Behaviorism and Fundamental Psychologists and Their Contributions

Behaviorism and Fundamental Psychologists and Their Contributions

The study of Behaviorism dates can be traced back to the classical Greek philosophers, and goes into the nineteenth and twentieth-century psychology. Below is a list of fundamental psychologists and their contributions.

* Greeks

Philosophers and psychologists have been intrigued with the human thought process for thousands of years, with one of the first being the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He presented some of the first operational methods in how human learning and memory are formed. He also emphasized the importance of mental imagery.

* Wundt

William Wundt is considered the father of Psychology when he opened his laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. With this done, Wundt separated the disciplines of philosophy and physiology and psychology emerged as a new and separate discipline. G. Stanley Hall was one of Wundt's early students, and was important in that he contributed to psychology's rapid growth in America.

Hall opened America's first psychological research lab at John Hopkins University in 1883. A few years after that, Hall launched America's first Psychology journal. Finally, in 1892, he pushed to establish the American Psychological Association (APA), and was elected as the first president. Today, the APA is the world's largest organization that strives to further psychological research, and has over 14,000 members.

Wundt also proposed that psychology should study mental processes via a method called introspection. Introspection is where trained observers would pay careful attention to their own sensations and try to report them as subjectively as possible. The observers were encouraged to describe the sens...

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...siologist and a skillful surgeon, Ivan Pavlov is remembered primarily for his development of the concept of conditioned reflex. In a well-known experiment he trained a hungry dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. The bell had

previously become associated by the dog with the sight of food. (Classical conditioning)

Pavlov's work laid a foundation for the scientific analysis of human behavior. In 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his work on digestive secretions.

* Behaviorism

Behaviorism is the theoretical orientation that is based on the belief that scientific psychology should study only observable behavior. One of the biggest contributions that came out of behaviorism was the rise of animal research in psychology. From the use of animal research, experiments with a tighter control over variables are not possible.