behaviourist

• Assumptions of Behaviourism:

  Behaviourists are interested in observable and measurable phenomena such as reactions, salivation and avoidance etc. its not about internal and mental processes.

  They believe that mental processes are not as important as the role of the environment/experience in behaviour. Biology isn’t a part of the approach.

  Behaviourists adopt the principle that humans are just animals and therefore they argue that animal research is strongly generalisable to most things.

  They argue that humans don’t have free will.
• Classical conditioning- Pavlov’s research

   Classical conditioning – learning through association.

  Found dogs could be conditioned to salivate to the sound of a bell if it was repeatedly presented at the same time as food.

  Showing how a neutral stimulus (a bell) can elicit a new learned response (conditioned response) through association.
• Extinction- If the bell (CS) is repeatedly presented without food, the salivation (CR) will slowly disappear

  Spontaneous recovery- Even though the CR appears to have disappeared, the dog will still sometimes salivate to a bell

  Stimulus generalisation- The CS (the bell) can be changed slightly and still produce the same CR.

  Law of temporal contiguity- Both stimuli have to be presented at the same time for the association to occur
• Operant conditioning- Skinners research

   Skinner suggested that learning is an active process whereby humans and animals operate on their environment.

  In operant conditioning (maintaining of learning) there are 3 consequences of behaviour:

  Positive reinforcement- receiving a reward when a certain behaviour is performed.

  Negative reinforcement- behaviour reinforced when someone does something to avoid something unpleasant.

  Punishment- an unpleasant consequence to behaviour performed. (finding a way to avoid this in the future would be negative reinforcement)
• Schedules of reinforcement refers to when and how often a behaviour is rewarded. A variable schedule is when behaviour is rewarded at random points in time with no set timings and behaviour being reinforced is more likely as they want to keep going for the reward whereas if rewards happen at a consistent schedule it won’t be as significant and reinforcement starts to slack.
• Real world application

  Can be applied to treatments for phobias etc. however has been shown treatment doesn’t always work therefore may only be a partial explanation and other factors may have influence such as biology.
• A weakness of research into behaviorism is that it uses animal research, this makes the findings ungeneralizable to humans because their brains and the reactions are different and therefore not applicable, experiments done with animals are also conducted unethically as there is not the same rights and regulations as there are with humans. However it is still partly beneficial because many experiments done with animals are not possible to do with humans and without said animal research we may not have the findings that we do today and knowledge of behaviour may not be so advanced.
• a weakness of the behaviorist approach is that it is reductionist as it assumes that there are no other factors that influence the behaviour of a person.