Psychologists in the 19th and 20th centuries came up with different models and tests that helped shape present day psychology. These psychologists including John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner, and Edward C. Tolman among others published their ideas which became key viewpoints of psychology.
This paper is going into detail about The Behavioral Perspective (BP). The first person to discover behavioral perspective (BP) was John B. Watson. Later, another person became the new leader of this perspective which will be discussed later in this essay.
Behavioral perspective (BP) is explaining why we behave the way we do, and what causes our behavior towards certain things and in certain scenarios. There is an experiment called conditioning and it will help researchers explain the actions and reactions of animals and humans.
The social cognitive theory is also a part of the behavioral perspective (BP) and it influences behavior. This perspective is still being used today but in different ways, I will explain how it is being used later in this paper.
Now some critics do believe that this perspective it only has one main quality. They do not believe that it explains other ways our body behaves like our moods, thoughts and feelings.
There has been a lot of research done on behavioral perspective (BP) and there are pros and cons to this specific perspective. This perspective is very beneficial to people with behavioral problems and is a good base for psychiatrist to use when dealing with certain clients with behavioral problems.
There is also a lot of history behind this perspective, how it was discovered, how it was used back in the 1930s and how it has helped people better understand behavior. Although there are some downsides to this perspective, it does not adequately prove what causes our moods, thoughts and feelings.
In the late 1930s, John B. Watson started the idea of the behavioral perspective. Then B.F. Skinner (1938) became the master of this perspective. Skinner was a psychologist in the late 1930s, he created the theory of conditioning.
Skinner was born March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna Pennsylvania, he received a doctorate degree at Harvard. Conditioning was when someone is rewarded or punished through conditioning to make them react a certain way.
While Skinner was at Harvard, he wanted a better and more accurate way to study behavior. He created The Skinner Box, which he also called it “an operant conditioning apparatus”.
Using the Skinner Box he could study animal(s) interacting with the environment around them. The first animal he studied in his box were rats and seeing how they discovered and used a level in the box. The level would dispense food at certain levels.
Skinner also studied pigeons and their behavioral patterns. The pigeons would peck at a disk in order to gain food. From Skinners studies he came to the conclusion that some type of reinforcement was pivotal in learning new behaviors.
After he got his doctorate degree, he published the results from his experiments in conditioning. His work was similar to Pavlov, but Skinners work was watching the learned responses to an environment rather than involuntary response to stimuli.
The main principle of this perspective is to show what causes our behavior, how does the environment around us effect our behavior. It includes the same aspects of the social cognitive theory.
Like how we react when others around us react, we learn from how people around us act and that influences our behavior, personal thought process, learning ability and personality.
Researchers who still use conditioning as a method for behavior issues can explain the causes of the actions and reactions from humans and animals. From the view point of Skinner and Watson they prove that what a person or animal does is in response to a stimulus that has been conditioned or reinforced in some type of way.
The social cognitive theory also has an effect on our behavior, it takes control not just by influence or external stimuli. It is also by cognitive process like anticipation, judging, and memory.
This perspective is still being used in the field of psychology today. There are multiple therapeutic techniques that this perspective does. It helps children with autism and developmental delays, there are multiple processes used in this perspective, the two I will talk about are called shaping and chaining.
What shaping does is to reward the child when he/she is closer to accomplishing their desired behavioral goal. Chaining is when they break a small or big task down into smaller more easier steps and doing them one at a time to make it easier for the child to learn. Other techniques used in the world today are aversion therapy, modeling, and contingency management.
There are some limitations to this perspective and many people argue that behaviorism is a one-dimensional approach to learning the human behavior. They think that behavioral theorist are not accountable for free will and internal influences such as: moods, thoughts, and feelings.
They also do not account for certain types of learning that is used without reinforcement and punishment. Some people may think that people and animals can adapt their behavior when new information is introduced even when reinforced.
