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BEHAVIOURIST APPROACH - Coggle Diagram
BEHAVIOURIST APPROACH
Research Methods
Almost all Behaviourist research involved laboratory experiments on animals because of their desire to be scientific.
Conducting them in laboratories allowed strict control of any extraneous variables, as well as of the variables they manipulated and measured.
In their experiments, they manipulated the environment (stimuli) to tests its effect on the animals’ behaviour (response).
Behaviourists because they believed that there was no qualitative difference between man and animals and they were seeking general laws of learning that should apply to any animal or person in any situation.
Behaviourists would only measure observable responses. For classical conditioning, this related to quantity of response, whereas with operant conditioning they measured frequency.
Summary:
studied changes in behaviour that are caused by a person’s direct experience of their environment, using the principles of classical and operant conditioning to explain them.
made a deliberate effort to be scientific, refusing to discuss mental processes that might be involved in learning because they are not observable and could not be studied objectively.
This led to behaviourist explanations sometimes being called Stimulus-Response (S-R) explanations, because they only refer to observable stimuli and responses and ignore everything else.
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From conducting their experiments, behaviourists found that the strength of the response to the stimulus was related to the number of trials that the animal received.
This was important because it appeared to show that the animals did not make a sudden leap of learning as they restructured their mental understanding of the task and their behaviour - to the behaviourists, this proved that the process of learning was mechanical and due to repeated environmental experience rather than anything more complex.
