Behaviorism

Behaviorism according to Craig & Dunn (2010, p.14), is defined as the view that the appropriate focus of psychology should be on observable behavior. There were several people that help contribute to the study of behaviorism; however there are five that were key in pioneering what we know today; Ivan Pavlov, Edward Lee Thorndike, John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born September 14, 1849 in Ryazan, Russia. His father was a poor village priest, who wanted his son to become a priest as well. Pavlov had planned to become a priest until the age of 21, when he decided he was more interested in a scientific career, (Crain, 2011, p.180). For most of his career he was dedicated to physiological investigations, and in 1904 he won the Nobel Prize for his work on the digestive system. According to Ivan Pavlov.com (2003) the most important dates of his life included, 1907 when he was elected Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1912 given an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University, and 1915 awarded the Order of the Legion of Honour at the recommendation of the Medical Academy of Paris. He died on February 27, 1936. Around the time that he turned 50 was when he started his work on the conditioned reflexes; however for a while he could not decide whether to pursue the implications of his new discovery or to continue with his earlier research, after a long struggle with it, he began studying the conditioning process (Crain, 2011, pp.180-181). Pavlov coined the classical conditioning “a type of learning in which an association is learned between an environmental event and the stimulus-response reflex that follows (e.g., a salivary response when a person smells delicious food, even before t...

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...es the influence of the social behavior of others on our learning”, (Craig & Dunn, 2010, p.16). His most famous experiment was that of the Bobo doll, where he would have three sets of children watch a video, where an adult would begin to beat on the doll and in the end one would get punished, one would get praised, and one would have nothing at all. Then those groups would get their own Bobo doll and he would watch to see if they would have the same aggressions that the adults showed. Some of the important times of his life have been; 1953 began teaching at Stanford University, 1974 served as the president of APA, 1980 received the APA’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, and 2004 Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology by the American Psychological Association, (Cherry, 2010). He is currently still alive and teaching at Stanford University.