Tag
Behaviorism
Entries tagged behaviorism.
10 entries
Behaviorism
The movement that tried to make psychology a science of observable behavior alone, ruling the mind out of its own subject matter until the mind forced its way back in.
12 min
Thought experimentClassical Conditioning
Pavlov's discovery that pairing a neutral signal with a reflex-triggering stimulus teaches the nervous system to treat the signal as a cause in its own right.
9 min
ThinkerEdward Tolman
The behaviorist who proved rats build "cognitive maps," keeping internal representation alive until neuroscience found it in the brain.
11 min
Thought experimentInsight Learning
Wolfgang Köhler's chimpanzees solved problems by a sudden reorganization of the whole situation, not by gradual trial and error, and that challenged the behaviorist account of how learning works.
9 min
Thought experimentLearned Helplessness
Repeated exposure to a shock a dog cannot escape teaches it, wrongly, that nothing it does will change what happens, even later when escape is easy.
9 min
Thought experimentLittle Albert
The 1920 study in which two psychologists conditioned an infant to fear a white rat, a landmark of behaviorism and one of the most ethically indefensible experiments in the field's history.
8 min
Thought experimentObservational Learning
Bandura's Bobo doll studies showed that children learn new behavior, including aggression, simply by watching a model perform it and seeing what happens next.
8 min
Thought experimentOperant Conditioning
Behavior that is rewarded tends to recur, behavior that is punished or ignored tends to fade, and Skinner built a whole science out of that one fact.
9 min
ConceptThe Cognitive Revolution
The mid-century shift, led by Chomsky, Miller, and Neisser, that put unobservable mental states back on psychology's table after fifty years in which behaviorism had ruled them out of bounds.
8 min
Thought experimentThe Garcia Effect
Rats made sick hours after tasting sweet water learned to avoid the sweetness alone, a result that broke the rule that any cue can be conditioned to any consequence.
7 min