Behavioral Psychology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Behavioral Psychology - Essay utilisationJohn B. Watson founded the school of appearanceal psychology in hopes that it would make psychology as academically consider as other sciences such as chemistry and physiology were. He moved outside from the introspective methods of psychology which were popular at the time, and moved towards a more scientific, observable approach. He believed that the behavior of humans and animals were comparable, and therefore, near behavioral experiments used animals such as rats as subjects and then generalized the findings to humans. Watson believed that all behavior could be explained by what was called classical conditioning (Watson, 1999). The idea behind classical conditioning is that one could pair a stimulus that causes a response or reflex with an unrelated stimulus. Over time, the unrelated stimulus wholly should cause the response or reflex. An example of this would the famous experiment conducted by Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov noticed that when h e site food come forward for his dogs, they would salivate. He then paired the setting out of food with ringing a bell. Over time, the dogs salivated to the ringing bell alone, without the setting out of food. ... While he agreed that the behaviors of animals and humans argon comparable and that psychology should focus of observable behavior, mule driver did believe that there is such thing as the mind. The only reason he chose to study observations over the mind is because observations can be objectively thrifty in a scientific way whereas the mind cannot (Boeree, 2006). Skinner also differs from Watson in that he believes that changes in behavior can be attributed to reinforcers, whereas Watson attributes change in behavior to associations between events. Skinner referred to this theory of behavior as operant conditioning which maintains that the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms tendency to bear the behavior in th e future (Boeree, 2006, p. 2). Depending on the type of reinforcer, the likelihood of the behavior can be increase or decreased. For example, if a child is given praise every time he says please, he will likely continue to say please. This is an example of positive reinforcement, which increases the likelihood of a behavior. At the same time, punishment decreases the likelihood of a behavior. For example, if a child is put in time out every time he pushes his sister, then he should begin to push his sister less and less. Skinner also believed that once a reinforcer is taken away, then the behavior should occur less and less. This stamp led Skinner to believe that there was no such thing as free will. He explained that people behave badly because that behavior is rewarded in some way and that people behave comfortably because that behavior is rewarded in some way. On the other hand, Edward C. Tolman had a different set of views than Watson and Skinner. While Tolman shied away