Thabani Behaviourism

Lisa-April Naidoo 1155538

Thabani is a third year student who has been experiencing depression and a feeling of emptiness if you are a Behaviourist like Pavlov, Skinner, and Watson we could deduce that the environment he is in affects the way he responds to different stimuli. They believe that they can only study what they observe. Biological psychologists like Olds and Sperry claim that environment has nothing to with the way we respond to stimuli but with the way the body is structured. Although both perspectives are flawed this essay aims to use the behavioural and biological schools of thought in order to better understand Thabani.

Watson believed that behaviourism is the only logical version of functionalism (Watson J.B 1913). Watson

We can see this through the fact that Thabani walks ten kilometres to university. This could be because Thabani comes from a relatively rural area so did not travel by motor vehicle and is afraid to travel by motor vehicle which leaves him with less time to study and makes him tired and demotivates Thabani further. If we look at skinners idea of learning by consequence we could say that Thabani has forgotten the consequences of not working hard enough so his grades are slipping. Thabani describes being his happiest when he is on the veld because there isn’t an area like this in university it could contribute to the factor of unhappiness. As a child Thabani was exposed to many different environments one where he lived alone with his mother that was hard and lonely and one with is grandmother and cousins which was difficult. His increasing levels of depression could be because he is associating his new environments to those of his tragic

We cannot fully understand Thabani by using one perspective only because there are limitations for each perspective. There are limitations to the behaviourist view because behaviour cannot fully be understood without addressing the consciousness and thoughts of the subject (Titchener 1914). Looking at Thabani’s case with a biological view is significant because we can then understand all the internal factors that we have no control over. This however limits our thoughts to that only of natural instinct when in fact there is more to response than just human instinct. There are other external factors like the environment in which we are surrounded by and the way we think and want to better ourselves (Polich and Kok 1985). Thabani has unconscious thoughts that we are unaware of which limits our understanding of Thabani. Thabani could want to better himself but is distracted and these perspectives don’t take in to account of social surroundings and