Chapter 9: Behaviourism

1. Chapter 9: Behaviourism A History of Psychology (3rd Edition) John G. Benjafield

2. Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–1936) • Set out to become a priest • Abandoned idea after reading a Russian translation of Darwin • 1883: became a medical doctor • 1904: awarded Nobel Prize • Work on the physiology of the digestive system

3. Pavlov’s Animals • Early career: • Often took his animals home because of a lack of facilities at the university • Later career: • Constructed an Institute of Experimental Medicine in St Petersburg (1891)

4. Conditioned Reflexes • I.M. Sechenov (1829–1905): Cerebral Reflexes • Proposed that mental life should be understood entirely in physiological terms • Reflex is the appropriate unit of explanation • Pavlov dissociated himself from the psychology of the time

5. Conditioned Reflexes • Unconditioned reflexes • The same response always occurs in the presence of the same stimulus • Unconditioned Stimulus • Conditioned Stimulus • Conditioned Response • Unconditioned Response

6. Facts: Conditioning • A conditioned response is usually smaller in magnitude than an unconditioned one • Extinction: The CR will eventually cease if the CS is repeatedly presented alone • Spontaneous recovery: A previously extinguished CR may return after a period of rest

7. Speech • Higher-order conditioning: A second CS is paired with a CS that has already been established • Primary signalling system: consists largely of sensory stimuli • Secondary signalling system: consists largely of words • Words name primary signals

8. Temperaments and Psychopathology • Fundamental cortical processes: • Excitation • Inhibition • Temperaments arranged on a scale: • Choleric (extremely excitatory) • Sanguine • Phlegmatic • Melancholic (extremely inhibitory)

9. Vivisection and Anti-vivisectionism • Vivisection: the dissection of live animals • Anti-vivisectionism: the movement against the use of live animals in research

10. Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857–1927) • Reflexology: attempt to explain all behaviour, from the individual to the social, in terms of the reflex concept • Developed a technique for studying associated motor reflexes in both dogs and humans

11. John B. Watson (1878–1958) • 1899: graduated from Furman University • Graduate student at University of Chicago • Impressed by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924) • 1903: doctoral dissertation in animal psychology • 1908: Faculty at Johns Hopkins University

12. ‘Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It’ • Published in 1913 • Challenged psychologists to change virtually every aspect of their discipline: • Not a study of consciousness • Study human behaviour in same way as animal behaviour

13. Habits • Behaviorism (1939): humans are unique because of the variety of habits they can form through conditioning 1. Visceral (emotional) habits 2. Manual habits 3. Laryngeal (verbal) habits

14. Emotional Habits • Can only study emotion via very young children • Innate emotional responses: fear, rage, love • Little Albert study • Produced conditioned emotional reactions in an 11-month-old infant

15. Manual Habits = the entire range of muscular responses • Manual habits form through repetition • Formation permits smooth transition from one situation to the next • Watson advocated distributed practice to acquire skills (vs. massed practice)

16. Verbal Habits • Thought same as internal speech • Verbal habits constitute thinking • Speech is a serially-ordered behaviour

17. Watson’s Second Career • Following second marriage (to Rosalie Rayner), Watson worked for: • J. Walter Thompson advertising agency • William Esty & Co. • Watson transferred principles of conditioning to advertising

18. Karl S. Lashley (1890–1958) • Undergraduate at University of West Virginia • PhD at Johns Hopkins • Under Herbert S. Jenings • Postdoctoral studies with Watson

19. Cortical Localization of Function • 1916: Lashley studied with Shepherd Ivory Franz • Ablation: technique by which parts of the cortex are destroyed and the results observed • Studied the effects of ablation on the frontal lobes in rats • 1917: moved to University of Minnesota

20. Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence • Law of mass action: learning and memory depend on the total mass of brain tissue remaining • Law of equipotentiality: within limits, any part of an area can do the job of any other part of that area

21. The Problem of Serial Order in Behaviour • Criticized Watson’s associative chain theory • Priming of responses • Spoonerisms

22. B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) • ‘. . . behaviour which seemed to be the product of mental activiy could be explained in other ways.’ • Consciousness = a form of behaviour

23. The Behavior of Organisms • Published in 1938 • Respondent behaviour: elicited by a known stimulus • Operant behaviour: no known eliciting stimulus • Studied by means of a Skinner box

24. The Behavior of Organisms • Behaviour regulated by Three-term Contingencies: • Environment provides a stimulus situation • Which elicits a response • Which is followed by a reinforcing stimulus • Reward or punishment • Negative reinforcement ≠ punishment

25. A Case History in Scientific Method • Published in 1956 • Discussed the ways in which Skinner made discoveries • Applied the principles of his psychology to his own creativity • Ex. ‘When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it’ • Ex. ‘Apparatuses sometimes break down’

26. The ‘Baby Tender’ • Air crib = ‘Baby tender’ • Built for his second daughter • Wrote about the innovation in the popular press • ‘Baby in a box’

27. Teaching Machines • Typical classroom: reinforcement only when the child does the work required to avoid punishment • Skinner suggested: reinforce students for each response in a sequence that gradually builds up

28. Skinner’s Utopian and Dystopian Views • Walden Two (1948) • Utopian novel of a community regulated by positive reinforcement • Received mixed reviews • Skinner increasingly discussed the dystopian features of modern life in the West • Dystopia: a society that is the opposite of a Utopia