Behaviorism

=**Behaviorism **=  The philosophy that people were born with nothing in there brain, we started as a "clean slate." The different types of theories that will be learned during this presentaion are classical conditioning theory  instrumental conditioning  and the social learning theory  



B.F Skinner(1904-1990)
B.F Skinner and E.L Thorndike both worked on the **operant conditioning theory**. E.L Thorndike started off by using children in his experiment, he asked them to tell him what he was thinking. If the children guessed right they got candy. Overall the experiment was a failure. He decided that he would do the same type of experiment but with animals. It resulted in the law of effect which is- **Consequences + Behavior =Learning**. When Thorndike tried this out he put a cat into a box and waited for the cat to eventually press the lever and jump out. He kept putting the cat into the box until the cat realized to press the latch. Skinner wanted to do the same type of experiment but he wanted to make some changes. He decided to use a rat instead of a cat and the rat had water and a wheel but when it wanted food it had to press a lever. The rat did not know that pressing the lever would give food so he was rewarded continuously for pressing it. Adventually he caught on and realized pressing the lever would give him food. Then Skinner started rewarding the rat every few times it would to the right thing. He had to use positive and negative reinforcements. B.F Skinner was widely known and has helped out the psychology department greatly, he has shown a new way to organize information.

Ivan Pavlov (1845-1936)
//"Essentially, only one thing in life is of real interest to us - our psychical experience. Its mechanism, however, was and still is shrouded in profound obscurity//" Ivan Pavlov was a Nobel Prize winning Russian physiologist. He spent most of his time of the study of digestion and ulcers, which led to his study in dogs. In this study, he found relationships between the stimulus and it's response in nature. These studies became known as **CLASSICAL CONDITIONING,** which is defined as 'the process by which a previously neutral stimulus acquires the capacity to elicit a response through association with a stimulus that already elicits a similar or related response.' Simply put, this conditioning is using a stimulus to get a trained response. His Examples:


 * **Unconditioned Stimuli --->** || **Unconditioned Responses** ||
 * 1. meat for dinner || the dog salivates ||
 * 2. a balloon pop || a startle response ||
 * 3. an air puff to your eye || blinking your eye ||

John Watson(1878-1958)
John B Watson was a psychologist best known for creating the field of behaviorism. When he first graduated in 1903, he had an interest in animal behavior, publishing the first modern study of behavior in rats. Watson also studied bird behavior As his career matured, Watson’s focus shifted to human behavior. It was around this time that he officially started studying behaviorism by studying external reactions of people exposed to stimuli instead of their mental state. Watson often wrote about child-rearing, stating that he believed children should be respected, but not be emotionally attached to their parents. He believed that emotional attachment would create over-dependent adults. He is probably best known, however, for his work on the controversial Little Albert experiment. In the experiment, he tried to get children to associate rats with fear by associating the rats with loud noises, stimuli that normally induce fear. After his time as a psychologist, Watson became a successful author, before moving on to the advertising industry.

**BEHAVIORISM vs. ALL**

The recent event on behaviorism is a post-skinnerian book called the //Relational Frame Theory.// It is a psychological theory of human language and cognition, and focuses on how humans learn language through interaction with the environment. It also refers to how humans interpret and decode the sound waves that they receive when someone speaks to them. Also it emphasizes the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events, such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, by focusing on variables in their context. Further, the contextual approach of RFT provides a useful explanation of the structure of verbal knowledge and cognition. While there are many different theories of language and cognition available, RFT offers a few advantages over traditional approaches. One of these advantages are that the theory is very precise and allows it to be conducted according to strict procedures according to its components. These advantages make RFT interesting to cognitive psychologists, therapists, educators, and anyone studying the human condition.
 * Current Event **



Behaviorism – The theory that all of an organism’s actions are reactions to its environment. Also, the study of an organism’s behaviors. Conditioning – Teaching an organism to react to a stimulus a certain way, by associating that stimulus with something else. Cognitive Revolution – A movement that masked behaviorism and focused on the mind and how it works, rather than reactions to the environment. Methodological Behaviorism – A subset of behaviorism that says that we have no mental life, all of our thoughts are just things we want to say Radical Behaviorism – In addition to behaviors, processes within the organism are determined by the environment, too. Operant Conditioning Theory- an association between a behavior and a consequence
 * Vocabulary: **

Works Cited:
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http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=13&hid=5&sid=a1e2296e-590e-410f-bea4-f025c177c352%40sessionmgr4&bdata=JmxvZ2lucGFnZT1jdXN0bG9naW4uYXNwJnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=f5h&AN=9604163332

http://web.mst.edu/~pfyc212b/behaviorism.htm

http://web.mst.edu/~pfyc212b/behaviorism.htm

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Book Source: Volume 1- History of Psychology