Theoretical System of Behaviorism

The main idea of behaviorism is that psychology should not study consciousness but only behavior, putting behavior in complete opposition to consciousness. In terms of research methods, behaviorism advocates the use of objective experimental methods instead of introspection. The main points can be summarized as follows:

(1) Mechanical materialist determinism.

(2) The view that psychology is a natural science, a department for the study of human activity and behavior, and the demand that psychology must give up all relation to consciousness, making two demands: first, that the differences between psychology and the other natural sciences are only some differences in the division of labor; and, second, that concepts in psychology which cannot be accounted for by the universal terminology of science must be given up, such as consciousness, mental states, mentality, volition, imagery, etc.

(3) The objective method of behaviorism is strongly demanded to oppose and replace the introspective method, and it is believed that there are four kinds of objective methods: firstly, natural observation without the aid of instrumentation and experimental observation with the aid of instrumentation; secondly, verbal reports; thirdly, conditioned reflexes; and fourthly, tests. Skinner, on the other hand, belongs to the neo-behaviorist psychology, which studies only observable behavior and tries to establish a functional relationship between stimulus and response, arguing that the event between stimulus and response is not something objective and should be rejected. Skinner believed that the problem of consciousness could be accounted for without abandoning the behaviorist position. The period 1913-1930 was the period of Early Behaviorism, founded by the American psychologist Watson on the basis of the Pavlovian doctrine of conditioned reflexes, in which he argued that psychology should reject consciousness, imagery, and other things too subjective, and study only the stimuli and responses that are observed and can be measured objectively. Watson called it "black-box work". He believed that human behavior is acquired, the environment determines a person's behavioral patterns, both normal and pathological behavior is acquired through learning, and can also be changed, increased or eliminated through learning, that by identifying the regular relationship between environmental stimuli and behavioral responses, we can predict the response based on the stimulus or infer the stimulus based on the response, and achieve the purpose of predicting and controlling the behavior of animals and human beings. behavior. He believed that behavior is a combination of various somatic responses used by an organism to adapt to environmental stimuli, some of which are expressed externally and some of which are hidden internally, and that there is no difference between human beings and animals in his eyes, and that they all follow the same laws.

The behaviorist view is that psychology should not study consciousness, but only behavior. Behavior is the combination of bodily responses that an organism uses to adapt to changes in its environment. These responses are nothing more than muscular contractions and glandular secretions, some of which are expressed outside the body, some of which are hidden inside the body, and some of which are of greater or lesser intensity.

Watson points out that thoughts and emotions, which have always been regarded as purely conscious, are in fact also hidden and slight bodily changes. The former are changes in the muscles of the body, especially the speech organs, and the latter are changes in the internal organs and glands. techniques for recording changes in muscle potentials have improved since the 1920s, and it has been found that mental activity is accompanied by slight muscle contractions. But the concomitant events are not necessarily the same events. So the fact that there is a slight muscle contraction when thinking is not enough to prove that thinking is a slight muscle contraction.

Watson argues that both muscular contraction and glandular secretion can be attributed to physical or chemical changes; and that the stimuli which cause the organism to react can, in the last analysis, only be physical or chemical changes within and without the organism. In this way. All behavior, including what is commonly called mental activity, is nothing more than some physical or chemical changes causing some other physical or chemical changes. Thus, he believed that all mental observations could be accounted for by physical and chemical concepts. An early behaviorist, Weiss, took this view to the extreme of reductionism, but Watson himself argued that psychology should focus only on the adaptive behavior of the organism as a whole, and need not concern itself with these physical and chemical changes.

Watson claimed that behaviorism was the only thorough and logical functionalism. He was heavily influenced by functionalism at the University of Chicago. Angel, one of the representatives of functionalism, also said that psychology has to study behavior. But the functionalists viewed both consciousness and behavior as the means by which man adapts to his environment. According to pragmatism, the philosophical basis of functionalism, the only test of the adaptability of consciousness can only be the adaptability of behavior. Therefore, there is no need to examine consciousness when behavior is examined; conversely, the adaptability of consciousness cannot be examined without examining behavior. Therefore, a thorough functionalism must recognize that one can throw away consciousness to examine behavior, but one cannot throw away behavior to examine consciousness.

Watson claimed that psychologists should use consciousness in the same way as physicists, that is, as an experience of objective things only, not as an experience of mental activity, thus denying the distinction between direct and indirect experience to which Vonte refers, and equating the consciousness studied by psychologists with the objective things studied by physicists. Lashley made it clear that this was a neo-positivist view and greatly appreciated it.

Watson believed that the task of psychology in studying behavior lay in identifying regular relationships between stimuli and responses. In this way the response can be deduced from the stimulus, and the stimulus from the response, for the purpose of predicting and controlling behavior. Behaviorists reject introspection in their research methods and advocate the use of objective observation, conditioned reflexes, verbal reports and tests. This is a corollary to their denial of consciousness in the object of study.

Watson, on the one hand, opposed introspection, but on the other hand could not help utilizing some of the material that only introspection could provide. So he drove introspection out the front door and invited it in through the back door under the name of "verbal report". This confuses the two roles of speech. Speech is a response to objective stimuli, like action, but it can also be used to make statements about one's own psyche, which are in fact introspections.

Behaviorist psychology has been heavily influenced in its methodology by animal psychology since the advent of evolutionary theory. Animals do not make introspective reports, so their psychology can only be inferred from their responses to stimuli. This colored early animal psychology with a strong anthropomorphism. Morgan proposed to try to overcome anthropomorphism, and after further efforts by Loeb, up to Thorndike, failed to solve the problem completely.

Watson undertook the rest, did a lot of research on animal psychology, and finally came to an anti-anthropomorphism conclusion, asserting that there is no qualitative difference between human and animal psychology, but not according to human psychology to speculate on animal psychology, on the contrary, we should be like the study of animal psychology as the study of the human psyche. Therefore, he greatly appreciated Pavlov's conditioned reflex method because it allows subjective experiences like sensory discrimination to be transformed into objective facts of response differences.

But fundamentally, Watson was quite different from Pavlov. Watson denied the special importance of the nerve center in animal behavior, believing it to play only a liaison role. Pavlov, on the other hand, viewed the relationship between the activities of the peripheral organs of the body and the activities of the nerve centers as a projective relationship, and examined the activities of the peripheral organs with the aim of understanding the activities of the nerve centers. Furthermore, Pavlov did not deny consciousness and placed great emphasis on the essential difference between man and animals in the psyche. Watson believed that, except for a very few simple reflexes, all complex behavior depended on environmental influences which were realized through conditioned reflexes. He therefore regarded Pavlovian conditioned reflexes as the "pivotal stone" of behaviorism. Watson boasted that given a dozen healthy babies to nurture in an environment over which he had complete control, he could turn any one of them into any kind of character. He experimented on the emotional behavior of infants, causing their love and fear to change through a change in conditioning. He later spoke lavishly of establishing a behaviorist experimental ethics.

The influence of Watson-style behaviorist psychology reached its peak in the 1920s. Some of its basic ideas and research methods permeated many of the humanities, giving rise to the name "behavioral sciences". To this day, the areas covered by these sciences continue to expand. Although they do not all take behaviorism as their guiding viewpoint, the origin of their name cannot be attributed to behaviorism. Watson's environmental determinism influenced American psychology for 30 years. His view of predicting and controlling behavior contributed to the development of applied psychology.

It is recognized in American psychology that for a long time, since the introduction of behaviorist psychology, American psychologists were mostly de facto behaviorists. After the rise of cognitive psychology, although consciousness was re-emphasized, cognitive psychology also tried to study subjective experience by observing objective behavior in its methods.

Watson's oversimplified stimulus-response formulations failed to account for the most salient features of behavior, namely, selectivity and adaptability, a fatal shortcoming that some of his successors after the 1930s attempted to overcome under the guiding light of operationalism, resulting in various forms of neobehaviorism. If Watson's claim for the abolition of consciousness was gradually abandoned because it caused psychology to lose its subject matter, methodological behaviorism was perpetuated in the United States through the ingenious arguments of operationalism. From 1930 onwards there emerged the theory of neobehaviorism, in which the neobehaviorists modified Watson's extreme views. They pointed out the existence of intermediate variables between the stimulus received by the individual and the behavioral response, this intermediate variable refers to the physiological and psychological state of the individual at that time, they are the actual determinants of behavior, they include demand variables and cognitive variables. Needs variables are essentially motivations, and they include sex, hunger, and the need for safety in the face of danger. Cognitive variables are abilities, and they include object perception, motor skills, and so on.

Taking Skinner as a representative, Skinner proposed operant conditioning on the basis of Pavlov's classical conditioning, he made a "Skinner box", and installed a special device inside the box, which would produce food when the lever was pressed once, and he put a hungry mouse into the box, which would run around and explore freely, and by chance, it would get food when the lever was pressed once. Once press the lever to get food, after that the frequency of the mouse press the lever more and more, that is, learned to get food by pressing the lever, Skinner named it operant conditioning or instrumental conditioning, food is reinforcers, the use of reinforcers to increase the frequency of a certain response (i.e., behavior) is called the process of reinforcement. Skinner believed that reinforcement training is the main mechanism to explain the learning process of the organism.

Skinner believed that psychology was concerned with the outward appearance of behavior that could be observed, rather than the internal mechanisms of behavior. He believed that science must be studied within the context of the natural sciences, and that its task was to determine the functional relationship between an experimenter-controlled stimulus followed by an organismic response. Of course he took into account not only the relationship between a stimulus and a response, but also those conditions that altered the relationship between the stimulus and the response, his formula being: R=f(SoA) where R is the response, S is the stimulus, and A is the experimental variable controlled by the experimenter in the study. However, his study of behavior focused only on experimental studies of individual subjects under strictly controlled conditions.

Skinner worked primarily in experimental comparative psychology from the 1930s to the 1950s, but he remained the best known of the still living behaviorist theorists until his death in 1990. He developed a different set of behaviorist philosophies known as fundamentalist behaviorism (radical behaviorism). After he published The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis Of Behavior he is credited with creating another new variant of psychology - known as behavior analysis or experimental analysis of behavior. analysis or experimental analysis of behavior.

Skinner was influential in defining fundamentalist behaviorism, and based on the law of classification his research was named experimental analysis of behavior (experimental analysis of behavior, EAB), which differed from other behavioral research in many methodological and theoretical ways. In contrast to methodological behaviorism, which subscribes to experiments with touch and believes that mindfulness and introspection exist and can be explained scientifically, fundamentalist behaviorism denies these views.

Skinnerian Behavioral Analysis

Skinner's analysis of the behavior of organisms was an important part of his behavioral science research, and his principles on the role of operant conditioning were central to his behavioral analysis.

Skinner conducted a series of studies on animals using Skinner's box of his own design and came up with the theory of operant conditioning. He categorized conditioning into two types: respondent conditioning, Pavlov's classical type of conditioning, and operant conditioning, the kind of conditioning he himself had discovered in his animal experiments. The former is triggered by an observable stimulus, while the latter occurs in a situation without any observable external stimulus, and the latter is more important in the learning process than the former.

1, the law of acquisition

Skinner believed that the process of shaping animal behavior is the process of animal learning, and he summarized the formula for learning as follows: if an operation occurs followed by the administration of a reinforcing stimulus, then its intensity will increase. The increase in intensity referred to here is not a particular response, but the general tendency to make these responses occur. He argued that the key variable in making the rate of conditioning increase is reinforcement, and that practice does not cause the rate of response to rise, but merely provides the opportunity for further reinforcement to occur.

Skinner also studied the effects of different reinforcement programs and concluded that different intervals, different ratios, and different scheduling had a significant effect on the formation of behavior.

2. Conditioned Reinforcement and Generalization Phenomena

Skinner pointed out that when a certain stimulus is used when reinforcing an action with a reinforcer, this stimulus eventually becomes a conditioned reinforcer, which, like the previous reinforcers, can be used to reinforce a number of other operations of this action.

If a conditioned reinforcer is associated with many primary reinforcers, then that conditioned reinforcer is generalized, e.g., money is the best generalized reinforcer.

3. Regression and forgetting

Skinner argued that regression is caused by the absence of reinforcement, whereas forgetting is a gradual decline over time. In neobehaviorism, there are two schools of thought, the radicals represented by Skinner and the more "moderate" camp represented by Bandura.

Bandura proposed four main theories: ternary interaction determinism, observational learning theory, self-efficacy theory, and behavior modification theory.

Bandura's neobehaviorism is called social cognitive behaviorism.

△Representative theories: Bandura's social learning theory (observational learning theory)

Rothwell's social behavioral learning theory;

Mitchell's cognitive social learning theory.

△***same characteristics: both adhere to the spirit of behaviorism research and absorb the results of cognitive psychology research.

△Specific performance (characteristics):

1. Boldly using psychological concepts previously discarded and rejected by traditional behaviorism, exploring the role of cognition, thinking, and imagery in the regulation of behavior.

2. Emphasizes the integration of behavior and cognition. Both human behavior can be predicted through cognitive processes such as human thinking, beliefs, and expectations, and human behavior can be changed by changing human cognition, and cognitive processes such as beliefs and expectations can be changed through changes in behavior.

3. Emphasizes the role of self-regulation. Traditional behaviorism emphasizes the influence of external reinforcement on behavior, ignoring the role of "self" in behavior regulation. The new neo-behaviorists believe that if behavior is determined solely by external rewards or punishments, people will act like weathervanes, constantly changing direction to adapt to the various transient influences acting on them.

4. Emphasizes the positive and active nature of mental processes. The new neo-behaviorists emphasize the need to combine behaviorism with constructivism and to value the role of cognitive rules previously acquired through learning in the process of responding to environmental information.

5. Adherence to objectivism.

Bantula (1925- ) American, observational learning theory. 1974, President of the American Psychological Association

▲Main Ideas:

Observational learning is also known as learning without trying or alternative learning. The ability to acquire information through verbal and nonverbal forms and to self-regulate allows individuals to learn complex behavioral responses by observing the behaviors exhibited by others (role models) and their outcomes without having to experience everything firsthand.

Features:

1. Observational learning does not necessarily have an outward behavioral response;

2. Observational learning does not rely on direct reinforcement;

3. Observational learning is cognitive in nature;

4. Observational learning is not the same as imitation.

Basic types:

Direct observational learning, also known as behavioral observational learning, refers to simple imitation of demonstrated behavior.

Abstract observational learning means that the observer acquires certain rules or principles of behavior from the behavior of others, and later under certain conditions the observer will exhibit behaviors that embody those rules or principles without imitating the particular ways of responding to those observed.

Creative observational learning refers to the fact that the observer through observation can combine the characteristics of the various different role model behaviors into a new hybrid that is different from the characteristics of the individual role models, i.e., extracting different behavioral characteristics from different demonstration behaviors to form a new way of behaving.

Bantula advocated that behavior, environment, and factors within the individual interact and determine each other, constituting a triangular interaction. He believes that how an individual achieves is the result of the interaction between the external environment and human factors.

The unique feature of evaluating interactive determinism is that it distinguishes human behavior from cognitive factors, points out the role of cognitive factors in determining behavior, and establishes the status of cognition within the framework of behaviorism. In addition, this view regards the environment, behavior, and human cognitive factors as mutually determining factors, noting the influence of human behavior and its cognitive factors on the environment, and avoiding the tendency of behaviorism's mechanical environmentalism.

▲Self-regulation theory

Self-regulation theory is an individual's internal reinforcement process, a process in which an individual regulates his or her own behavior by comparing and evaluating his or her plans and expectations for the behavior with the realistic outcomes of the behavior. It consists of three processes: self-observation, self-judgment, and self-response.

Evaluating Bantula's theory of self-regulation emphasizes the subjective and active role of the human psyche and shows that human beings have the ability of rational cognition to rationally control and regulate their own behaviors, which is undoubtedly praiseworthy and affirmative.

▲Principle of self-efficacy

△Perceived self-efficacy is a perception of self-generating ability, and the result of perceived self-efficacy is self-efficacy.

△Self-efficacy deepens into the value system and becomes self-efficacy beliefs, which are cognitive orientations about self-efficacy judgment.

△Self-efficacy is essentially self-generated competence.

Factors affecting the formation of self-efficacy: ① experience of success or failure in behavior; ② experience of alternatives; ③ verbal persuasion; ④ emotional arousal; ⑤ situational conditions.

▲Evaluation of Bantula's Observational Learning Theory

[Contributions]

1. Focusing on the influence of social factors, it changed the tendency of traditional learning theory to emphasize the individual over the social, and combined the study of learning psychology with the study of social psychology, which made a unique contribution to the development of learning theory.

2. Absorbing the research results of cognitive psychology, the theory of reinforcement and information processing theory organically combined to change the traditional behaviorism focusing on "stimulus-response" and the central process of light ideological tendency, so that the theory of interpretation of human behavior of the point of reference has undergone an important transformation.

3

3. Emphasizing the role of social factors in the learning process and cognitive processes in learning, and focusing on experiments with human subjects in methodology, it changed the wrong tendency of behaviorism to take animals as the experimental objects and extend the conclusions drawn from animal experiments to human learning phenomena.

4, his concepts and theories are built on the basis of rich and solid experimental verification information, his experimental methodology is more rigorous and his conclusions are more convincing.

[Limitations]

1, due to the open character of Bantula's theory, resulting in its lack of a theoretical framework rich in internal unity.

2. Most developmental psychologists believe that Bantula's view ignores the importance of developmental variables. That is, it ignores the extent to which children are able to learn independently and the extent to which developmental stages have an impact on children's observational learning.

3. Some of the methods used by Bantula in his study of observational learning of aggressive behavior are difficult to agree with. It adversely affects the healthy development of children.

4, Although Bantula emphasized the influence of human cognitive ability on behavior, he focused on and aimed at studying behavior and did not actually give the cognitive factor its rightful place. Watson's theory of behaviorism convinced many academy researchers of the importance of studying behavior experimentally in psychology. In comparative psychology, in particular, there were earlier warnings in this regard, criticizing some researchers of the time for their increasing bias toward anthropomorphism. C. Lloyd Morgan, for example, criticized George Romanes for directly describing the mental processes of animals in his studies. Edward Thorndike did a similar study (of cats' reactions to escaping from a maze box). Most psychologists, however, have adopted a position they call methodological behaviorism, which recognizes that "behavior" is the only, or the simplest, way of looking at the mind, but suggests that it may simply be a manifestation of the results of the operation of a mental state. Prominent behaviorists who supported this position included Clark L. Hull, who called himself a neo-behaviorist, and Edward C. Tolman, who later developed cognitivism. Tolman's experiments found that rats were able to explore the distribution of mazes on their own even in the absence of reward conditions, and he claimed that there was a third party connecting the stimulus to the response (S->R) - the organism - and that the whole step should therefore be (S->O->R). His theory, along with others, is known as "purposive behaviorism".

Methodological behaviorism remains to this day the school of psychology with the greatest emphasis on experimentation, including by many who study cognitive psychology, as long as behavior is defined as including speech -- at least non-introspective speech. Since the 1980s, more and more studies of animal cognition, as well as some unorthodox views such as those of Donald Griffin, have also appeared in discussions of the psychology of animals in terms that increasingly include discussions of the mindfulness of consciousness, and there is no contradiction between comparative psychology and animal psychology, methodologically behaviorist. About the behaviorism line respectively to not yet have a certain *** knowledge, the following is only a brief distinction: orthodox (Classical):Watson discussed behaviorism, advocating the objective study of behavior, denying the process of the psyche and the internal state.

Methodological:Observation of behavior from a third-person, objective point of view; observed psychological data must be documented in an inter-subjectively testable manner, not theoretically. This approach is utilized in experiments in general and has been absorbed by cognitive psychology.

Radical: Skinnerian behaviorism, because it extends the principles of behaviorism to intraorganic processes, does not require intermediary observer agreement compared to methodology, is not mechanized or simplified, and assumes that "behavior" is not the result of internal states (of the psyche), and that the behavioral phenomena of a person must at least be caused by the person's own behavior. The phenomenon of behavior must at least be experienced by the person himself.

Logical: Established by Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949).

Teleological:Post-Skinnerian, purposive behaviorism, close to the concept of microeconomics.

Theoretical: Post-Skinnerian, allowing for the observation of internal states ("states within the skin" were once considered "unobservable", but modern technological advances will make it possible). dynamics, but takes an eclectic approach to theoretical structure, emphasizing experimental caution.

Biological: Post-Skinnerian, focusing on perceptual and motor neural architecture of behavior, theoretically belonging to one of the behaviorism.

Interbehaviorism (Interbehaviorism):Created by J.R. Kantor before Skinner's theory, being continued by L. Hayes, E. Ribes, S. Bijou, and others. Focuses on processes within individual organisms, with extensive research on behavior, with emphasis on human behavior.

The other two widespread but less typical schools are the new-:ClarkL.Hull and post-Hull schools, of a theoretical, data-aggregating, non-psychodynamic, physiologically biased nature. and purposeful:Edward C. Tolman's cognitive psychology of predictive behavior.