Behaviourism: History, Principles &amp Essay Example

making Pavlov more popularized.John Watson began his career by being one of the first ethologists in the U.S, by studying and explaining the behaviour of animals in its natural environment. It was through his studies of animals that led Watson to shift his studies to humans. In 1908, Watson had voiced out his thoughts on behaviorism, which fell on highly criticizing ears leading him to silence for several years. It was only during a lecture in 1913, when Watson’s manifesto, “Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It” was said to be the formal founding of behaviourism quoting:

Psychology as the behaviourist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependant upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms on consciousness. (p. 158) Watson’s objective as we saw, fully dismissed the role of consciousness and it’s effect on behaviour. He further went on to state that psychology should only use objective observational data and not introspective data, which he thought unreliable (O’Neil, 1995).

As with the Russian psychologists, Watson agreed that consciousness does not cause behaviour. It was in 1919, that Watson used Pavlov’s stimulus and response connection to explain human behaviour and again agreeing that its connection is physiological and mechanical (O’Neil, 1995).

In Watsonian behaviourism, there were four types of behaviours, which are explicit learned behaviour (e.g. talking), implicit learned behaviour (e.g. increase heart rate upon an exam), explicit unlearned behaviour (e.g. blinking) and finally implicit unlearned behaviour (e.g.

circulatory changes). According to Watson, everything we did fell into one of these categories.When looking at instincts in our behaviour, Watson simply denied its existence explaining that learned behaviour would substitute it. Watson made a famous statement saying that he could raise a child to be anything if he had full control of the environment (Hergenhahn, 2009). This powerful statement concluded that it was experience and not inheritance that makes people who they are.

The most controversial aspects of behaviourism would concern learning as well as thinking and language, which he simply deemed it both as a form of behaviour. Watson described thinking as sub vocal speech and speech or language as a type of overt behaviour. Watson explained learning by again using the context of stimuli and response explaining that the correct response will occur more frequent and hence will be the final response of learning for the individual or organism (Hergenhahn, 2009).

Furthermore, Watson expressed that there were only three types of emotions: fear, rage and love. He again used his theory of stimulus and response connections, stating that these feelings were learnt through external stimuli that elicit them. Feelings and sensations were merely not important to him. Watson demonstrated this by his highly popularized and criticized experiment in conditioning fear in the little Albert experiment.

According to Watson (1913), he believed that psychology has failed significantly as an experimental discipline. He concluded that psychology must discard all references to consciousness believing that we could only study observed behaviour and not the measurable behaviour in an individual’s mind. Again, making behaviour and not consciousness the objective point of psychology.