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PSYC 312 History > Chapter 8: Behaviourism > Flashcards

Chapter 8: Behaviourism Flashcards

1
Q

what did Watson give a talk about at Columbia

A
  • dissatisfied with progress in psychology
  • conceptual and methodological complaints
  • didn’t like continued focus on mental states –> thought they were elusive to study
  • disagreed with method of introspection
  • thought science of psychology had failed –> initiated the behaviourism revolution
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2
Q

why was animal research not an option in structuralism

A
  • structuralism relied on introspection
  • only used in functional psychology (e.g. adapting to changing environments)
  • also good to use in behaviourism
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3
Q

what is comparative psychology

A

subfield of animal psychology –> study nonhuman animal behaviour to generalize the findings to human behaviour

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4
Q

what were the conditions for comparative psychology

A
  • only possible if there is some tie between humans and these other animals
  • need some evidence of common ancestry
  • most views beforehand had tried to keep humans separate from other animals
  • Darwinian theory demonstrated morphological and behavioural ties between humans and rest of animal kingdom –> made humans seem somewhat less significant
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5
Q

describe Romanes’s “introspection by analogy”

A
  • started from what was known subjectively of the operations of his own mind and activities which are prompted by these
  • infer observable activities of other organisms the mental operations that underlie them
  • more danger in the analogy between humans and lower species (but mammals are closer to humans)
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6
Q

describe Morgan’s response to Romanes’s work

A
  • thought attributing human mental processes (e.g. reasoning) to animals lower in phylogenetic scale was unwarranted
  • Morgan’s canon –> higher mental processes should not be invoked if the beahviour can be explained adequately by a lower mental process
  • Watson & other behaviourists used Watson’s canon as a basis for rejecting psychological explanations that appealed to mental states like consciousness
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7
Q

what kind of methods did Morgan use

A
  • did not rule out introspection by analogy
  • limited use of introspection to only mammals
  • stressed importance of empirical observations (under controlled conditions)
  • simple experiments with animals in natural setting (i.e. manipulated environment to see how animals responded)
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8
Q

describe the work of Thorndike

A
  • animal research in baby chicks and cats
  • e.g. tested cat’s problem solving abilities
  • found animals learn in a trial-and-error fashion –> rejected idea of reasoning being involved
  • successful responses learned gradually, unsuccessful responses eliminated
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9
Q

law of effect/law of reinforcement

A
  • Thorndike
  • any act which produces satisfaction becomes associated with that situation
  • when the situation recurs, the act is more likely than before to recur also
  • also called “instrumental learning”
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10
Q

classical/Pavlovian conditioning

A

dogs start salivating before food is present –> elicited by stimuli that had been paired with food previously

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11
Q

what are the 8 parts of Pavlovian conditioning

A
  • acquisition
  • extinction
  • spontaneous recovery
  • generalization
  • discrimination
  • conditioned inhibition
  • conditioned emotional reactions
  • higher-order conditioning
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12
Q

what did Watson think the goal of psychology was

A

prediction and control of behaviour

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13
Q

why did Watson oppose the study of consciousness through introspection

A

thought introspection allowed so much personal bias into the observational process –> thought we had to measure physiological manifestations to get objective truth

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14
Q

what were some methods that Watson approved of

A

reaction time, experimental studies on memory, some psychological tests (but not mental tests), puzzle boxes by Thorndike

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15
Q

what was Watson’s most famous study

A
  • conditioned emotions study (little albert)
  • made him fear a white rat and any other qualities that resembled it (i.e. white fur) by pairing it with an aversive sound
  • was never deconditioned
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16
Q

what three emotions did Watson think humans were born with

A
  • fear
  • rage
  • love
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17
Q

to what fields did Watson try to apply his behaviourist psychology to

A
  • advertising
  • child psychology –> thought it was good to raise children by displaying minimal affection (induced self-reliance and independence)
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18
Q

why was Watson’s contribution to behaviourism important

A
  • he crystallized scattered ideas of his predecessors into systematic formulation
  • had drive and personality to sell the idea
  • slowly spread and dominated American psychology
  • called for science capable of prediction and control
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19
Q

what is neobehaviourism

A
  • 1930s-70s
  • interested in theory, focused on learning and motivation
  • argued over role of reinforcement on learning
  • used animals (rats)
20
Q

who were the three most influential neobehaviourists

A

Tolman, Hull and Skinner

21
Q

describe Tolman’s theory on behaviourism

A
  • behaviour is purposive –> directed towards some goal
  • purpose is determined by cognitions
  • objected to Hull that cognitive processes could not explain behaviour –> thought rats had cognitive maps
22
Q

describe Tolman’s idea of cognitive maps

A

spatial representations of the world that allow them to function effectively –> with experience, animal builds up expectancies about environment

23
Q

intervening variables (Tolman)

A
  • processes within the organism that intervened between stimulus and response
  • similar to Woodworth’s S-O-R formulation
  • cognitions were examples of these variables
24
Q

describe some of Tolman’s most important contributions to psychology

A
  • distinction between learning and performance
  • demonstration of latent learning
  • distinction between response and place learners
  • cognitive maps
25
Q

describe Tolman’s research on the learning-performance distinction

A
  • learning could not be observed but could be inferred from measures of performance
  • learning sets upper limit on performance
  • performance = behaviour
  • learning = internal state
  • had to measure learning under conditions where maximal performance could be achieved
26
Q

describe Tolman’s beliefs about the role of reinforcement in learning

A
  • did not believe reinforcement was necessary to learn
  • latent learning supported this position
  • e.g. rats would learn something about the maze even without a food reward being given
27
Q

describe Tolman’s study with rats showing evidence for cognitive maps

A
  • plus shaped maze
  • one group always turned right to get food (response learners), other group was always fed in the same place (place learners)
  • place learners learned the maze faster than response learners
28
Q

why were Tolman’s theories initially rejected and overruled

A

the movement was to completely remove the idea of cognition from behaviourism –> theories would re-emerge when ideas of consciousness were renewed

29
Q

what was Hull’s work on

A
  • early work on aptitude testing and hypnosis
  • theory of behaviour made him most cited psychologist of all time
30
Q

Hypothetico-deductive method (Hull)

A
  • began by stating a series of postulates from which one could derive testable hypotheses
  • hypotheses would be tested
  • support of hypothesis = support of postulate
31
Q

law of primary reinforcement (Hull)

A
  • any act which in a given situation produces satisfaction becomes associated with that situation
  • recurrence of this situation = act is more likely to recur also
32
Q

what made Hull’s system different from Tolman’s

A
  • reinforcement was a key concept of Hull’s theory
  • learning does not occur without reinforcement
  • reinforcement operates by means of drive reduction (drives such as hunger, sex and sleep)
  • reduction of drives is reinforcing –> actions lead to drive reduction are likely to be repeated
33
Q

habit strength (Hull)

A
  • strength of association between stimulus and response (which reinforcement is key to)
  • strength of learning
34
Q

what were the strengths of Hull’s theory

A
  • theory that generates testable hypotheses
  • created industry of experimental psychology
35
Q

describe the nature of Skinner’s theory

A
  • used deductive methods to build mathematical science of psychology
  • carried Watson’s goals of prediction and control to higher levels
  • called psychology “experimental analysis of behaviour”
  • emphasized study of learning in animals
36
Q

operant conditioning (Skinner)

A
  • form of instrumental learning
  • proposed an R-S psychology (rather than S-R)
  • focused on how consequences affect behaviour
  • interested in stimulus events that followed a behaviour
  • reinforcers = more behaviour
  • punishers = less behaviour
37
Q

why didn’t Skinners work fit the dominant paradigm for psychological science at the time

A
  • did many studies with one single animal
  • no statistical analyses
  • difficult to get work published for this
38
Q

continuous reinforcement (Skinner)

A
  • every response that was supposed to be reinforced was reinforced
  • this rarely happens in the real world
39
Q

partial reinforcement (Skinner)

A
  • reinforcement occurring on an intermittent basis
  • produced behaviour that was more resistant to extinction than those that had been continuously reinforced –> “partial reinforcement effect”
40
Q

what were some of the partial reinforcement patterns Skinner found

A

ratio schedules, interval schedules –> number of responses and intervals could be fixed or variable

41
Q

what was the main aim of Skinner’s work

A

to change behaviour –> advocated for minimal use of punishment because of its undesirable effects

42
Q

what were some of the phenomena Skinner studied

A

shaping, acquisition, extinction, discrimination, generalization, schedules of reinforcement, reinforcement delay, punishment, negative versus positive reinforcement, partial reinforcement effect, persistence

43
Q

how did Skinner apply his work to behavioural technology

A
  • missile guidance system using pigeons in WWII
  • designed crib for infants (baby tender)
  • teaching machines & programmed learning
  • designing classrooms, working with people with intellectual disabilities, designing prison systems, treating psychological disorders, use of punishment in society, etc.
44
Q

what did Skinner write about freedom

A
  • much of people’s lives are controlled by other forces not of their own choosing
  • freedom was largely an illusion
  • not well received
  • people cannot gain control of lives until they pay attention to the controls in place and decide what to do about them
45
Q

what were the main critiques of Skinner’s work

A
  • unwillingness to look inside the animal (“black box”)
  • found system was too narrow –> avoided mental processes
46
Q

what was Behaviourism’s contribution to psychology

A
  • some argue it limited the development of psychology and closed off important areas for research
  • others say it propagated psychology’s success as a science –> broke it off from philosophy
  • strengthened role of physiological processes in psychological explanations
  • expanded psychological methods
  • made ties between human & animal behaviour more evident
  • tried to improve humanity and make a better world
  • cognitive psychology used many tenets of behaviourism in establishing its science

PSYC 312 History (9 decks)

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