Behaviorism And Behaviourism

Behaviourism is described as “a school of psychology launched in 1913 by the US psychologist John B Watson (1878–1958) with the theoretical goal of the ‘prediction and control of behavior’, representing a radical break with the classical experimental psychology of structuralism” (Colman, 2009). It is often said that behaviourism advocates “that psychologists should restrict themselves to the scientific study of objectively observable behaviour” (Schacter, Gilbert & Wegner, 2012, p.19). Behaviour is an action therefore it can be observed, described, and recorded by the person engaging in the behaviour or by others observing the person(Miltenberger, 2008). The four main figures that helped develop behaviourism within psychology during the 20th century were Pavlov (1849-1936), Thorndike (1874-1949), Watson (1878-1958) and Skinner (1904-1990) (Miltenberger, 2008). Pavlov’s study of salivation within dogs gave way

Skinner in the early 1930s carried out carefully controlled experiments on the behaviour of individual laboratory rats (Leigland, 2010). The early studies of Thorndike on animal behaviour and Watson’s definition of a science of behaviour established the potential value of experimental research with animals (Leslie, 2002). Skinner was one of the major proponents of behaviourism. He studied how learning is affected by changes in the environments and sought to prove that behaviour could be predicted and controlled (Weegar & Pacis, 2012). Skinner believed that all behaviour is determined (Ardila, 2012) and that there is no such thing as “free will” (Weegar & Pacis, 2012). He invented the famous Skinner box where a white rat was put into an enclosure with a lever where, if pushed by the rat, it resulted in the delivery of a small pellet of food into a cup located below the lever which was to reinforce the behaviour. Skinner called his approach the ‘experimental analysis of behaviour’ and this behaviour came to be known as operant conditioning (Leslie,