Behaviorism
Behaviorism, also spelt behaviourism, is a family of approaches to psychology that gives behaviour a central place in scientific explanation. Behaviourists have disagreed about the role of mental concepts and about what an adequate explanation of action should contain; the term therefore does not identify a single uniform theory.[1]
Approaches
Methodological behaviourism treats publicly observable behaviour as the appropriate basis for psychological investigation. Psychological behaviourism seeks explanations in relationships among environmental events, responses and learning histories. Analytical behaviourism is a philosophical approach that interprets mental concepts in terms of behavioural dispositions. These positions can overlap, but are not interchangeable.[1]
Learning
The behaviourist tradition helped develop experimental accounts of learning. In classical conditioning, an organism learns an association between events. In operant conditioning, the relationship between an action and its consequences changes subsequent behaviour. Reinforcement is defined by its effect on the likelihood of behaviour, rather than simply by whether a consequence sounds pleasant to an observer. Learning through observing others adds social and cognitive questions to the investigation of behaviour.[2]
Influence and debate
Behaviourist programmes were prominent in twentieth-century psychology before the growth of cognitive psychology. Criticism concerned, among other matters, whether explanations could dispense with mental representations and whether behavioural translations of mental terms still depended on other mental terms.[1] The study of learning now includes traditions centred on behaviour, cognition and memory; investigating observable behaviour does not by itself commit a researcher to every philosophical claim associated with behaviourism.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 George Graham. Behaviorism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Revised 13 January 2023.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Rose M. Spielman, William J. Jenkins and Marilyn D. Lovett. What Is Learning? In Psychology 2e. OpenStax, 2020.
Attribution
Prepared with reference to the structure and linked topics of the English Wikipedia article, revision 1375127029. Rewritten and checked against the sources cited above; changes have been made. Wikipedia contributors’ material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.