Behaviourism

3. Behaviourism is one of the major schools of psychology from 1913 to about 1970, and it influenced the development of scientific psychology enormously. The behaviourists had the idea that thoughts, feelings, intentions - in fact, all mental processes- do not determine behaviour. We are biological machines. We don't act of our own free will, but rather we react to stimuli according to the waysin which we have been conditioned.

Behaviourism was created and promoted by J. B. Watson, in reaction against the introspective psychology of the German school. He also used the ideas of Pavlov and argued that the behaviour of animals and human beings was determined by their conditioned reflexes. He promoted the study of infants to trace the full conditioning history of individuals. Skinnerdid develop some important concepts in behaviourism. The best known are operant conditioning and shaping behaviour.

Like many psychological theories, behaviourism was imperfect and incomplete, but it played an important role in shaping psychological thought. It remains, together with psychoanalysis, perhaps the most important influence on psychology for the first 60 years of this century.For behaviourists learning is the process whereby an organism changes its behaviour as a result of experience.

Typically, in school learning, the change in behaviour we are looking for, is the ability to remember, understand, and apply various things and the tendency to have certain attitudes and values. And we want these kinds of learning to be relatively permanent.

The final component ofour definition of learning is experience- interchange with the environment whereby stimuli take on meaning and relationships are established between stimuli and responses.

Operant Conditioning
A form of conditioning identified and developed by B. F. Skinner. Skinner noticed that in classical conditioning, autonomic responses, which are usually not under any kind of conscious control, are oftenstrengthened. Skinner worked with naturally occurring behaviours and then strengthened them. Thus, while Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell, Skinner conditioned pigeons to direct their natural pecking at a ping - pong ball so that eventually they were able to peck a ball to play ping- pong. For Pavlov, the point of the study was to show that dogs could learn to salivateto a non- food stimulus. He didn’t use this canine ability. In operant conditioning, the idea is to produce useful sequences of behaviour - like birds playing ping- pong.

Skinner argued that, in real life, operant conditioning is much the more significant process. It underlies how we learn many behaviours such as driving a car of even reading poetry, both of which are under our consciouscontrol. He also argued that our feeling of control was an illusion since our reinforcement history actually determined our actions.

The simplest example of operant conditioning is the rat in a so - called Skinner box. The Skinner box is a small enclosure, empty except for a food tray and a lever. When a hungry rat is first placed in the box, it emits a wide variety of responses, or operants -getting up on its hind legs, sniffing around, and trying to climb the walls. Eventually, more or less by accident, it presses the lever. Later it presses it again. Then again, the frequency with which it presses the lever under these conditions, where nothing. Reinforcing happens as a result of the lever pressing, provides a baseline that we call the operant level.

In human beings, the same modelapplies. All of the infinite variety of human behaviour can be made more or less frequent or probable by the use or non-use of reinforcement, contingent on some response. The response can be anything -an action, a statement, or even inaction. For example, the response may be volunteering to answer a teacher's question or the answer itself. Or the response may be a student's sitting quietly and...