Behaviorism

• Behaviourism


  The study of the relationship between people, environment and their behaviour
• Behaviourism followed functionalism
• What occurred in a person's head was irrelevant to behaviourists
• Operant psychology


  The study of the effects of reinforcement on behaviour, focusing on the consequences of behavioural actions rather than on stimuli that precede and evoke such actions
• Skinner believed that human behaviour is a product of the conditions in which a person grows and lives, and that terms like freedom, will power and dignity etc, only obscure our understanding of the relationships between behaviour and its consequences
• Behaviourism


  • Emphasis on role of environmental factors influencing behaviour - the focus is on LEARNING (Operant learning)
  • Objective methods are most useful - not vague and subjective like previous methods
  • Aims of science are to control and predict behaviour
• Operant conditioning


  Learns an association between behaviour and its consequences, where behaviour changes because of the consequence that occur after it, dealing with voluntary behaviour that operate on the environment
• Classical conditioning


  Learns an association between 2 stimuli, where it occurs before the natural response, dealing with involuntary responses like emotional ones
• Types of reinforcement


  • Positive reinforcement (rewarding good behaviour)
  • Negative reinforcement (Doing something to avoid something else)
  • Punishment (punishing poor behaviour)
• Skinner's operant conditioning chamber (Skinner box)


  1. Rat is exposed to an aversive stimulus (electric grid)

  2. Rat presses lever to turn off electric current (negative reinforcement)

  3. Rat is rewarded with food when it presses lever (positive reinforcement)

  4. Light is turned on before electric current, so lever pressing after light is negatively reinforced
• Classical conditioning (Pavlov)


  Behaviours can be learned through the association between different stimuli
• Pavlov's dog experiment

  1. Dogs are presented with food, causing them to salivate (unconditioned stimulus and response)

  2. Metronome is introduced before food, eventually causing dogs to salivate to just the metronome sound (conditioned stimulus and response)