Skinner And Watson's Theory Of Behavior

“The psychology of the late 20th Century took two forms: one was radical behaviourism, distinctly the minority position. The majority position was the ‘rest of psychology’” (Malone, Cruchon: 2001). Psychologists such as Skinner and Watson didn’t see psychology as the study of the mind, but as the study of behaviour. In Watson’s view, the behaviour of a person, or animal, involved responses to different stimuli in its environment. He believed these responses could be learnt and that the stimuli in the environment were clear factors in conditioned reflexes. “According to Watson, all behaviour, even feelings and thinking, is just a set of learned habits (Cavijo, 2013)”. In contrast to this science based behaviourism, the psychodynamic approach

Freud developed an idea of past experiences contributing to our current actions. He emphasised “that behaviour is motivated by sexual and aggressive drives creating psychic energy that generates tension and anxiety” (Parkinson; 2014), which in turn creates our personality over time and into adulthood. Freud also believed that one’s psychological problems could also be traced back to when they were children. As briefly mentioned before, behaviourists theory is quite different. Psychologists, such as Pavlov, believed that our behaviour is simply determined by our environment. It is argued that we learn from our environment and by repeating our actions they ultimately become automatic. This in comparison to the psychodynamic theory is quite dissimilar. As Killeen identified… “With practice, instrumental responses may take on increased strength, and in some cases become motivationally autonomous—become habits” (Killeen; 2014). In this case, behaviourists strongly believe we can regulate pre- conditions for learning or acting and by activities such as modelling, repetition and support we can gain these

We have already seen how behaviourism implies that the environment determines all of our actions, thus rejecting the idea that people have free will. For example, in education, “learning is demonstrated by the behaviour of the learner in their actions or reactions to further stimulus” (Woollard; 2010). Students are ‘trained’ to learn and they are required to obtain new behavioural patterns. Psychodynamic psychologists such as Freud and even Adler also have claim to a deterministic approach, although, as Smith suggested, they “both were involved in a kind of a balancing act” (Smith; 2003). This ‘balancing act’ was referring to the notions of free will and the unconscious struggle. Freud, for example, believed superstition as the “unconscious process of the person’s mind and perhaps his or her libidinal fixations”, whilst Adler didn’t believe in “fortuitous psychological events”, strongly believing in ‘cause and effect’ (Smith; 2003). The question can be argued from both approaches of whether free will is real or just an