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Problem 4 – Hergenhahn + Richards + Gardner Chapter 2 Laying the Foundation for CognitiveScience
Behaviorism and Watson
- Objective psychology (studying only things that are directly measurable) was already well
established in Russia before the onset of behaviorism
- But Watson arrived at his ideas independently of the Russians
- Watson worked on white rats and animal education for a long time
- He thought “if you can understand the rats without the convolutions of introspection,
could you not understand people?”
- Watson’s famous lecture “psychology as the behaviorist view it” is taken as the formal
founding of behaviorism (around 1913)
- Watson’s position gradually extended to the point he attempted to explain all human
behavior, his ideas were criticized to be too radical
- He rejected introspection and any explanation of behavior based on mentalism
- Consciousness can’t cause behavior, it’s a phenomenon that accompanies certain
physiological reactions caused by stimuli
- According to Watson’s the goal of psychology is the prediction and control of behavior –
elaboration on stimulus (general environmental situation or internal condition) and
response (anything the organism does)
Types of behavior:
- Explicit (overt) learned behavior: talking, writing, playing basketball
- Implicit (covert) learned behavior: increased heart rate cause by dentist drill
- Explicit unlearned behavior: grasping, blinking, sneezing
- Implicit unlearned behavior: glandular secretions, circulatory changes
4 method to study behavior:
- Observation: naturalistic or experimentally controlled
- Conditioned-reflex method: Pavlov proposed
- Testing: taking the behavior samples and no the measurement of capacity
- Verbal reports: treated as any other overt behavior
Language and thinking:
- The most controversial aspect of Watson’s theories
- Speech and language are simply overt behaviors
- Thinking was claimed to be implicit or subvocal speech
- Watson assumed the tongue movements and larynx accompany thought
- He also couldn’t solve thought’s relationship to behavior
Experience:
- Experience makes people what they are, not inheritance – radical environmentalism
- He still said heritable differences in structure (physical) could to influence personality
characteristics
- Instincts: he rejected the idea of instincts, and said there are only a few simple innate
behavior patterns /reflexes such as sneezing, crying, crawling, sucking etc.
, Emotions:
- Watson said along with basic structure and basic reflexes humans inherit emotions of fear,
rage and love (All adult emotions are derived from those 3)
- Through learning these emotions can be elicited by stimuli other than those originally elicit
them in infancy
- 3 important aspects of emotions are the stimuli that elicits the emotions, the internal
reactions, and the external reactions
- Little Albert experiment: Demonstrates how experience rearranges the stimuli that causes
emotional responses
- They wanted to remove Albert’s fear and thus showed how fear can be systematically
eliminated – behavior therapy
Learning:
- Watsons explained learning in terms of principles of contiguity and frequency
- Conditioning causes events to be associated in time, so it causes contiguity
- Learning trial always ends with the correct response, so it occurs more frequently
- The more a response is made, the higher the chances that it will be made again
- Law of recency: the final response made in a learning situation will be the response the
person’s makes in the next in that situation
Watson’s influence:
- He changes psychology’s major goal from consciousness to behavior
- He made overt behavior the most exclusive subject matter in psychology
- There are different types of behaviorists, Watson was a radical behaviorist who believes
that: explanation of behavior can’t be in terms of unobserved internal events
- Methodological behaviorism: behavior is used to index the cognitive or physiological
events taking place in the organism
Neobehaviorism
- Neobehaviorism resulted when behaviorism was combined with logical positivism
- Logical positivism: divides science into 2 parts, empirical and theoretical
- The observational terms refer to empirical events and the theoretical terms attempt to
explain what is observed
- Logical positivism it allowed theorizing without sacrificing objectivity
- All neobehaviorists believe that:
o If theory is used, it must be used in ways demanded by logical positivism
o All theoretical terms must be operationally defined
o Nonhuman animals should be used as research subjects because relevant variables
are easier to control & results from nonhumans can be generalized to humans
o The learning process is of prime importance which organisms use to adjust to
changing environments
Criticism to Behaviorism:
- There’s evidence suggesting that human and non-human learning is so different that little if
anything can be learned about humans by studying nonhumans
- Today’s cognitive psychology runs counter to all brands of behaviorism (except Tolman)
- Some responses an animal makes are more easily modifiable than other’s and genetic
makeup determines that
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