Rise and fall of Behaviorism
Partly in reaction to the subjective and introspective nature of Freudian psychodynamics, and its focus on the recollection of childhood experiences, during the early decades of the twentieth century, Behaviorism gained popularity as a guiding psychological theory. Founded by John B. Watson and embraced and extended by Edward Thorndike, Clark L. Hull, Edward C. Tolman, and later B. F. Skinner, behaviorism was grounded in studies of animal behavior. Behaviorists shared the view that the subject matter of psychology should be operationalized with standardized procedures which led psychology to focus on behavior, not the mind or consciousness.[3] They doubted the validity of introspection for studying internal mental states such as feelings, sensations, beliefs, desires, and other unobservables. In his paper, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" published in 1913, Watson argued that psychology "is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science," that "introspection forms no essential part of its methods," and that "the behaviorist recognizes no dividing line between man and brute."[4] In his work on the study of learning, Skinner famously argued that psychology was not ready for the creation of theories, but rather that progress toward an understanding of learning would be better achieved by the collection of "data showing orderly changes characteristic of the learning process." [5]
Behaviorism reigned as the dominant model in psychology throughout the first half of the twentieth century, largely due to the creation of conditioning theories as scientific models of human behavior, and their successful application in the workplace and in fields such as advertising and military science. However, it became increasingly clear that, although it had made some important discoveries, behaviorism was deficient as a guiding theory of human behavior. Another revolution occurred in psychology in the 1950s, this time the "cognitive revolution."[6]
Noam Chomsky helped spark this revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of behavior and language.[6] He showed that the rules that govern the grammatical production of sentences are not the product of overt behavior but mechanisms of cognition—processes of the mind. Others, such as Jerome Bruner, began to take seriously the notion of cognitive strategies.[7] Similarly, work by Albert Bandura showed that children could learn by social observation, without any change in overt behavior, and so this must be accounted for by internal representations.[8]
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