Download Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent Influences

Chapter 9 Behaviorism:
Antecedent Influences
Dr. Rick Grieve
PSY 495
Western Kentucky University
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Toward a Science of Behavior
• Background
– Functionalism was more evolutionary than
revolutionary
– Behaviorism revolutionary
• John B. Watson
• These ideas did not originate with Watson; they had been
developing for some time in psychology in biology
• Major forces that were brought together to form behaviorism
included:
– Philosophical tradition of objectivism and mechanism
– Animal psychology
– Functional psychology
• Insistence on objectivity can be traced back to Descartes and,
probably more importantly, Compte, who created positivism
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
• Most important antecedent to Behaviorism was animal
psychology
– Grew out of evolutionary theory and led to attempts to demonstrate:
• Existence of a mind in lower organisms
• The continuity between animal and human minds
• Jaques Loeb (1859-1924)
– Did animal research
– Postulated that animal behavior was influenced by tropism
• Involuntary movement in response to a stimulus
– Did not totally reject animal consciousness, especially in humans and
other animals at the top of the evolutionary scale
– If the actions of lower organisms can be explained without reference
to mental events, why cannot human behavior be explained in the
same way
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Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism Cont.
• Rats, Ants, and the Animal Mind
– Willard Small
• Introduced the rat maze in 1900 at Clark University
• Studied
St di d behavior,
b h i but
b t also
l interpreted
i t
t d the
th behavior
b h i
in terms of consciousness, writing about the rats’
images and ideas
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
– Charles Henry Turner
• Zoologist
• Interested in and published articles on comparative
and animal studies
• “A Preliminary Note on Ant Behavior” (1906)
– Margaret Floy Washburn
• Taught animal psychology at Cornell
• The Animal Mind (1908)
– 1st comparative psychology textbook published in US
– Last book to discuss animal consciousness and
introspection by analogy
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
– Difficult to be an animal psychologist
– Clever Hans the Clever Horse
• Supposedly could add and subtract, use fractions and
decimals, read, spell, tell time, distinguish among colors,
y objects,
j
, and perform
p
phenomenal
p
feats of memoryy
identify
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Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
• Turns out that Hans did not know anything that is owner
didn’t know
• Illustrates that need and value of an experimental approach to
y of animal behavior
the study
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
• Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949)
– Called his experimental approach to the study of
associations connectionism
• Approach to learning that is based on connections between
situations and responses
– Law of effect
• If the response to a stimulus is followed by a reward, the
connection is strengthened
– “stamped in”
• If the response is followed by a punishment, it is weakened
– “stamped out”
– Law of exercise
• Any response to a situation, other things being equal, will be
more strongly connected with the situation in proportion to
the number of times it has been connected with the situation
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
– Developed these laws from using the Puzzle Box
• Trial-and-error-learning
– Learning based on the repetition of response tendencies that
lead to success
– Disagreed with behaviorism
• he wanted to keep the mentalistic qualities in psychology
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Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism Cont.
• Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov (1849-1936)
– Shifted work on association from subjective
ideas to objective and quantifiable
physiological events
– Conditioned reflexes
• Psychic reflexes
– Changed to conditional reflexes
» were conditional upon the forming of an association
or connection between the stimulus and the response
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Classical Conditioning Apparatus
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Ivan Pavlov
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Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov
Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
• Higher mental processes in animals could
be described in physiological terms
without mention of consciousness
• Edwin B.
B Twitmyer—the
Twitmyer the lost one
– Gave a talk in 1904 that described conditioned
reflexes, but no one noticed
• Alois Kreidl’s goldfish
– Fish anticipated feeding
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism Cont.
• Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857-1927)
– Contemporary and rival of Pavlov
– Founded Psychoneurological Institute
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Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism Cont.
– Helped lead the field away from subjective
ideas and toward objectively observed overt
behavior
– Associated reflexes
• Reflexes that ca be elicited not only by
unconditional stimuli but also by stimuli that have
become associated with the unconditioned stimuli
• This is actually Pavlov’s conditioned response but
with a motor learning bent
• Behkterev postulated that higher-level processes
could be built using associated reflexes
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The Influence of Functional
Psychology and Behaviorism
• Functionalism was a direct antecedent of
Behaviorism
– It was more objective than other schools of
psychology at the time
• F
Functionalists
ti li t were calling
lli for
f a more objective
bj ti psychology
h l
even as Watson created the first tenets of behaviorism
– In 1911, Pillsbury defined psychology as the science
of behavior
• he argued that it was possible to treat human beings as
objectively as other aspects of the physical universe
– Others moved away from mentalistic ideas:
• William Montague
• J. R. Angell
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Which Brings Us to:
• John Broadus Watson
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Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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References
• Kendler, H. H. (1987). Historical foundations of
modern psychology. Pacific Grove, CA:
Brooks/Cole.
• Schultz,
Schultz D.
D P.,
P & Schultz,
Schultz S.
S E.
E (1996).
(1996) A history
of modern psychology (6th edition). Ft. Worth,
TX: Harcourt Brace Publishers.
• Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2004). A history
of modern psychology (8th edition). Ft. Worth,
TX: Harcourt Brace Publishers.
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Chapter 9 Behaviorism: Antecedent
Influences
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