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The behaviourist approach (Key terms (Classical conditioning: Learning…
The behaviourist approach
Behaviourists argue that much behaviour results from conditioning which involves the organism forming learned associations between stimuli in the environment and the responses they make to them.
Classical conditioning and Pavlov's research
Animals (including humans) have innate reflexes consisting of an unconditioned stimulus and an unconditioned response. In classical conditioning, a neutral stimulus is presented just before the UCS several times. The NS becomes capable of eliciting the UCR a conditioned response (CR). Pavlov (1927) trained dogs to salivate to the sound of a buzzer in this way.
Operant conditioning
Organisms spontaneously produce diffrent behaviours, and these have consequences. Operant conditioning (Skinner, 1938) is the process by which behaviour is changed by its consequences.
Types of reinforcement: Positive and negative reinforcement
Reinforcement strengthens a response making it more likely to re-occur. Positive reinforcers are pleasant. Negative reinforcers remove something unpleasant. Both types increase the frequency of the preceding response.
Evaluation
Strengths
Systematic desensitisation is effective
Is an effective, classical conditioning-based therapy for phobias. The learned anxious response associated with the feared situation is gradually replaced with another CR of relaxation so that the patient is no longer anxious.
Cause and effect can be established
Skinner used the highly controlled experimental method to discover causal relationships between variables. By manipulating the consequences of behaviour, he could measure the effects on an organism's behaviour thus establishing confidence in a cause and effect relationship between them.
Limitations
Classically conditioned associations cannot be achieved with equal ease
CS_CR associations cannot be established with equal ease. Animals are biologically prepared to learn associations that aid survival very rapidly but unprepared, therefore slower, to learn other associations. This challenges the idea that any NS can become associated with any UCR.
Limited applicability of animal research to human behaviour
Critics claim that Skinner's research using rats and pigwons tells us little about human behaviour which results from free will rather n positive and negative reinforcement. Skinner, however, argued that free will is an illusion and what we believe are behaviours chosen through free will are actually the product of external influences that determine our behaviour.
A limited perspective on behaviour?
Critics complain that treating human behaviour as a product of conditioning underplays the importance of other factors, such as cognition or emotional states, in shaping behaviour. Skinner rejected this, arguing that internal states are scientifically untestable. He asserted that complex behaviours such as our interactions with each other or pathological behaviour could be explained by our reinforcement history.
Key terms
Classical conditioning:
Learning through association. A neutral stimulus is consistently paired with an unconditioned stimulus, producing a conditioned response.
Operant conditioning:
Learning through reinforcement or punishment. If a beahviour is followed by a desirable consequence, then that behaviour is more likely to occur again in the future.
Reinforcement:
A term used in psychology to refer to anything that strengthens a response and incresaes the likelihood that it will occur again in the future.