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In the United States, behaviorism became the dominant school of thought during the 1950s. Behaviorism is a discipline that was established in the early 20th century by John B. Watson, and embraced and extended by Edward Thorndike, Clark L. Hull, Edward C. Tolman, and later B.F. Skinner. Theories of learning emphasized the ways in which people might be predisposed, or conditioned, by their environments to behave in certain ways. Classical conditioning was an early behaviorist model. It posited that behavioral tendencies are determined by immediate associations between various environmental stimuli and the degree of pleasure or pain that follows. Behavioral patterns, then, were understood to consist of organisms' conditioned responses to the stimuli in their environment. The stimuli were held to exert influence in proportion to their prior repetition or to the previous intensity of their associated pain or pleasure. Much research consisted of laboratory-based animal experimentation, which was increasing in popularity as physiology grew more sophisticated. Skinner's behaviorism shared with its predecessors a philosophical inclination toward positivism and determinism.[28] He believed that the contents of the mind were not open to scientific scrutiny and that scientific psychology should emphasize the study of observable behavior. He focused on behavior–environment relations and analyzed overt and covert (i.e., private) behavior as a function of the organism interacting with its environment.[29] Behaviorists usually rejected or deemphasized dualistic explanations such as "mind" or "consciousness"; and, in lieu of probing an "unconscious mind" that underlies unawareness, they spoke of the "contingency-shaped behaviors" in which unawareness becomes outwardly manifest.[28] Notable incidents in the history of behaviorism are John B. Watson's Little Albert experiment which applied classical conditioning to the developing human child, and the clarification of the difference between classical conditioning and operant (or instrumental) conditioning, first by Miller and Kanorski and then by Skinner.[30][31] Skinner's version of behaviorism emphasized operant conditioning, through which behaviors are strengthened or weakened by their consequences. Linguist Noam Chomsky's critique of the behaviorist model of language acquisition is widely regarded as a key factor in the decline of behaviorism's prominence.[32] Martin Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes ("learned helplessness") that opposed the predictions of behaviorism.[33][34] But Skinner's behaviorism did not die, perhaps in part because it generated successful practical applications.[32] The fall of behaviorism as an overarching model in psychology, however, gave way to a new dominant paradigm: cognitive approaches.[35] |
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