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Summary 2.3 History and Methods of Psychology: Problem 4
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Summary of the literature, videos, tutorials, and exercises for problem 4 of course 2.3 History and Methods of Psychology.
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PROBLEM 4:Learning Goals
• What was revolutionary about Gestalt and Behaviourism?
• What is the conflict between Gestalt and Behaviourism and the history behind these two?
• Don’t focus on perceptual elements
• How did the cognitive revolution come to pass?
BEHAVIOURISM
• Behaviourism: theory of learning which states all behaviours are learned through interaction
with the environment through conditioning.
o behaviour is simply a response to environmental stimuli
• May be seen as extreme form of functionalism
John B. Watson:
• Did not believe definition of psychology was the science of mind
o Positivist view of science à only capable of studying overt, visible, measurable
phenomena
§ consciousness could not be investigated scientifically
o experimental psychology was amateur à poor standards of
conceptual/methodological rigour
o too human centred
o hereditarian bias
o believed psychology should be viewed as purely objective experimental branch of
natural science
o goal of science was predict and understand behaviour
• thinking could be understood as “subvocal speech”
• we can only study observable phenomena: feelings, emotions, mental images, fantasies are
beyond our concern
• experimented on little albert à conditioning fear
• extreme environmentalism à environment affects behaviour
The Varieties of Behaviourism
• stimulus response relationship
, • E.C. Tolman:
à stimulus organism response à intervening variables/hypothetical constructs:
internal factors
à influenced by Gestalts
à concerned with developing behaviourism which could handle purposiveness and
evade the over-reductionist character of Watsons original version
à S-R model: thinking about Gestalt approach, more holistic response (added
organism so it was more broad) which countered the biggest criticism of
behaviourism
à concluded that organisms acquired a cognitive map of their surroundings
merely by moving around it = latent learning
• Karl Lashley:
à claimed that brain functioning was only localised in very broad terms, large tracts
of the brain showing “equipotentiality” (used to serve many functions and assume
those of the part which have been moved) à lead the view to merge with other views
• G.H. Mead:
à social behaviourism: concerned with the social construction of the self
à differed from Watson’s ideas on what psychology should be
• Skinner:
à atheoretical, concerned with empirically studying shaping of behaviour by
reinforcement contingencies
à no attention on internal events and no elaborate theory construction
à rat testing
• Hull:
à attempt at producing a “hypothetico-deductive” theory with postulates, theorems
and quantification
How people viewed behaviourism: looked at it as conceptual framework not theory
• methodological practices
The Decline Of Behaviourism
1. The organisation of behaviour problem
• Complex behaviour involves associatively conditioning such successive component item to
its predecessor
o Apparent that this simply can’t explain higher-order human behaviours (piano
playing, language learning)
• Cognitive attack boosted by the fact that in designing computers to perform complex actions,
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