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Behaviorism
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Behaviorism, Watson states that behaviorism is the scientific study of human behavior. It is simply the study of what people do. Behaviorism is intended to take psychology up to the same level as other sciences. The first task is to observe behavior and make predictions, then to take determine causal relationships. Behavior can be reduced to relationships between stimuli and responses, the S --- R Model. A stimulus can be shown to cause a response or a response can be traced back to a stimulus.
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Behaviorism is a form of materialism about mental processes: every mental process is some physical process or other. Your mental processes are certain physical processes that take place in your body. But that's not all that Behaviorism says. It says something much more specific about how to say which physical processes are mental processes. And what more it says is at the heart of Behaviorism.
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Behaviorism has lost strength and influence. It is dismissed by cognitive scientists developing intricate internal information processing models of cognition. Its laboratory routines are neglected by cognitive ethologists and ecological psychologists convinced that its methods are irrelevant to studying how animals and persons behave in their natural and social environment. Its traditional relative indifference towards neuroscience and deference to environmental contingencies is rejected by neuroscientists sure that direct study of the brain is the only way to understand the causes of behavior.
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Behaviorism has the distinction of being the first truly psychological account of learning, and some of its byways still provide good accounts of otherwise inexplicable behavior. Truly, it only focuses on the objectively observable behaviors and not mental activities.
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Behaviorism stumbled upon various critical difficulties with some of its commitments. One difficulty is confusion about the effects of reinforcement on behavior (see Gallistel 1990). In its original sense, a stimulus such as food is a reinforcer only if its presentation increases the frequency of a response in a type of associative conditioning known as operant conditioning. A problem with this definition is that it defines reinforcers as stimuli that change behavior. The presentation of food... may have no observable effect on response frequency even in cases in which an animal is food deprived. Rather, response frequency can be associated with an animal's ability to identify and remember temporal or spatial properties of the circumstances in which a stimulus is presented.
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Behaviorism originated with the work of John B. Watson, an American psychologist. John B. Watson believed that psychological data which did not result from direct observation was useless (Alberto and Troutman, 2003). Watson did not believe in human instinct, thought or emotion. Instead, he concluded that human behavior is strictly shaped by one’s environment. Watson claimed that psychology was not concerned with the mind or with human consciousness. Instead, psychology would be concerned only with behavior.
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Behaviorism