What is Behavioral Psychology – Behaviorism

Hello friends!

This is the 1st Lesson of our Behavioral Psychology Course – Free Behaviorism

To start studying behavioral psychology, we have to know that this is one of the most important approaches within psychology. It is considered by historians of psychology as one of the 3 great forces, alongside psychoanalysis and humanism.

In this text, we are going to see the definition of what behaviorism is, a brief history with the main authors so that we can start to study more deeply in the next lessons, ok?

The term behaviorism comes from the English behavior, behavior. In Portuguese, we can say both behaviorism and behaviorism.

Behaviorism defines psychology as the science that studies behavior. Authors such as Pavlov, Watson and B. F Skinner made great contributions to the development of this approach to psychology.

Pavlov and Respondent Conditioning

Pavlov studied animal behavior. In his research laboratory, he created an experiment that made him world famous: Every time he fed the dog, he rang a bell. After a while, just ringing the bell, the dog salivated.

That is, he proved respondent conditioning, when a given stimulus is “connected” to another stimulus that is not necessarily related. In other words, the sight of food is a stimulus that is conditioned by biology, by genetics. A stimulus such as the sound of a bell is not directly related to salivation.

However, when presenting the two stimuli paired together several times, the dog is conditioned to salivate just by listening to the sound (which is a stimulus that has no necessary relationship with food).

Respondent conditioning is important because it explains the cause of certain phobias in humans. For example, in public speaking, a person is criticized and the criticism elicits a response in the body that is unpleasant. The unpleasant stimulus is linked to the behavior of speaking in public and, the next time it becomes necessary, the person will feel the unpleasant stimulus when having to speak in public.

Skinner and Operant Conditioning

Skinner deepened research in the area, inaugurating what he called radical behaviorism. Also making use of animal experiments, he developed the concept of operant conditioning.

Roughly speaking, we can summarize this concept as follows: the behavior is likely to happen given its relationship with earlier and later phenomena.

In other words: a behavior will be controlled by what happened before and what might happen after. For example, I might love to eat chocolate. But if before eating chocolate, I have eaten a lot of chocolate, if you offer it to me – even though I really like chocolate – I probably won’t accept it.

Learn more – Behaviorism by Watson and Skinner

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