioral events may be observable but not all are, some are considered "private": they are accessible and noticed by only the person who is behaving. B.F. Skinner described behavior as the name for the part of the functioning of the organism that consists of its interacting or having commerce with its surrounding environment. In simple terms, how an individual interacts with its surrounding environment.] Although private events cannot be directly seen by others, they are later determined through the species' overt behavior. Radical behaviorism forms the core philosophy behind behavior analysis. Willard Van Orman Quine used many of radical behaviorism's ideas in his study of knowledge and language.
  • Teleological behaviorism: Proposed by Howard Rachlin, post-Skinnerian, purposive, close to microeconomics. Focuses on objective observation as opposed to cognitive processes.
  • Theoretical behaviorism: Proposed by J. E. R. Staddon, adds a concept of internal state to allow for the effects of context. According to theoretical behaviorism, a state is a set of equivalent histories, i.e., past histories in which members of the same stimulus class produce members of the same response class. Conditioned stimuli are thus seen to control neither stimulus nor response but state. Theoretical behaviorism is a logical extension of Skinner's class-based definition of the operant.
Two subtypes of theoretical behaviorism are:
  • Hullian and post-Hullian: theoretical, group data, not dynamic, physiological
  • Purposive: Tolman's behavioristic anticipation of cognitive psychology

    Modern-day theory: radical behaviorism

B. F. Skinner proposed radical behaviorism as the conceptual underpinning of the experimental analysis of behavior. This viewpoint differs from other approaches to behavioral research in various ways, but, most notably here, it contrasts with methodological behaviorism in accepting feelings, states of mind and introspection as behaviors also subject to scientific investigation. Like methodological behaviorism, it rejects the reflex as a model of all behavior, and it defends the science of behavior as complementary to but independent of physiology. Radical behaviorism overlaps considerably with other western philosophical positions, such as American pragmatism.
Although John B. Watson mainly emphasized his position of methodological behaviorism throughout his career, Watson and Rosalie Rayner conducted the infamous Little Albert experiment, a study in which Ivan Pavlov's theory to respondent conditioning was first applied to eliciting a fearful reflex of crying in a human infant, and this became the launching point for understanding covert behavior in radical behaviorism; however, Skinner felt that aversive stimuli should only be experimented on with animals and spoke out against Watson for testing something so controversial on a human.
In 1959, Skinner observed the emotions of two pigeons by noting that they appeared angry because their feathers ruffled. The pigeons were placed together in an operant chamber, where they were aggressive as a consequence of previous reinforcement in the environment. Through stimulus control and subsequent discrimination training, whenever Skinner turned off the green light, the pigeons came to notice that the food reinforcer is discontinued following each peck and responded without aggression. Skinner concluded that humans also learn aggression and possess such emotions no differently than do nonhuman animals.

Experimental and conceptual innovations

As experimental behavioral psychology is related to behavioral neuroscience, we can date the first researches in the area were done in the beginning of 19th century. Later, this essentially philosophical position gained strength from the success of Skinner's early experimental work with rats and pigeons, summarized in his books The Behavior of Organisms and Schedules of Reinforcement. Of particular importance was his concept of the operant response, of which the canonical example was the rat's lever-press. In contrast with the idea of a physiological or reflex response, an operant is a class of structurally distinct but functionally equivalent responses. For example, while a rat might press a lever with its left paw or its right paw or its tail, all of these responses operate on the world in the same way and have a common consequence. Operants are often thought of as species of responses, where the individuals differ but the class coheres in its function-shared consequences with operants and reproductive success with species. This is a clear distinction between Skinner's theory and S–R theory.
Skinner's empirical work expanded on earlier research on trial-and-error learning by researchers such as Thorndike and Guthrie with both conceptual reformulations—Thorndike's notion of a stimulus-response "association" or "connection" was abandoned; and methodological ones—the use of the "free operant", so-called because the animal was now permitted to respond at its own rate rather than in a series of trials determined by the experimenter procedures. With this method, Skinner carried out substantial experimental work on the effects of different schedules and rates of reinforcement on the rates of operant responses made by rats and pigeons. He achieved remarkable success in training animals to perform unexpected responses, to emit large numbers of responses, and to demonstrate many empirical regularities at the purely behavioral level. This lent some credibility to his conceptual analysis. It is largely his conceptual analysis that made his work much more rigorous than his peers, a point which can be seen clearly in his seminal work Are Theories of Learning Necessary? in which he criticizes what he viewed to be theoretical weaknesses then common in the study of psychology. An important descendant of the experimental analysis of behavior is the Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior.