Download Behaviourism - Dave Brodbeck

Behaviourism
Psychology 4006
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
• In training for ministry, but decided on
science after reading Darwin and
Sechenov
• 1883 degree in medicine
• 1891 director of Institute of
Experimental Medicine (St. Petersburg)
• Research on digestion
• Research on salivary reflex leads to
conditioning work
• Nobel Prize for physiology 1904
Ivan Petrovich knew his stuff
• Replication strategy
• Acquisition of a CR
• Extinction of a CR
• Generalization and discrimination
• Experimental neurosis
• Breakdown in discrimination
Commies Loved him…
• Pavlov and Soviets
• Conditioning work consistent with Soviet mission
• Condition people to share Communist ideals
• Hence, Pavlov’s work favored and well funded
• Pavlov initially critical
• But accommodated in face of Nazi threat in 1930s
The Founding of Behaviourism
• John Watson (1878-1958)
• Trained at functionalist University of
Chicago
• Ph.D. 1903 correlated brain
development and improved learning
ability in rats
• 1903-1908 on the faculty at Chicago
• Maze studies with Carr
A Radical New Idea
• Watson at Johns Hopkins 1908-1920
• Continued animal studies
• Both lab and field
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1913 Behaviorist Manifesto paper
Introspection and consciousness out
Thinking is just sub-vocal speech
Study of overt behavior in
Goal given S, predict R; given R, predict S
Promise of applications
• 1915 APA presidential address
• Demonstrated effects of conditioning procedures
Watson was ‘asked to resign’
• Watson after Johns Hopkins (after 1920)
• Applying science to a new life in advertising
• Marketing research
• Advertising campaigns based on emotions
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Popularizing behaviorism
Behaviorism (1924)
Importance of the environment
Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928)
Rational rather than emotional parenting
strategy
Watson left, but behaviourism continued
• Events in the 1920s leading to neobehaviorism (1930-1960)
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Operationism
Operational definitions
Enables replication
Converging operations
Increased confidence when the same outcomes result from multiple
operational definitions of the same construct
• Consensus on
• Evolutionary continuum (human to animal links)
• Learning/conditioning (nurture focus)
Skinner, the father of Radical Behaviourism
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B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)
Ph.D. from Harvard (1931),
then University Fellow (until 1938)
The Behavior of Organisms (1938)
Type S conditioning Pavlovian
• Two stimuli paired, producing same response
• Type R conditioning operant
• Behavior produces predictable consequences
• Minnesota for 9 years, then 4 years as
department head at Indiana
• 1948 returns to Harvard to stay
Radical Behaviourism
• Operant conditioning
• Controlled environment (operant chamber)
• Experimental analysis of behavior
• Stimulus control
• Opposed formal theory
• Preferred an inductive strategy
• The problem of explanatory fictions
• Dangers of labels becoming explanations
Radical Behaviourism
• The technological ideal
• Goal not just to predict and understand behavior, but also to control it
• Project Pigeon
• WWII guided missile system using pigeons
• Applications to child rearing and teaching
• Walden Two (1948)
• Utopian community built on operant principles
• Became widely read in the 1960s
Conclusions
• Huge in North America, not as huge in Europe
• Probably saved psychology
• Probably went too far
• What’s on your behaviour?
• Methods are still used today.