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Behaviorism
A brief overview…
What is behaviorism all about?
• Behavioral psychology is the study of
external behavior
• Behavior is the response of an
organism to stimuli
History of Behaviorism
• Pavlov (1927),
a Russian
physiologist
discovered
classical
conditioning in
dogs.
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“Give me a dozen healthy
infants, well-formed, and
my own special world to
bring them up in and I’ll
guarantee to take any
one at random and train
him to be any type of
specialist I might select
– a doctor, a lawyer,
artist…”
John B. Watson 1924
Classical Conditioning
• Explains some learning of involuntary
emotional and physiological responses.
– Dog drooling when it smells food and later when it
hears a bell
• School is often the cause of unintentional
learning through classical conditioning,
especially anxiety.
– Test anxiety conditions us to have general school
anxiety
Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
Before Conditioning
Unconditioned
Stimulus
Neutral Stimulus
Unconditioned Response
No Response
Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
During Conditioning
Unconditioned
Neutral
Stimulus
Stimulus
Unconditioned
Response
Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
After Conditioning
Conditioned
Conditioned
Stimulus
Response
Examples of Classical
Conditioning
• Kids who often get strep throat, after much
swabbing of their throat, begin to gag as soon as
they see the doctor with the swab.
• Hearing a teacher, roommate, boyfriend/girlfriend
say to you, “We need to talk”. Upon hearing this
phrase your stomach “flutters”.
• The point is, we learn to associate a stimulus
with a response, and eventually our body does
this automatically in the presence of the stimulus.
Our response is involuntary.
B.F. Skinner (1904 –1990)
• American psychologist - influential from the 1930’s 60’s – developed operant conditioning
• Skinner was interested in education
– He believed that behavior is sustained by
reinforcements or rewards, not by free will.
• Famous for the skinner box & the teaching machine
• Often worked with pigeons
& rats and applied what he learned
with these animals to human learning
Skinner’s Operant Conditioning
Positive
Reinforcement
Presence of Pleasant
Stimulus
Negative
Reinforcement
Absence of Unpleasant
Stimulus
Punishment
Presence of
Unpleasant Stimulus
Behavior
Increases
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Behavior
Decreases
Consequences for Behaviors
• Positive Reinforcement – You behave in a certain
way that results in a reward, and as a result, you are
more likely to repeat that behavior
• Negative Reinforcement – You behave in a certain
way that results in the removal of something
unpleasant, and as a result you are more likely to
repeat that behavior (ex: doing a paper early)
– In both cases, something happened that you saw as
“good” and as a result, you exhibited the behavior more.
Consequences for Behaviors
• Punishment – A consequence that follows a
behavior so that you do the behavior less
often in the future.
– Punishment can involve adding something
(paying a fine, staying after school) or involve
removing something you like (losing recess
time, leaving your friends)
– In both cases, adding something or removing
something, you perceive it as “bad” and as a
result, you exhibit the behavior less.
Critiques of Behaviorism
• External rewards may diminish motivation
–Studies where participants work on an interesting task
(ex: puzzles) - experimental group is given a reward
when finished while the control group is not.
• Behaviorism doesn’t account for anything that isn’t an
observable behavior
– There has to be more going on than what is observable
- doesn’t there?
• Behaviorism only accounts for learning through direct
experience with the environment (not observational
learning)
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THE END
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