Behaviorism

History

Behaviorism developed more than 100 years ago when the field of psychology was in its infancy. Early psychology emphasized the examination of consciousness and other mental states through introspection, a process by which an individual reflected on, or “observed,” their own internal thoughts, images, and feelings. Thus, in some ways, this early psychology was not well differentiated from the field of philosophy. The lack of clearly specified subject matter and lack of well-defined and rigorous research methods in psychology resulted in a search for a more precise science.

John B. Watson responded to this situation by describing a new direction for the field of psychology. First, Watson argued that states of mind such as consciousness and mental processes did not [Page 88]have any explanatory or predictive value for behavior and that psychology would need to rely on observable behavior as a source of data for explanation and prediction. Second, he argued that the methods of psychology ought to be modeled after those in the physical sciences.

Watson shifted the focus of psychology from the attempt to describe internal states to the attempt to describe the relationship between environmental stimuli and responses. From this view, environmental stimuli serve as the independent variable and responses serve as the dependent variable. Learning occurs when an organism acquires new stimulus–response relationships. The goal of psychology, according to Watson, should be to understand (i.e., predict and control) behavior through a careful analysis of stimulus and response relationships.

Now that the purpose of psychology had been established, the next step was to define its methodology. To do this, the field of psychology turned to the research methods of physiology, most notably to the methods of the Russian researcher Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov was studying digestive processes in dogs. He noted, for example, that dogs would salivate (i.e., the response) in the presence of food (i.e., the stimulus) and that he could transfer this salivating response to another stimulus such as a bell by pairing the presentation of the food with the sound of the bell for several trials. Over time, the sound of the bell could independently elicit the salivating response from the dogs.

Pavlov and others were interested in examining basic learning processes that involved involuntary or reflexive behavior. This area of psychology is called classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is a process by which new stimuli can acquire the properties of existing stimuli through pairing. The early research in classical conditioning contributed to the development of behaviorism in at least two ways. First, it created and refined techniques that facilitated the precise measurement of both independent (i.e., environmental stimuli) and dependent (i.e., reflexive behavior) variables related to the behavior of an organism. Second, it laid the groundwork for a scientific and systematic investigation of the variables that influence behavior.

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