Behaviourism

• Explaining Behaviour

  • Interested in observable and measurable phenomena such as reactions, salivation, avoidance etc
• Is is a scientific method?

  • Mental processes are not as important as the role of the environment/experiences in behaviour
  • Biology is not part of this approach either
• Animal research?

  • Behaviourists adopt the principle that humans are just animals
  • Therefore they argue that animal research is strongly generalisable to most things
• Free Will?

  • Humans do not have free will
  • Behaviourists view free will as an illusion
• Classical conditioning


  Before conditioning

  • Unconditioned stimulus -> Unconditioned response
  • Neutral stimulus -> no response

  During conditioning

  • Unconditioned stimulus + neutral stimulus -> unconditioned response

  After conditioning

  • Conditioned stimulus -> conditioned response
• Discovery of classical conditioning

  • Investigating the salivary reflex in dogs, when he noticed they would start salivating before the food was presented
  • He systematically explored the conditions under which this learning happens
• Extinction


  • The association is not permanent
  • Wears off over time if the UCS and NS aren't presented together
• Spontaneous recovery


  • After extinction the link can be learned very quickly again if presented together
• Stimulus generalisation

  • Responses are also made to stimuli are very similarity to the CS
• Timing (law of temporal contiguity)

  • Conditioning only occurs if the NS can be used to predict the UCS
• Operant conditioning

  • Reinforcement and punishment changes the likelihood of behaviour being repeated
• How did Skinner discover operant conditioning?

  • Organisms spontaneously behave, some behaviours have positive or negative consequences and so they are repeated
  • He developed the operant conditioning chamber to investigate the learning of rats
• Positive reinforcement

  • giving something desirable
• Negative reinforcement

  • taking away something aversive
• Punishment

  • undesirable consequences that reduce the likelihood of the behaviour being repeated in the future
• Schedules of reinforcement

  • How often consequences follow
  • Continuous (every time)
  • Partial (not every time)
  • Variable (randomly)
• Scientific (strength)

  • Behaviourism was able to bring the language and methods of the natural sciences into psychology by focusing on the measurement of observable behaviour within highly controlled lab settings
  • By emphasising the importance of scientific processes such as objectivity and replication, behaviourism was influential in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline, giving it greater credibility and status
• Real world applications (strength)

  • Operant conditioning is the basis of token economy systems that have been successfully used institutions such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals
  • Work by rewarding appropriate behaviour with token that can then be exchanged privileges
  • Treatment such as these have the advantage of requiring less effort from a client because the client doesn't have to think about their problem
  • These are also suitable for client who lack insight
• Use of animals (limitation)

  • The animals involved were exposed to stressful and aversion conditions, which may also have affected how they reacted to the experimental situation
• Reductionist

  • From a behaviourist perspective, animals are seen as passive and machine-like responders to the environment, with little or no conscious insight into their behaviour
  • These processes suggest that people may play a much more active role in their own learning
  • This means that learning theory may apply less to a human than to animal behaviour