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BEHAVIORISM:
ANTECEDENT
INFLUENCES
Chapter 9
Lecture Prepared by: Dr. M.
Sawhney
Topics
1. The Influence of Animal Psychology on Behaviorism
2. Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949)
3. Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov (1849-1936)
4. The Influence of Functional Psychology on Behaviorism
Student Presentation
1. Mary Shrake
The Influence of animal
psychology on behaviorism
2. Elizabeth Garcia
Ivan Pavlov
3. Katrin Seideman
Edward Lee Thorndike
Toward a Science of Behavior
 Evolution of psychology from Wundt to
functionalism
 Functionalism movement was more
evolutionary than revolutionary
 Watson promotes another change: the
philosophical tradition of objectivism and
mechanism, animal psychology, and
functional psychology
 Zeitgeist dominated by the objectivistic,
mechanistic, and materialistic influences
 New psychology: focused on only what
could be seen, heard, or touched
John Watson
The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
 Animal psychology: antecedent to Watson’s
psychology
 Jacques Loeb (1859-1924): German
physiologist and zoologist
Animal Tropism: which is an involuntary
forced movement
Argued that animal consciousness was
revealed by associative memory
Animals had learned to react to
certain stimuli in a desirable way
Jacques Loeb (1859-1924)
Tools for the behaviorists: Rats, Ants,
and the Animal Mind
 Robert Yerkes: strengthened comparative
psychology in the US.
 Willard Small (1900): the rat maze is introduced
as a standard method for the study of learning
 Charles Henry Turner
 A Preliminary Note on Ant Behavior (1906)
 Watson later adopted the term
 1910: eight comparative psychology
laboratories had been established
 The animal mind analogous to the human mind
 Margaret Washburn published The Animal Mind
(1908).
The Hampton Court
On Becoming an Animal Psychologist
 Animal psychology was a difficult profession
Not well respected in academia
Always concerned with funding
Poor career prospects
Revival of animal psychology:
1909: Publication of detail account of Pavlov's work by
Yerkes and Morgulis in Psychological Bulletin.
 Clever Hans case showed animals are capable of learning
Edward Lee Thorndike
(1874–1949)
 Created a mechanistic, objective learning theory that
focused on overt behavior
 Believed that psychology must study behavior, not
mental elements or conscious experiences
 Finished Ph.D. with Cattell
 Animal Intelligence (1898)
 Connectionism: Thorndike’s approach to learning that
was based on connections between situations and
responses
 Argued that behavior must be reduced to its simplest
elements: the stimulus–response units (S-R)
Edward Lee Thorndike
(1874–1949)
The Puzzle Box
 Thorndike built crude puzzle boxes out
of crates and sticks to use on animals
 Example: Thorndike placed a fooddeprived cat in a box to test how
long it would take for the cat to
activate the lever to be fed
 Responses were random at first
 On subsequent trials, random
behaviors were less frequent until
learning was complete
 Trial-and-error learning: learning based
on the repetition of response
tendencies that lead to success
Laws of Learning
 Law of effect: acts that produce
satisfaction in a given situation
become associated with that
situation; when the situation recurs,
the act is likely to recur
 Law of exercise: the more an act or
response is used in a given situation,
the more strongly the act becomes
associated with that situation
Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov
(1849–1936)
 Worked on learning
 Helped shift associationism from its
emphasis on subjective ideas to
objective and quantifiable physiological
events
Example of topic: glandular secretions
and muscular movements
 Provided Watson with a method for
studying behavior and for attempting to
control and modify it
Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov
Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov
(1849–1936)
 Won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work in physiology.
 During his work on the physiology of the digestive system Pavlov
discovered the conditioned reflex.
 Conditioned reflexes: reflexes that are conditional or dependent on
the formation of an association or connection between stimulus and
response
 Noted that objects or events associated with presentation of food
also produced gastric secretions.
 Referred to these as “conditional” because they depended on something else.
 An early translation of his work mistranslated conditional as
conditioned.
Ivan Pavlov (continued)
 Developed classical (Pavlovian) conditioning
In classical conditioning:
An unconditioned response, is triggered by an unconditioned
stimulus.
For example, food elicits salivation out of an organism.
The conditioned reflex is developed by the laws of contiguity
and frequency.
A biologically neutral stimulus is associated, through contiguity,
with the unconditioned stimulus and develops the capacity to
elicit some fraction of the unconditioned response
At this point the neutral stimulus has become the
conditioned stimulus and the response to the conditioned
stimulus is the conditioned response.
 Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery
Classical Conditioning
Step 1: Unconditioned stimulus (UCS) > Unconditioned response (UCR)
Conditioned Stimulus (CS)
Step 2: Pairing UCS and CS
>
No response
Conditioned Response (CR)
+
Step 3: Conditioned Stimulus (CS)
> Conditioned Response (CR)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhqumfpxuzI&feature=related
The Influence of Functional
Psychology on Behaviorism
 Before Watson: functional psychologists moved away
from Wundt’s and Titchener’s pure psychology of
conscious experience
Need for an objective psychology that would focus
on behavior instead of consciousness
 Zeitgeist: overall movement of American psychology
was in a behavioristic direction
Missing link: the agent of a revolution whose
inevitability and success were assured (Watson)