Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This has been the dominant school of thought in academic P sychology since the publication of J. B. Watson's classic work Behaviourism in 1924. Few psychologists since his time would accept his theory without reservations. Most, however, would subscribe to the general features of his position. He claims: 1  Mental events cannot constitute the data of a reputable science, the proper object of psychological study being behaviour, not thought or feeling; 2  All behaviour is the effect of reinforcement, that is the response to a stimulus is the consequence of the repeated coincidence of the response with a reward (or punishment); and 3  Experimental techniques in psychology allow us to manipulate behaviour towards socially approved ends. Since all behaviour is conditioned anyway, the objection to conditioning as opposed to rational persuasion fails. The school of behaviourism first arose in protest against the unsatisfactory state of psychology at the turn of the century. Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener and William James supposed that psychology studied mental events by means of introspection. This process was notoriously unreliable, lacking any way of replicating reported findings. It was anathema to a generation guided by a conception of science drawn from Ernst Mach and envious of scientists widely celebrated for their successes in predicting events in the physical world. Bodily ... log in or subscribe to read full text