Lecture 9 - Behaviourism Flashcards
Who are the people of Russian Objective Psychology?
Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov 1829 – 1905
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov 1849 – 1936
Who is Ivan Mikhailovich?
Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov 1829 – 1905
- Studied with German physiologists including
Müller & von Helmholtz (von helmholtz is studying the speed of reduction) - Argued thoughts did not cause behaviour;
external stimulation did - Published Reflexes of the Brain (1863) evoking
inhibition as an explanation for how
behaviour could be both reflexive and
controlled - Human development as the establishment of
inhibitory control over reflexive behaviour
Inhibition
- he showed that stimuluating a frogs nerve csan cause the heart to go slower
- one of the things the nervous system does in inhibit things
- he proposes the idea of inhibition can explain behviour outside of things just being an instinct
- you can think about when you are a kid you sneexe and cough everywhere but when you get older
you inhibit this when it would be inappropriate
This is still not being called psychology this would be called physiolology at the time
Who is Ivan Petrovich Pavlov?
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov 1849 – 1936
- Studied physiology in St.
Petersburg under a successor of
Sechenov - Discovery of the conditioned
reflex - Relationship to psychology
- Punctual and perfectionistic at
work, but romantic and absent-
minded personally
he discovers the conditioned reflex
- he is a phsyioloigist and is working on digustion in living dogs
- these dohgs are given surgically channells so you can insert something and take
a sample of their fluids
- he gets the 1904 prize of physiolology
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov 1849 – 1936
* Unconditioned stimuli (US) and unconditioned reflexes (UR) – innate
* Conditioned stimuli (CS) and conditioned reflexes (CR)
* Extinction, spontaneous recovery
* Following Sechenev, believed that all
CNS activity was excitation or inhibition (in a cortical mosaic) and all
behaviour was caused by external
events
* Complex human behaviour as “signals
of signals”
Who are the people of comparative psychology?
Edward Lee Thorndike 1874-1949
Margaret Floy Washburn 1871-1939
Who is Thorndike?
Edward Lee Thorndike 1874-1949
he completes the first psychology dissertation on non human animals
- Studied with James (Harvard), Cattell (Columbia)
- First psychology dissertation on non-human animals
- Law of Effect (Found that overtime behaviours that were associated with the
outcome that the animal wanted were repeated and the behaviours that
were associated with the outcome the animal did not want die out )
Who is Margaret Floy Washburn?
Margaret Floy Washburn 1871-1939
- Titchener’s first doctoral candidate; 1st woman to
received a PhD psychology (1894) - Long career teaching at Vassar; APA president
- The Animal Mind (1908), attempting to infer
consciousness in animals by observing their sensory
discrimination, space perception, movements, etc. - Advanced a motor theory of consciousness
- Critical of behaviourism and supportive of Gestalt
psychology (focused on conscious experience)
she makes the argument for a motor theory of consciousness
- she argues that animals perceive the world in terms of their possible
aions, this evokes a arrary of possible actions
- she argues that conciousness is different actions weighted out to different degress
and the one that wins is the one that is performed
What were the early behaviourist rumblings?
In the early 1900s, some functionalists drifted
towards the “behavioristic position”
“Psychology may be most satisfactorily defined as the
science of human behavior. Man may be treated as
objectively as any physical phenomenon. He may be
regarded only with reference to what he does. Viewed in
this way the end of our science is to understand human
action.” – W. Pillsbury, APA president 1910
this big trend is visisbale to the 1910 APA
Who is John Watson?
John Watson 1878 - 1958
- Studied in Chicago with Dewey, Angell, and Jacques
Loeb, a physiologist who studied automatic behaviour
(such as plants orienting to the sun) - Cared for lab rats as paid student work
- Hired at Uchicago to teach animal and human
psychology using Titchener’s laboratory manuals; later
poached by Hopkins - Early work on maze learning in rats, tern migration
with Karl Lashley
(1904 – 1913)
* 1913 lecture series at Columbia, “Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It”
* Responses:
* Too extreme: Angell, Calkins, Cattell, Washburn, Woodworth
* A technology of behavior but not a science: Titchener
* Sympathetic, but concerned it could become “a restrictive orthodoxy” Thorndike
* Little Albert with Rosalie Rayner, 1920
* Expulsion from JHU following discovery of affair
* Movement into advertising
many of the figures we have talked about thus far respond to this
- Thorndike thinks this idea is too restrictive
Psychology as the Behaviorist views it is a purely objective
experimental branch of natural science.
Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.
Introspection forms no essential part of its methods […]
The Behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal
response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.
- John B. Watson, 1913 Psychological Review
Who is Edward Tolman?
Edward Tolman 1886 – 1956
* Argued that behaviour is purposive (goal-
directed) and shaped by cognitions
* Demonstration of cognitive maps and latent
learning in rats (1930s); both examples of
learning without reinforcement
argues that behaviour is goal directed and is supported by cognition
- does a lot of work with animals to show that there are these nternal cognitions
- shows that the animal does not produce the exact
sequence of beghaviours that were previously recinforced
- goes to the spacial location of the food -> shows that the animal has made a spacial representation of the food this would be a cognitive map
Who is Clark Hull?
Clark Hull 1884 – 1952
* Argued that behaviour follows testable,
quantifiable laws
* Intended to extend this even to social behaviour
* All learning requires reinforcement
Tolman disagrees quite a bit with Hull
- Hull produces complex equations that produce all behviour
- ppl can test these laws and see when they work and when they do not work
- does allow ppl to engage with the scientific process that is fruitfull for the field
- he in the 1930s argues that what they need to do is identify these laws that can layer
be connected to machines
Believed that thinking machines could be
constructed: “It should be a matter of no great difficulty to
construct parallel inanimate mechanisms, even from inorganic
materials, which will genuinely manifest the qualities of
intelligence, insight, and purpose, and which, insofar, will be truly
psychic.” (1930!)
Who is Burrhus Frederic Skinner?
Burrhus Frederic (BF) Skinner 1904-1990
- Undergraduate life
- Career at Minnesota, Indiana, Harvard
- Materialist: consciousness as a non-physical
entity does not exist - Believed that “mental events” are simply verbal
labels for certain bodily processes: - “What is felt or introspectively observed is not some
nonphysical world of consciousness, mind or mental
life but the observer’s own body” – Skinner, 1974
Majors in English and did not take psychology courses
- Trouble marker in his undergraduate
- is unsucessful at trying to be a writer and goes back to school to take psychology courses
- Studied operant behaviour, controlled by
consequences (= RS psychology) - Reinforcement and punishment
- Schedules of reinforcement
(fixed/variable, ratio/interval)
and how this changes the likelihood that an animal will produce that behaviour in the future
Comparison of Behaviourists
that behavior could be completely explained in terms of events external to the
organism.
For Watson, environmental events elicit either learned or unlearned responses; for Skinner, the environment selects behavior via reinforcement contingencies. For both, what goes on within the organism is relatively unimportant.
In contrast, Hull exempli
Who is Marian and Keller Breland?
Marian and Keller Breland
- Students of Skinner
(30s, 40s) - Applied operant
conditioning to
animal training - Animal Behavior
Enterprises 40s-50s - IQ Zoo 1955
They take his discoveries about operant conditioning in animals and take animal training
Discuss:
Where do you see the language and principles of behaviourism still
used today?
e.g., reinforce, punish, extinguish, shaping, habituation…
Skinner wrote a utopian novel based on his principles of operant
conditioning, Walden II. Critics argued that his ideas took away freedom and
dignity from human beings.
He argued back, in another book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, that:
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the
good is rewarded. There is no true freedom or dignity. Right now, our
reinforcers for good and bad behavior are chaotic and out of our control –
it’s a matter of having good or bad luck with your “choice” of parents,
teachers, peers, and other influences. Let’s instead take control, as a society,
and design our culture in such a way that good gets rewarded and bad gets
extinguished!
Some might argue that Behaviourism narrowed the field of psychology
in ways that limited its development for decades.
Others might argue that Behaviourism’s break with philosophy,
introspection, and consciousness as a focus of study, was why
psychology was able to progress as a science in the 20th century.
Which argument do you favour? What evidence supports your
position? What evidence might be applied against it?
