Behaviourism
School · 1913-1960s, mainly the United States · Psychology, stage 2: Map the schools
Behaviourism was a deliberate break, announced by John B. Watson in 1913, with the whole project of studying consciousness. Watson argued that introspection had produced fifty years of irreconcilable reports and that psychology should confine itself to what can be observed from outside: stimuli going in, behaviour coming out. Pavlov's work on conditioned reflexes supplied the mechanism for learning by association, and Skinner later supplied the mechanism for learning from consequences, along with the laboratory apparatus and the cumulative-record data that made the field look like physics. Behaviourism dominated American psychology for four decades and produced durable applied techniques, and it lost its grip in the 1950s and 1960s when linguists and the new cognitive psychologists argued that phenomena like language acquisition could not be described without positing internal structure.
What it claims
- Psychology should study observable behaviour, not consciousness.
- Behaviour is learned through conditioning, by association and by consequence.
- The same learning laws apply across species, which is why rat and pigeon studies are informative about people.
- Explanations that appeal to unobservable inner states add nothing that the behavioural record does not already provide.
Key ideas
People
Sources
- Behaviorism Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It Classics in the History of Psychology, York UniversityWatson's 1913 manifesto, short enough to read in one sitting and the clearest statement of the programme.
- Behaviorism Wikipedia
