Understanding Behaviorism: Origins and Impact

What is behaviorism and where did it come from? It emphasizes a scientific and objective approached to investigate behavior. Behaviorism is known to most as a psychological approach. John Watson was known to be the loudest voice for behaviorism even though he was not the founder. He started the spread of the knowledge of what behaviorism was in 1912, when he wrote an article that stated the methodology and behavioral analysis of behaviorism. The article that John Watson wrote was titled ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it’. First, to understand where behaviorism came from also known as its origin, you will have to understand what behaviorism is. So behaviorism is the theory that studies the overt, observable behaviors of people to understand their mental processes. Behaviorism also focuses specifically on the environment and its effects on the individual. It 's trying to decide if the environment influences behavior and causes people to react or act in certain ways. Behaviorism makes many basic assumptions. Some of those assumptions are behavior is learnt in the

in traditional ways such as how well they could spell, count, or solve problems. He was more concerned with the processing of these things much more than the result came up with. Many people had the idea that children were less competent of thinkers then those older than them. Piaget did not think this way however, he designed a systematic study and was the first psychologist to do this. Piaget believed that genetics played a role in mental structure do to children being born with a certain mental structure. One of the biggest difference in Piaget’s theories was he was not concerned with all learners and narrowed it down to only involve children. With the children he was not concerned with how much they learned but how much they were developing. Piaget’s theory was to identify mechanisms and processed infant and children use to