The Behaviorists Summary

Towards the end of the 19th century, psychologists began to reject “mentalism,” the idea of the mind as a separate essence and began thinking of mental experiences as simply a response of the nervous system to stimuli. Through animal experiments, Edward Lee Thorndike discovered the laws of natural learning that became the basis of behavioral psychology. Ivan Pavlov’s experiments conditioning dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell and other stimuli led to the discovery of the laws of conditioning—a major addition to psychological knowledge. John B. Watson did the most to popularize behaviorism among American psychologists, specifically as it related to a theoretical approach to personality. In his manifesto on behaviorism, he declared that psychology would focus on behavior rather than consciousness, its method would be objective rather than introspective, and its goal would be to predict and control behavior.

Behaviorism was the dominant form of psychology from the 1920s to the 1960s. Learning was the central concern in American psychology during the behaviorist era, and there was an assumption that all learning could be explained by stimulus-response (S-R) learning principles. Neobehaviorist Clark L. Hull worked to make behaviorism a quantitatively exact science by developing equations that could be used to predict the effects of a number of factors on S-R learning. B. F. Skinner’s most important contribution was his concept of operant conditioning, which stands in contrast to Pavlov’s classical conditioning and Thorndike’s instrumental conditioning. Skinner’s ideas influenced education with the development of what is known as “programmed instruction.” Additionally, Skinner’s experiments with behavior modification had a measurable effect on the treatment of mental and emotional disorders. Behaviorism began to decline in the 1960s as psychologists realized its limits.

Reference

Hunt, M. M. (2007). The Behaviorists. In M. M. Hunt, The Story of Psychology (pp. 356-408). New York: Anchor Books.