Behaviorism

Behaviorism is a philosophy and conceptual framework for the study of behavior. It advocates the use of a natural science approach to establish general laws and principles that explain the causes of behavior—its acquisition, maintenance, and change—without reference to mental events or internal psychological processes. These principles emphasize relationships between behavior and the physical and social environment, particularly the contingencies of reinforcement that control the occurrence, strength, and choice of behaviors.

Behaviorism developed primarily in the United States, originally in opposition to the philosophy of “introspection” as a technique for investigating mental processes (thoughts, feelings, and perceptions). Behaviorists disagreed with both the subject matter of introspection (subjective experience and internal states) and the questionable reliability and validity of the technique itself (critically examining one's own mental processes by “looking inward”). John B. Watson coined the term “behaviorism” in 1913 and developed its earliest form: classical or “S-R” behaviorism, which sought to explain behavioral events in terms of a publicly observable antecedent stimulus (S) that elicited a publicly observable response (R). As this statement suggests, Watson believed that psychology should concern itself solely with publicly observable behavior, without reference to private, mental events, a philosophical position now called “methodological behaviorism.”

In the 1930s, B. F. Skinner launched a new form of behaviorism, “radical behaviorism,” which became the primary influence on modern behaviorism in the psychological and social sciences. Unlike methodological behaviorism, radical behaviorism advocates the analysis of all forms of behavior, both public and private, as long as they are observable in some way. Although radical behaviorists accept that some behavioral phenomena are private, they believe they can be analyzed and explained by the same principles as public behaviors. In contrast to the S-R model of classical behaviorism, which assumed that behaviors are produced by stimuli in a simple, associationistic sort of chain, Skinner argued that most behaviors are produced by more complex relationships with the external environment. These relationships include not only stimuli that precede behaviors but also, more important, stimulus consequences that follow them and alter the probability of their occurrence in the future. Modern behaviorism is largely the legacy of Skinner, whose work included treatises on the philosophy of behavior analysis, numerous scientific works documenting his experimental analyses of behavior, and practical (and utopian) applications of behaviorism. Most influential was his extensive research on operant conditioning, showing how the consequences of behaviors (in common parlance, the “rewards” and “punishments” that follow behaviors) systematically modify their subsequent performance.

While key principles of behaviorism were originally established in research on animals (particularly Skinner's well-known work with pigeons), extensive work has also been conducted on human behavior, both individual and social. The movement to more complex forms of human behavior led to the spread of behaviorism's influence beyond psychology, to the social sciences. The purest expression of behaviorism's influence on the social sciences is behavioral sociology, a perspective that was most active during the 1960s and 1970s. Behaviorism was also a strong influence on the development of the social exchange tradition in sociology, particularly the social exchange theories of George Homans and Richard Emerson.

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