Walden 2 Reflection

Psychology isn’t always easy to understand. In the psychology capstone course we discuss many important studies and readings from the history of psychology. Many of these studies and reading I have either heard of, read them, or were discussed in another class while some were completely fresh. Because I have had some experience with these studies and readings, I assumed that I knew the take away message and that that was the only important aspect of reading these studies. After being in this class and having seminar based discussions on each of the readings my view has changed. From being in this environment, I have developed my critical thinking abilities, learned how to think more like a psychologist, and learned how my psychological knowledge …show more content…
I believe that my critical thinking abilities were challenged especially when we were reading the book “Walden Two”. This book was about a utopian society created by B.F. Skinner to address many of the issues in our then, current society. One of the challenging aspects of reading this novel was deciding whether or not I liked or agreed with the changes made in the society Walden Two. I remember struggling with the fact that they keep their children housed separately from their parents, and this struck me as something I would not be okay with. After learning why their community housed the children separately, I wasn’t completely sold, but I was forced to look at the idea in a new way and determine whether or not I thought that was a better alternative to parenting. There were many times throughout this book where I had to make my own decision on whether or not the way they were running things in the society Walden Two was better for society than our current practices. Forcing myself to think about these things not just for myself but for an entire community really helped strengthen my critical thinking …show more content…
By thinking like a psychologist, a person has to consider who can or is benefiting from the research. They also have to consider whether or not there are ethical implications that need to be addressed and they need to consider why a research study is important to us today. I have gained more insight into the perspective as a psychologist by reading the article “Psychology as a Behaviorist View it” written by John Watson. In this article Watson is giving his argument as to why he thinks psychology should move away from introspection and consciousness and start looking at observable behavior. Because the psychology that we know today is a mixture of behavior and the consciousness, I think I had to think more about why he wanted to just focus on behavior and how this was a big deal during his time period. Behaviorism was a new idea and Watson was helping start the conversation. I think this helped me think more like a psychologist because I was considering what changes were being made and whether or not they were the right call for the field of psychology. In the end, I think that completely scraping introspection benefited the entire field as a whole. We were able to advance and develop meaningful research because of it. Also with Watson being a huge advocate for behaviorism, he conducted an experiment testing whether or not a conditioned emotional response could be created using methods of classical