Historical Context Of Behaviourism

Behaviourism

Historical Context

It began in 1913 with John Broadus Watson, when he wrote an article entitled ‘Psychology as the behaviourist views it’ which set out the main principles. It became as a reaction to Wundt. This approach influenced with Pavlov and developed with Thorndike and Skinner. It focuses on behaviour rather than mind. To understand people they didn’t look inside their minds, they consider the role of environmental influence on behaviour.

Key Assumptions

All behaviour is learned and all behaviour could be unlearned as well by breaking the association. Psychology is a science because it’s empirical and can be putted evidence towards it. To explain behaviour we would need to focus on how it’s learned. Responses would be

For this research the aims was to see if it was possible to induce a fear of a previously neutral stimulus through classical conditioning, seeing if the fear could be transferred to other similar objects and looking at what effect time has on the fear of response. The research was made on Little Albert which was a child (11 months) who didn’t have any fears or abnormalities. He was tested on his reactions to various stimuli. He was shown a rat and other similar objects, he showed no fear. Then he was shown the same similar objects with a hammer noise in the background. This was repeated seven times which was once a week. Each time Little Albert was in tears. At the same time he generalized his response with the similar objects such as the family dog, cotton wool or his father’s Christmas

Freud thought about the human process through psychosexual stages (5) and named them each with a particular characteristic behaviour. Such as; Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency and Genital stages. In this approach unconscious is the key determine of how humans behave. At the same time our childhood experiences are important to determine our personality when we reach adulthood.

Anxiety is the key concept of Freud’s personality profile. Defence mechanisms are psychological strategies that are unconsciously used to protect a person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings. https://www.simplypsychology.org/defense-mechanisms.html Key assumptions

All our behaviour has a cause, and the major causes have their origin in the unconscious. We are not aware of our conscious. Another key point in this approach is that our mind is like an iceberg that there are different levels of consciousness. According to Freud the mind has 3 levels of awareness; The conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious mind. The conscious is the small amount of mental activity we know about. Such as what we are thinking right now. The Preconscious is the information is just below the surface of awareness, things we could be aware of if we wanted. The unconscious is the information that we are unaware of, that are