“Behaviorism is not the science of human behavior; it is the philosophy of that science." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Behaviorism emerged in the early 20th century and became a driving force in American psychology. This school of psychology was championed by psychologists such as John B. Watson and J.F. Skinner. Behaviorism's predecessor, functionalism, expressed disapproval of introspection and this paved the way for behaviorism. “Behaviorism rejected any reference to the mind and considered manifest and observable behavior as the proper object of psychology.” Behaviorism completely excludes all internal processes and does not consider them relevant in attempting to further understand human actions. Nowadays, this exclusion of internal events from understanding behavior seems absurd. In modern psychology what goes on in someone's head is considered just as important, if not more important, than their behavior. Internal processes can be seen as the driving forces of human behavior. However, at that time many graduate students found Watson's proposals appealing as they felt that he was solving some of the mysteries of psychology that had been carried over from philosophy. This is why behaviorism has had such a large following and, in turn, become a leading force in American psychology. Behaviorists have proposed that behavior is the result of environmental factors and no matter how complex it may seem, it is always just a response to a simple external stimulus. They believed that any type of behavior was a direct result of experience. Animal psychology can be seen as the most important antecedent of behaviorism since behaviorism arose as a result of studies conducted on animal behavior. Ivan Pavlov greatly influenced the development of behavior with his experiments on dogs. Pavlov was a Russian physiologist widely known for developing the concept of the conditioned reflex. Classical conditioning (or Pavlovian conditioning) is often described as “the transfer of the response-stimulating property of a biologically significant stimulus to a new stimulus lacking that property.” This basically means that two stimuli are linked together to create a new learned response in an animal or person. The first phase of classical conditioning occurs before conditioning. The unconditioned stimulus produces an unconditioned response. This means that an external stimulus has produced an unlearned response in an organism. This first phase also includes a neutral stimulus. This stimulus does not produce a response until it is paired with an unconditioned stimulus. In the second stage of classical conditioning, the neutral stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus, thus creating a conditioned stimulus. In the third phase, the conditioned stimulus was associated with the unconditioned stimulus, in turn creating a conditioned response. Through this learning method, we learn to associate factors in our environment with certain reactions and consequences. This may explain why children hate the ringing of the school bell and why people who have been trapped in an elevator may refuse to enter it again. Behaviorists believed that this process of classical conditioning could explain human psychology. Operant conditioning, unlike classical conditioning, is a learning situationin which behavior is emitted by an organism rather than as a result of a stimulus. Operant conditioning differs from classical conditioning in that it occurs without any external environmental stimuli. In operant conditioning students are rewarded, given incentives and must actively participate, unlike classical conditioning where the student is passive to the experiment. “Through operant conditioning, an individual creates an association between a particular behavior and a consequence.” Watson insisted that only the most objective methods of inquiry should be used. He believed these to be: 1. Observations with and without the use of instruments, 2. Testing methods, 3. Verbal report method (which can be seen as a type of introspection), and 4. Conditioned reflex methods. He supported the idea that researchers in this field should use only natural science data and that the results of experiments were samples of behavior and did not indicate any internal mental processes. BF Skinner expanded on Watson's work. He agreed with Watson insofar as internal processes could not explain behavior, yet he believed that they should be explained in the analysis of behavior. Skinner believes that organisms are born with intrinsic behaviors and traits, thus recognizing the biological element of behavior. Behaviorism contributed both classical conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning) and operant conditioning to modern psychology, both of which are still widely used today. Operant conditioning can be used in a school setting where the teacher punishes those who have not completed homework. This gives other students an incentive to do their homework. This supports Skinner's view that punishment weakens behavior. While behaviorism has undoubtedly contributed to modern psychology, it is not free from criticism. Many critics of this school of psychology argue that it is a one-dimensional approach and although it can be useful for understanding behavior, it cannot do so effectively if done without considering other schools. Critics of behaviorism suggest that behavioral theories do not take into account free will and internal influences such as moods, thoughts, and feelings. In my opinion, to completely ignore any internal process from the analysis of behavior is to exclude, arguably, the most important factor in explaining behavior. complex cognitive processes such as thinking, problem solving, language, concept formation, and information processing. This period of time is now known as the cognitive revolution. Cognitivism is, in essence, a direct response to and rejection of the ideas set forth in behaviorism. Although these two schools of thought are essentially very different, they both share the belief that learning should be objective. Cognitivism believes that an individual's behavior is much more than a simple response to an external stimulus. They believe that by observing an individual's behavior you can learn much more about the internal mental processes that occur in someone's mind and that may have caused them to react to the stimulus in the way that they did. Cognitive psychologists believe that a mental process occurs between the observation of an external stimulus and the response to that stimulus. This process could be memory, perception, attention, or problem solving. Due to technological advances after the World War, two digital computers were developed. As a result, psychologists began to compare the intelligence of humans with that of computers. TheCognitivism used much of the terminology originally used to describe computer processes, to further analyze the human mind. Terms such as "information processing" became widely known in the field of cognitivism. The comparison between the way the human mind processes information and the way a computer does the same thing became known as the computer analogy. Roger Brown and George Miller were the driving forces of American cognitive psychology. Brown conducted original research on language and memory, coined the term “flashbulb memory,” and discovered how to study the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Flash memory I have a highly detailed view of the moment you heard the shocking news. An example of this is that many people remember exactly the circumstances they were in and exactly what they were doing on 9/11. The tip of the tongue phenomenon occurs when you can't remember something but feel like you're on the verge of remembering. Brown said that when people experienced the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon they knew what the first letter was of the word they were trying to remember and sometimes they even knew how many syllables there were in that word. This concludes that the tip of the tongue phenomenon arises from your real memory and is not simply an illusion. Miller's "The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"; Some limits to our ability to process information', is one of the best-known articles in psychology. Miller was an American psychologist who was at the forefront of the development of cognitivism. Miller's work in "The Magic Number Seven..." refers to our memory capacity. Memory span refers to our ability to recall a list of items. Miller found that the memory capacity of young people was seven times greater. He concluded that memory span is not limited in terms of the amount of information we can remember, but rather in terms of "chunks." Chunks are the largest pieces of a unit of information that a person recognizes. The knowledge of the person being tested determines the size of the piece. Cognitivism has undeniably contributed greatly to modern psychology, some would even say more than behaviorism. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Roger Sperry commented that, compared to the behaviorist and psychoanalytic revolutions in psychology, the cognitive revolution is the “most radical turning point; the most revisionist and transformative.” However, cognitivism has some limitations. For example, cognitivism has been criticized for focusing too narrowly on mental processes, just as behaviorism focuses too narrowly on these internal processes. As a result of the computer analogy, researchers focus too much on information processing and do not pay enough attention to the more emotional aspects that also influence thinking. Another problem with the computer analogy is that, although there are similarities between the way humans process behavior and the way computers do, both are fundamentally separate and distinct entities. Embodied cognition, which is an extension of cognitivism, assumes that there are physical aspects of cognition revealed in the activity of the brain. This means that we need to analyze behavior in relation to the environment and then, in turn, in relation to the brain's internal processes to gain a more holistic understanding of humans and their behavior. The philosopher John Searle questioned the extent to which computation can capture the complexity of mental processes. Searle developed the "syntax is not semantics" argument. He imagines himself in a room.