In this video, we're going to talk about behaviorism which developed in the 1920s. Behaviorism is an approach to psychology that focuses on observable behavior. With behaviorism, we're going to see a lot of stimulus and response scenarios. You have a rat or a pigeon or a person in your lab and you present them with a stimulus, and then you record their observable behavioral response. That's kind of the basic idea here.
Now, to give you some historical context, during this time, despite the best efforts of Wilhelm Wundt and William James, psychology was not being taken very seriously as a science. Especially once Freud came along and started talking about the unconscious and dream analysis, and basically, all the other hard sciences were pointing and laughing at the time. Some psychologists didn't like that, and they wanted to be taken more seriously. The types of things that psychologists were studying, like thoughts, perceptions, and emotions, are challenging to assess in a scientific way. So, they thought, we need to focus on something we can apply the scientific method to, which is behavior.
This approach was huge. Behaviorism was a juggernaut. It dominated psychology from the 1920s right up through the 1950s, especially in the United States. It still has strong roots in several psychology concepts that we'll learn about later. The main research question for behaviorists was how stimuli and/or reinforcement shape behavior. Anytime you see terms like stimuli, reinforcement, and behavior, especially together, they're probably talking about behaviorism in some way. Now, we have a couple of important founders to discuss, and we are going to talk about the research of all three of these people in our section on learning. So, this is just a little sneak peek into what we will see later.
But we're going to begin with Ivan Pavlov. Now Pavlov was a Russian physiologist and he was studying digestion and salivation in dogs. One day, he discovered, or rumor has it his graduate student discovered, that dogs would salivate before their food came out. Pavlov thought that was interesting, so he began to test this by pairing the sound of a bell with the arrival of food. They would bring out the food and then they'd ring a little bell. Over time, dogs began to salivate at just the sound of the bell, even if they could not see or smell any food, which was very interesting. Pavlov realized he was studying a form of learning, which later came to be known as classical conditioning.
Now enter American psychologist John B. Watson. Watson had a lot of strong feelings. He did not like Freud. He did not like structuralism or functionalism. He thought the mind was not definable and that we needed to focus entirely on behavior. He loved Pavlov's research, thought it was super cool, and he began to systematically apply principles of classical conditioning to human behavior. Watson is credited with establishing behaviorism as a formal field of psychology.
A couple of decades later, another psychologist, B.F. Skinner, came onto the scene. Skinner liked behaviorism but thought it had some limitations because people don't just encounter stimuli and react all day long. People are autonomous. Sometimes, we act on our environment. So, he wanted to better understand how people select behaviors when we are in the presence of a stimulus or placed in different contexts. Thus, he introduced the idea of operant conditioning, a learning process where behaviors are modified by either rewards or punishments. By modified, I mean we can increase or decrease the frequency of the behavior or the likelihood of the behavior happening.
That was a lot of information, so just some broad strokes and big takeaways here. Behaviorism was a field that developed in the 1920s and remained prominent right up through the 1950s. It focuses on observable behavior. Our three main founders are Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner. Pavlov did research with bells and dogs, keep that in mind, and his research led to the discovery of classical conditioning. John B. Watson applied classical conditioning to human behavior and established behaviorism as a formal field. Later, B.F. Skinner introduced operant conditioning. Those are the big takeaways here.
Alright, that is behaviorism, and I will see you guys in our next video. Bye bye.
