Significance Of Behaviourism

Register to read the introduction… It was highly influential and dominated psychological theory for some thirty years between the early 1920’s and 1950’s. The early formulation of behaviourist theory was in the work of an American psychologist John B Watson. In some respects, his research was a response to the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches to therapy at the time. In his work ‘Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist’ published in 1929, Watson believed that behaviourism, ‘Attempted to make a fresh, clean start in psychology, breaking with current theories and with traditional concepts and terminology’ (www.britannica.com). His vision was one of psychology becoming a purely objective branch of natural science, where the only admissible conclusions were those that could be obtained by independent observers of the same object or event, as would be the case in scientific …show more content…
Much of his work involved studying the behaviour of rats and pigeons. He conducted several experiments using a special device he designed called the ‘Skinner box’. This provided a controlled environment in which animal behaviour could be observed in a systematic way. His experiments were designed to shed light on how behaviour is initiated, maintained and how under certain conditions it can be changed as a result of consequences of the behaviour. He argued that behaviour takes a particular form because it has consequences that both give rise to it and maintain it. When the consequences change, so does the behaviour he said. Skinner placed a hungry rat in the box where it had to negotiate a maze to find the food. At first the rat would run up blind alleys in the maze but with experience it gradually learned how to negotiate the maze to find the food more