Origin and History

The Behaviourist Approach (or learning theory, as it is sometimes called) was initiated by a group of psychologists who believed in the philosophy of empiricism, which argues that knowledge comes from the environment, via the senses, and is "written" on the new born, who is viewed as a 'tabula rasa, or blank slate, and the physical sciences, which emphasise scientific and objective methods of investigation.

John B. Watson (9th January 1878 - 25th September 1958) started the behaviourist movement in 1913 when he wrote and article entitled "Psychology as the Behaviourist view it", which set out its main principles and assumptions.  Drawing on earlier work by Ivan Pavlov(26th September 1849 - 27th February 1936), behaviourists such as John Watson, Edward Torndike (31st August 1874 - 9th August 1949) and B.F. Skinner (20th March - 18th August 1990), proceeded to develop theories of learning, such as clasical and operant conditioning, that they attempted to use to explain virtually all behaviour.

The Behaviourist Approach dominated experimental psychology until the late 1950's, when its assumptions and methods becam increasingly criticised by ethologists and cognitive psychologists.  The behaviourist theories have been modified to provide a more realistic explanations of how learning can occur, for example by psychologists such as Albert Bandura (4th December 1925 - 26th July 2021) with his Social Learning Theory, which argues that important cognitive processes occur between stimulus and response.

Assumptions

Behaviourists believed that the majority of behaviour is learned from the environment after birth, this approach takes the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate, and so psychology should investigate the laws and products of learning and to investigate how behaviour is determined by the environment, since we are the products of all our past learning experiences, freewill is an illusion.

Behaviourists believed that only observeable behaviour, not minds, should be studied if psychology is to be an objective science, since we cannot see into other people's minds, and if we ask them about their thoughts they may lie, not know, or just be mistaken.  Most learning theorists still adopt this approach.

Methods of Investigation

The scientific approach adopted by many behaviourists meant that they would use strict laboratory experiments, usually involving rats or pigeons.  Animals were usee because behaviourist believed that the laws of learning were universal; animals and humans only differed by the quantity of gray matter, not its quality; animals are practically and ethically more convenient to test.

Contributions to Psychology

The behaviourists' discoveries that the laws of learning were a universal feature of humans and animals, meant that they were applied to many aspects of animal and human behaviour, such as:

• Language acquisition e.g. the theory put forward by B.F. Skinner,
• Moral development e.g. conditioned emotional responses of guilt and conscience,
• Attraction e.g. Byrne and Clore's reinforcement affect model,
• Abnormality e.g. the classical conditining of phobias and their treatment,