Historical background of behaviorism

Behaviorism originated in America in the early 20th century, represented by Watson and Skinner. This is a psychological revolution in the United States, aiming at the deficiency of Feng Te school theory. It opposes traditional psychology and advocates the view of studying human consciousness; It is argued that psychology should not only study the intangible things in the human brain-consciousness, but also the objective things reflected from human consciousness, that is, human behavior. In their view, behavior is a combination of various physical reactions used by organisms to adapt to environmental changes. These reactions are nothing more than muscle contraction and gland secretion. Some of them are expressed in vitro and some are hidden in the body, and their intensity is large and small. They think that the specific behavioral response depends on the specific stimulus intensity, so they use "S-R" (stimulus-response) as a formula to explain all human behaviors; According to behaviorism theory, the task of psychology is to find the regular relationship between stimulus and response, so that we can infer the response according to the stimulus, and in turn, we can infer the stimulus through the response, thus achieving the purpose of predicting and controlling behavior.

The main idea of behavioral psychology School is the further development of James Functionalism School in schools of psychology, another native of the United States, at the end of 19. Behavioral psychology reached its peak in the 1920s and became a unique school in the history of American psychology and even in the history of world psychology. It has been in the leading position in American psychological research for 30 years from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Behavioral psychology is a rebel of traditional psychology. It is a modern schools of psychology based on mechanical materialism and positivism philosophy and influenced by animal psychology and functionalism psychology. The essence of behavioral psychology is to absolutely oppose consciousness and behavior.