Contrast the Behavioral Approach to Psychology with the Cognitive Approach - Essay Example

?Critically contrast the behavioral approach to psychology with the cognitive approach. The behavioral and the cognitive approaches are the basis of many psychological theories. Behaviorism was the most popular psychological perspective during the beginning of the twentieth century, first, gaining popularity in 1918 with the publication of an article by John B. Watson and enduring until cognitive psychology became popular in the late 1950s.The significance of behaviorism was diminished by the cognitive revolution. The term “cognitive psychology” came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser in 1967.  Since then, the cognitive approach became the dominant research line of inquiry in the most fields of psychological research. Along with some similarities, there are fundamental contrasts of the behavioral and the cognitive approaches to psychology. First of all, both psychological schools follow different points of view as for the subject of psychological science. Behaviorists consider person’s behavior, reflected in the available objective observation of physical processes, as the only subject of psychology.   Mental processes, as factors influencing behavior, are not taken into consideration by the behavioral concept. Hempel (1949), for example, claims that “all psychological statements … are translatable into statements that do not involve psychological concepts,” but only concepts for physical behavior (p. 18). The behavioral theory assumes that after birth all human beings are similar. Thus, the formation of personality is greatly related to the surrounding environment, which is to shape and bring up a future individual. “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select”. (John Watson, 1930, p. 82) The followers of the behavioral approach claim that behavior is determined by purely external factors, such as stimuli of the outside world. Cognitive approach adheres to the different conception as concerning the subject of psychological science.  Whereas Behaviorism looks only at the "observable" phenomenon of outward behavior, cognitive psychology focuses on internal considerations such as patterns of thoughts, obsessive preoccupations, or the manifest content of one's dreams. The cognitive approach views the processes of thinking and cognition as the determinant of human behavior. Cognition is the act or process of knowing. It refers to the mental processes of an individual and includes attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imaging, thinking, and speech. Cognitive psychology states that human behavior is not merely the product of interaction with outward reality. It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as belief, desire and motivation), “Not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behavior, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning…by adding a little mentalism to it.  It focused on the symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and making sense not only of the world, but of themselves.” (Jerome Bruner, 1990, p. 2) The cognitive approach spread also to the study of emotional and  motivational areas of personality. In fact, the behavioral approach is based on the mechanistic materialism, considering human consciousness as an artificial analogue of religious notion of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and it is absolutely rejected by behaviorists. Mental processes also seem mostly as some concomitant inner factors, which are not included in the causal relationships between an individual and actuality.  Only in the world of physical phenomena there are causal links, through which one of the events serves as a reason for another one, being its consequence. From this point of view, the relationship of stimulus and response (S - R) is accepted as the basic mechanism of the interaction between an individual and external factors, which determine human behavior regularly. Neither desire nor feelings may serve the cause of individual’s action, so far action is originally material and can be caused only by material stimuli, which evoke the reciprocal neuromuscular processes and behavioral response. However, Behaviorists do not reject the existence of internal processes. “The objection,” wrote Skinner, “to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that they are not relevant in a functional analysis” (Skinner 1953, p. 35). Materialistic basis of the cognitive conception is also evident. Accepting materialistic attitude, nevertheless, Behaviorism and cognitive psychology, have different notion of the role of mind and mental processes in determination of human behavior. Cognitive psychology gives mind a central value, assuming it as an inner and largely autonomous factor, which “function is to structure the universe just as the organism structures its immediate environment" (Piaget, 1963, pp. 3-4), governing human behavior.  However, for cognitive scientists, the meaning of human mind does not include the conception of “Ego” with its potential for self-realization. The term “mind” just defines brain as specific physical organ with its natural ability to process and manage information. Behaviorism emerged on the base of the objective understanding of scientific principles, suggesting the possibility of constructing the science about human behavior, which would be founded on the same methodological grounds as natural sciences.“Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.” (John B. Watson, 1913, p. 158) As the general explanatory theory of human behavior, Behaviorism is rooted in experimental animal psychology. It argues that science should study its subject by objective methods, as the only scientific, what involves objective observation, measurement, and objective experiment. Psychological theories need to be supported by empirical data obtained through careful and controlled observation and measurement of behavior.  Tolman noted that “everything important in psychology … can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice point in a maze” (1938, p. 34). Cognitive psychology is a pure science, based mainly on laboratory experiments. Interviews (Kohlberg, Piaget), case studies (KF, HM), observations (Piaget), computer modeling are also available as the methods of research within the cognitive approach in psychology. Nevertheless, behaviorists criticized cognitive psychology for the adoption of introspective method, considering it as subjective and not valid method of investigation generally rejected by science. “Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, no is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.” (John B. Watson, 1913, p. 158) Cognitive psychologists consider knowledge as being kept informed. That is why; the beginning of computerization allowed cognitive scientists to explain the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with an artificial system such as a computer. Accordingly, the brain of an individual is regarded as an active transmitter of information by analogy with a computer, where information can be manipulated, “computing became the model of the mind, and in place of the concept of meaning there emerged the concept of computability.” (J. Bruner, 1990, p. 6) Structural leveling and block models of processing information through perception, memory, and thinking became widespread in cognitive psychology (Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M, 1968).  The instrumental methods of investigation, taken from neo behaviorism, were supplemented by the methods of systematic observation.  The set of valid, correct techniques, adopted by cognitive psychology, fortified the position of objective methods in psychological science, increasing the reliability of experimental data. Cognitive researches equipped practical psychology with the methods and techniques of measurement of sensitivity, perception, attention, memory and thinking. Cognitive psychology designs theories, from which it derives hypothesis, carrying out their experimental verification by using group methods and statistical analysis for comparison of group differences. Both psychological approaches carried out many empirical studies to support their theories. Nevertheless, critics hold that the empiricism of cognitive psychology combined with its acceptance of internal mental states is contradictory. Biological determinism is the basic principle of Behaviorism. According to it, human behavior is determined by external factors. The conception of personality is not accepted in Behaviorism, which consider the formation of personality just as the result of learning through the reinforcement of eligible types of behavior and suppression of unwanted. Behaviorists believe there is no need in the theories about the inner structure of personality whereas there is the only necessity to analyze how individual learning occurred in the past and by which circumstances the individual behavior has been maintaining till present. The remarkable feature of human behavior, which behaviorists deliberately reject, is that people creatively make their own environment (Chomsky 1971, Black 1973). In contrast, the cognitive approach diminish the role of physical and environmental factors as the determinative points of human behavior, considering it as freewill and depending just on the cognitive process, which is always could be changed by human will. "People not only gain understanding through reflection, they evaluate and alter their own thinking." (Albert Bandura, 1986, p.27) The cognitive approach also assumes that disordered thinking can cause disordered or abnormal behavior. Disordered thinking includes negative thoughts, irrational beliefs, and illogical errors. The cognitive approach states that cognitive change will lead to changes in behavior. According to Albert Ellis, “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them. Shakespeare, many centuries later, rephrased this thought in Hamlet: “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” (1962, p.54) When we think rationally, we behave rationally, and as a consequence we are happy, competent and effective. On the other hand, prolonged irrational thinking can lead to psychological problems and abnormal behavior. The behavioral approach was criticized for suggesting that most human behavior is mechanical, and it is simply the product of stimulus-response process. The psychological school considers there are little difference between the learning that takes place in humans (Watson & Rayner Little Albert) and that in other animals (Pavlov), because Behaviorism “recognizes no dividing line between man and brute”. (John B. Watson, 1913, p. 158) Therefore, research can be carried out on animals as well as humans. This idea is based on the classical experiments of Russian physician and psychologist, Ivan Pavlov. All psychic phenomena in Behaviorism are reduced to the reactions of organism, mainly motor: thinking is identified with speech motor acts, emotions - with some changes inside of body. The Behavioral approach uses a very reductionist vocabulary: stimulus, response, reinforcement, and punishment. These concepts alone are used to explain all human behavior. Thus, Behaviorism represents environmental reductionism explaining behavior in terms of simple environmental factors. The different type of reductionism concerns cognitive psychology, which compares human mind to a computer. The cognitive approach demonstrates machine reductionism, which treats mind as an independent agent, granting meanings ??to external objects and creating dualism "mind-body", which Behaviorists reject completely. Cognitive psychologists developed the idea of the leveling organization of cognitive activity on processing, storage and using information, which includes the number of blocks. Memory, perceptual processes, attention, thinking, verbal and nonverbal components are represented by the multitude of structural models.  Cognitive psychologists and Behaviorists hold nearly opposite views on the perception of actuality by an individual. The cognitive approach states that a human can draw inferences about environment through the internal cognitive processes that produce responses. The assumption is based on the belief in the exclusive ability of human mind to receive, code, and interpret incoming information. Thus, mental constructions precede observation rather than be concluded from it. Finally, the structure of the behavioral act follows such a way: receiving information, its comprehension and interpretation, acting in accordance with the accepted decision. According to Behaviorism, interaction is not the meaning, which is ascribed to the object by some hypothetically independent agent (brain). Behaviorism considers brain activity just as one among many other biological factors. Behaviorists start with the observation of the interaction of organism with its environment and they note the changes in the behavioral response of the organism depending on the duration of the interaction. For example, the pattern of face’s recognition is not to see the face and then process the information on it and get mental product, so that a person starts to mean Alice C. Instead of this, seeing the face means to perceive Alice C. immediately, without any mental interpretations of the image. The achievements of Behaviorism brought psychology to the further development of views on the cause-and-effect relationships of human and environment.  Behaviorism and its offshoots tend to be among the most scientific of psychological perspectives. The emphasis of behavioral psychology is on how we learn to behave in certain ways. All of us learn new behavior and how to modify our existing behavior constantly. Behavioral psychology is the approach that focuses on how this learning takes place. Behaviorists enriched psychological science with their experimental achievements. One of the main strengths of the behavioral approach is that it focuses only on the behavior that can be observed and manipulated in its application as a tool for behavior modification, particularly in social constructs. Through the use of positive and negative reinforcement techniques almost any negative or socially unacceptable behavior can be reduced while conversely positive behavior can be enhanced. Cognitive psychology develops exploring of human mind and constant cognitive process within it. “Its aim was to discover and to describe formally the meanings that human beings created out of their encounters with the world, and then to propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated.” (Bruner J. S., 1990, p. 2) Cognitive approach overemphasizes the role of human brain as a biological system for the active search and processing information. Cognitive psychologists consider that human mind manage information of all sorts, recoding it into another form, selecting certain information for further processing or excluding unnecessary one from the system. The activity of human mind is the main factor influencing individual behavior. Piaget noted that persons" must interact with the environment to develop, but it is they, not the external environment, who build new cognitive structures” (Crain, 2005, pg. 116) to change themselves and outside world.  In general, cognitive psychology has still not created the unified theory of the cognitive processes.  Nevertheless, it is still the dominant theoretical approach in modern psychology. The practical applications of the cognitive psychology are combined with other approaches to develop and strengthen its usefulness. Being contradictory in many points of view on the factors, which determine and influence individual behavior and the process of human interaction with actuality, nevertheless, Behaviorism and Cognitive psychology remain materialistic and scientific branches, which contributed the development of psychological science. Regardless of all contradictions, both psychological approaches proved their ability to cooperate in the field of Cognitive behavioral therapy, based upon a combination of basic behavioral and cognitive research. Works Cited Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M., 1968. Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K.W. Spence and J.T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation. London: Academic Press. Bandura, A., 1986. Social Foundations of Thought and Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p.27 Black, M., 1973. “Some Aversive Responses to a Would-be Reinforcer”, in H. Wheeler (ed.), Beyond the Punitive Society, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, pp. 125–34. Bruner, Jerome S., 1990, The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, p.2, p.6. Chomsky, N., 1971. “The Case Against B. F. Skinner,” New York Review of Books, 30: 18– 24. Crain, W., 2005. Theories of development: Concepts and applications (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc. Ellis, Albert, 1962. Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. New York: Lyle Stuart, p. 54 Hempel,C., 1949. “The logical Analysis of Psychology”, in Feigl and W.Sillars (eds.), Readings in Philosophical Analysis, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, p.18 Piaget,J.,1963, The psychology of intelligence. New York: Routlege, pp.3-4 Tolman, E. C., 1938, “The Determiners of Behavior at a Choice Point,” Psychological Review, p.34 Skinner,B.F., 1953. Science and Human Behavior, New York: Macmillan, p.35 Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, p.1, 158-177. Watson, John B., 1930, Behaviorism (revised edition). University of Chicago Press, p.82 Read More