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

Chapter 9: Behaviourism

A History of Psychology

(3rd Edition)

John G. Benjafield

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

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)

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

Conditioned Reflexes

• Unconditioned reflexes– The same response always occurs in the

presence of the same stimulus

• Unconditioned Stimulus

• Conditioned Stimulus

• Conditioned Response

• Unconditioned Response

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

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

Temperaments and Psychopathology

• Fundamental cortical processes: – Excitation– Inhibition

• Temperaments arranged on a scale:– Choleric (extremely excitatory)– Sanguine– Phlegmatic– Melancholic (extremely inhibitory)

Vivisection and Anti-vivisectionism

• Vivisection: the dissection of live animals

• Anti-vivisectionism: the movement against the use of live animals in research

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

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

‘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

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

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

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)

Verbal Habits

• Thought same as internal speech

• Verbal habits constitute thinking

• Speech is a serially-ordered behaviour

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

Karl S. Lashley (1890–1958)

• Undergraduate at University of West Virginia

• PhD at Johns Hopkins– Under Herbert S. Jenings

• Postdoctoral studies with Watson

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

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

The Problem of Serial Order in Behaviour

• Criticized Watson’s associative chain theory– Priming of responses– Spoonerisms

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

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

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

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’

The ‘Baby Tender’

• Air crib = ‘Baby tender’

• Built for his second daughter

• Wrote about the innovation in the popular press– ‘Baby in a box’

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

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