Behaviorism In Psychology

BEHAVIOURISM

Georgia Sherriff November 15, 2017

Behaviorism is a big part of psychology, shaping a lot of how we see ourselves and whatever. Its very important to the development of psychology and helped to understand many part of how humans do what they Do. The idea of behaviorism is that behavior, all behaviour, is learned from the environment. It is mainly focused on observable behaviour. Behaviourism believes that everyone is born with a blank slate (the term used is Tabula Rosa) and that psychological disorders are the result of maladaptive learning. The earliest experiments are from Pavlov, in 1897. Thorndike, in 1905, formalized the Law of Effect. In 1913, John Watson founded the behavioral school of psychology. In 1920, he

He believed that all differences in behaviour were a result of different learning experiences. He wrote a groundbreaking article on behaviourism, but due to lack of evidence, many of Watson’s colleagues didn’t accept his beliefs as scientifically valid. Watson wrote a more accepted article later, but his theories were not fully adopted into mainstream and academia for another decade. He also wrote a book in which he believed that children should be treated more like adults, and cautioned against giving children too much affection. His wife later wrote a book that encouraged what her husband cautioned

Pavlov realized that his dogs would salivate when an object they associated with food would enter the room. He began to experiment, with ringing a bell and then letting the dogs smell food and recording how much they salivated. After long enough conditioning, the dogs would salivate when they heard the bell, regardless of whether or not there was food in front of them. This is a good example of classic conditioning.

Skinner Box is an example of operant conditioning. A rat placed in a box with a lever will eventually push it by accident; pushing the lever would cause food to drop down for the rat. After a few times in the box, the rat learned to go straight for the lever to obtain the food. Behaviour is also a very common practice in therapy. The ideas are that learnt behaviour can also be unlearnt is a big one, as well as introducing good habits and improving health through new habits and behaviour. A client wishes to remove a undesirable behaviour, then the client and the therapist work towards unlearning that behaviour. Aversion therapy is a type of operant conditioning, where the client learns to associate a punishment with a bad habit. Every time the behaviour is repeated, the therapist adds a bad stimulus, such as electric shock, for example. A bond between the habit and the bad response is formed, and eventually the client begins to stop doing that habit, due to aversion of the bad