Behaviourist Approach

Behaviourists regard all behaviour as a response to a stimulus. They assume that what we do is determined by the environment we are in, which provides stimuli to which we respond, and the environments we have been in in the past, which caused us to learn to respond to stimuli in particular ways. Behaviourists are unique amongst psychologists in believing that it is unnecessary to speculate about internal mental processes when explaining behaviour: it is enough to know which stimuli elicit which responses. 

Behaviourists explain behaviour in terms of (1) the stimuli that elicit it and (2) the events that caused the person to learn to respond to the stimulus that way. Behaviourists use two processes to explain how people learn: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, people learn to associate two stimuli when they occur together, such that the response originally elicited by one stimulus is transferred to another. The person learns to produce an existing response to a new stimulus. For example, Watson & Rayner (1920) conditioned a young boy (‘Little Albert’) to respond with anxiety to the stimulus of a white rat. They achieved this by pairing the rat with a loud noise that already made Albert anxious. The anxiety response was transferred to the rat because it was presented together with the noise. The response also generalized to other stimuli that resembled the rat, including a rabbit and a fur coat. Over time, conditioned responses like this gradually diminish in a process called extinction. In operant conditioning, people learn to perform new behaviours through the consequences of the things they do. If a behaviour they produce is followed by a reinforcement then the likelihood of that behaviour being repeated increases in future (the behaviour is strengthened). A consequence can be reinforcing in two ways: either the person gets something good (positive reinforcement) or they avoid something bad (negative reinforcement). Conversely, if a behaviour is followed by a punishment then the likelihood of that behaviour being repeated in future decreases (the behaviour is weakened). Whereas classical conditioning only allows the person to produce existing responses to new stimuli, operant conditioning allows them to learn new responses. 

The main strengths of the behaviourist approach come from the methods it uses. The insistence on objectivity, control over variables and precise measurement means that the studies carried out by behaviourists tend to be very reliable, and the behaviourists can be credited with introducing the scientific method into psychology. The drawback of these methods, however, is that behaviour may be studied under very artificial conditions than do not reflect real-world contexts very well (although this criticism clearly does not apply to all behaviourist studies). The widespread use of animals is a source of criticism. Whilst conditioning can be observed in most species, there are genetic influences on what different species can and cannot learn which reflect their different evolutionary histories (e.g. rats can be conditioned to respond to tastes but not smells). This means that generalizations between species must be made with more caution than many behaviourists apply. 

The behaviorist approach is deterministic: people’s behaviour is assumed to be entirely controlled by their environment and their prior learning, so they do not play any part in choosing their own actions. The approach takes the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate, believing that apart from a few innate reflexes and the capacity for learning, all complex behaviour is learned from the environment. Their insistence that all learning can be accounted for in terms of law-governed processes like classical and operant conditioning, reflects a nomological approach to studying human behaviour (although behaviourists never ignore individual differences, since every person’s history of learning is unique). The behaviourists’ view that all behaviour, no matter how complex, can be broken down into the fundamental processes of conditioning makes it a highly reductionist approach to psychology.