Task 6

Question 1

What was the Zeitgeist in the US in the beginning of the 20th century?

Answer 1

• Eugenics: fate of a nation can be improved by selective breeding
• Importance of the environment: human characteristics also depend on the environment
• Mistrust of intellectualism: nation of common-sense businessmen

Question 2

How did Psychology try to win over the public in the US ?

Answer 2

• Phrenology
• Mesmerism
• Spritualism
• Informing the public about the ‘new psychology’

Question 3

Who was George Romanes?

Answer 3

• combined observations of behavior with interference if the animal’s captive -> these capacities were believed to be the result of mind that resembled that of humans
• antropomorphic interpretation

Question 4

What is an antropomorphic interpretation?

Answer 4

• interpreting behavior of non-human living creatures by attributing human motives and human-like intelligence to them

Question 5

Who was Edward Lee Thorndike and what was his research method?

Answer 5

• Harward graduate
  1. he did not rely on anecdotal evidence, but careful observation on animals put in controlled environments
  2. he based his conclusions on the animal’s behavior, not on what supposedly went on in their minds

Question 6

What are important terms in regards to Thorndike?

Answer 6

• law of effect
• instrumental conditioning
• comparative psychology

Question 7

What is the law of effect?

Answer 7

Behavioral law introduced by Thorndike to refer to the fact that behaviors followed by positive consequences are strengthened and more likely to be repeated

Question 8

What is instrumental conditioning?

Answer 8

Name introduced by Thorndike to refer to learning on the basis of the law of effect

Question 9

What is comparative psychology?

Answer 9

Study of behavior of animals, usually with the intention to shed light on human functioning within the framework of the evolutionary theory

Question 10

Who is Ivan Pavlov and what did he do?

Answer 10

Russian physiologist who studied the digestive system

- classical conditioning: form of learning in which association is made between two events in the environment

Question 11

What is the Behaviorist Manifesto and who published it?

Answer 11

• article by Watson in 1913; which became the beginning of behaviorism

Question 12

What is Behaviorism?

Answer 12

• movement in psychology arguing that observable behavior is most important aspect of human functioning to be understood; denies to various extents the relevance of information processing going on in the mind

Question 13

What are the Behaviorist Manifest’s main points?

Answer 13

• Transition from introspection in one’s own mind to the observation of other’s behavior -> evolutionary theory impact (animals’ behavior depends on survival not thinking) & introspection turned out to be very counter intuitive
• in order to become a real science, psychology had to focus on observable behavior

Question 14

What is positivism?

Answer 14

Movement which saw science as the motor of progress
- led by authors who used scientific achievements to try to convince society that scientific knowledge was superior to humanist knowledge

Question 15

What were the positivist movement’s three main messages?

Answer 15

1. Because science is based on observation and experimentation, its findings are always true
2. Scientific theories are summaries of the empirical finding. Therefore, they are always true as well-
3. Because scientific knowledge is infallible, it should be the motor of all progress.

Question 16

What is the philosophy of scienceß

Answer 16

Branch of philosophy that studies the foundations of scientific research, to better understand the position of scientific research relative to other forms of information acquisition and generation

Question 17

What are the behaviorist three requirements of operational definitions?

Answer 17

1. you have to be able to represent the elements of a mathematical law as numbers
2. A distinction had to be made between independent and dependent variables
3. The need for verification - principle that up to the 1950s formed the core of the scientific method

Question 18

What is radical behaviorism?

Answer 18

Strong version of behaviorism, defended by Skinner, which denies the relevance of information processing in the mind and holds that all human behavior can be understood on the basis of S-R associations

Question 19

What was B. F. Skinner’s view?

Answer 19

• denied the relevance of information processing in the mind, all that happened was the direct activation of responses on the basis of stimulus input.
• > skinner box: he thought that animals acquire knowledge by mental cues that are reinforced through rewards

Question 20

Who was Edward C. Tolman?

Answer 20

Behaviorist, who disagreed with Skinner’s radical views; according to him operant conditioning could not be understood in simple S-R terms and he devised several experiments to show this

Question 21

What is latent learning?

Answer 21

The acquisition of knowledge that is not demonstrated in observable learning
-> rat experiment by Blodgett

Question 22

What is purposive behaviorism?

Answer 22

Version of behaviorism defended by Tolman, which saw behaviorism as goal-related; agreed with other behaviorists that psychology should be based on observable behavior

Question 23

What were the views of behaviorists on psychology?

Answer 23

• psychology has failed to become natural science, due to introspection and study of mental states
• psychology has been preoccupied with questions that are not open to experimentation
• psychology to a behaviorist is purely an objective and experimental branch of natural science
• psychology has to ignore more complex forms of behavior until behaviorist methods become more developed

Question 24

How was the understanding of animal psychology before Throndike’s thesis?

Answer 24

George Romanes: attempted to clarify nature of animal intelligence through anecdotal and anthropomorphic means
Lloyd Morgan: criticized anecdotal tradition and distinguished between two types of psychology (inductive&introspective and observational&objective)

Question 25

What were throndike’s explanations that replaced anthropomorphism?

Answer 25

1. Mechanomorphism: exclusive attribution of mechanistic properties to psychological phenomena
2. Theriomorphis,: attribution of qualities of nonhuman animal to human beings

Question 26

What is Vivisection and who introduced it?

Answer 26

• Watson

- practice of performing operations on live animals for purpose of experimentation or scientific research